I recently attended the Avaya Evolutions Conference in Toronto at the Metro Convention Center and had the opportunity to discuss the latest technology trends and best practices of Avaya partners and hearing success stories directly from satisfied customers.

It was insightful to hear from leaders on the direction of the industry as it embraces another exciting year ahead in Canada. I learnt how organizations in today’s turbulent economy have used these practical tips for improving their overall effectiveness through VPI products on the Avaya platform.

VPI has been a dedicated Avaya DevConnect Gold Partner since 2002 and has fully integrated its award-winning VPI Performance real-time reporting and performance management software with Avaya Communication Manager.

VPI Performance consolidates and presents real-time information to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents in several integrated ways to help them make better, quicker decisions with actionable, targeted performance and business intelligence. Included in this robust suite are 18 Avaya CMS reports, over 40 Avaya CMS metrics for use in customizable scorecards and desktop tickers, and a messaging and alerting capability.

This functionality supplements the Avaya Communication Manager platform greatly and has been a valuable asset to many Avaya customers in achieving their objectives. Regardless of the industry—an effective deployment requires the right partner like VPI who has insight on the right improvement methodologies and talented resources available with the highest impact and most cost-effective resourcing opportunities.

VPI Performance consolidates and presents real-time information to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents in several integrated ways to help them make better, quicker decisions with actionable, targeted performance and business intelligence. Included are 18 Avaya CMS reports, over 40 Avaya CMS metrics for use in customizable scorecards and desktop tickers, and a messaging and alerting capability.

In a turbulent and volatile economy, organizations still must strive to improve their business environments using these tools and strategies to develop their skilled workforce while automating routine tasks and processes.

This is where I believe VPI can greatly enhance an organization find ways to enhance their overall operational effectiveness with our wide range of products and professional services.

Here are some important capabilities that I believe, that VPI Performance offers beyond standard Avaya CMS reporting capabilities:

1. Gather Performance Information from Additional Contact Center Systems – VPI Performance can bring in meaningful data and metrics from other sources – including other business systems (CRM, ERP, WFM, etc.) and other VPI modules (Quality, Coaching) and in a timely and relevant manner for each user – to Avaya CMS to get a fully consolidated view of the contact center which is critical in today’s environments.
   
2. Easily Report Across Multiple Teams Across Multiple Queues, Multiple Locations and Even Multiple Avaya CMS Systems – Managers get a single, holistic and enterprise-wide view of their contact center operations across several work groups and channels. 
   
3. Create Custom Metrics based on Avaya CMS and Other Contact Center Data to Meet Business Objectives, then report on those metrics displayed in a variety of formats including real-time Web dashboard charts, scorecards and desktop tickers. No need to rely on raw Avaya CMS data alone.
   
4. Presents Information Instantly in Real-time – no need to rely on IT or reporting analysts to pull together information, by downloading it, adding to Excel, and preparing for management.
   
5. Off-loads the Burden on the Avaya CMS Server – all reporting is performed within VPI Performance. This saves time and money when creating reports for senior leaders.
   
6. Create Flexible Grouping Structures to Report on Groups and Teams in any Manner that Makes Most Sense to the Business – managers are not used to seeing reports by a single queue only. For example, most contact centers will have a team of agents that handle calls from multiple queues. VPI reports give managers a true view into an individual agent’s performance thereby the true measure of their individual performance.
   
7. Create a Flexible, Hierarchical Grouping of Split/Skills – Allows users to reorganize and consolidate data across multiple splits. Multiple hierarchies can be created to provide different views of split data. This is helpful when split/skills are created by IT and don't directly map to business measurements.
   
8. Reports Present a Historically Accurate Representation of an Agent's Group Assignment – team data is retained as agents are moved to different teams, something that is often asked by managers especially when skilled agents are moved around to help call loads.
   
9. No Limitation on the Amount of Contact Center Data Collected or How Long it is Stored – managers can do true historical reporting on consolidated contact center metrics (such as sales conversions, CSAT, emails, Web chats, etc. in addition to CMS call metrics), giving them insight into trending over time, or simply giving them the option to pull reports on older data. With VPI Performance, interval-based data is retained indefinitely.
   
10.   All Group and Agent Data can be Controlled and Dispersed Based on User Profiles and Permissions – this type of reporting flexibility allows contact centers to mitigate and contain risks and unwanted breached caused by agents. 
    
11.   Ability to Deliver Targeted Alerts, Notifications and Optional E-Coaching Assignments based on Performance Thresholds to promptly correct performance gaps while at the same time keeping a watchful eye out for situations that are creating issues for agents.

I found that VPI’s Call Center Reporting and Call Center Coaching Software are perceived as a cultural transformation within the contact centers by their leaders who are deeply appreciative of VPI. We have trained their Supervisory staff and Managers in powerful work habits that are easy to describe on a large scale and on a regular basis. For example, coaching, performance management, feedback sessions, formal rewards, and people development are now part of our customers’ culture where one did not exist. Such developments have strongly motivated our team of developers, our managers and most importantly the front-line agents, which is our ultimate goal.

Internal efficiency coupled with quality of patient care, customer service, and communications within a network of linked organizations are quickly becoming top objectives for healthcare insurance plan providers and care givers alike. Since overall quality scores will directly drive healthcare funding incentives versus disincentives, organizations face an urgent need to reevaluate their tools and processes for measuring and improving quality. And that must include a close look at monitoring of call quality and operational effectiveness in contact centers. These new priorities are driven by the fact that healthcare is undergoing a major transformation today. The purpose of the reformation is to address the many challenges including increasing costs and decreased, outcome-based reimbursement. Healthcare organizations are also grappling with internal pressures like spiraling out-of control costs, critical shortage of qualified healthcare workers and high employee turnover, combined with external pressures such as stricter CMS quality guidelines and pressure to achieve high star ratings to earn adequate funding, HIPAA compliance, increased insurance fraud and an aging population that is placing increasing demands on the entire healthcare industry.

Strikingly, only 5% of patients account for 60% or more of medical expense today, mostly due to high costs of managing chronic conditions – prevalent in our aging population. Out of the 3.8 million boomers aging into Medicare every year starting in 2011, 60% already have at least one chronic condition, so the pressure on healthcare insurance and care providers is about to grow even more dramatically. Amongst the many high level concerns to tackle, there are two significant concerns which keep healthcare executives awake at night and these are increasing operating costs and medical errors. Many leaders including federal, state and patient advocacy agencies have begun to address these critical issues by challenging previously held assumptions about these two factors. Evidence shows that elimination of errors alone leads to significant cost reductions. Therein lays the challenge to implement change to the patient experience. Historically, most efforts to manage the needs of these patients-customers have been stifled by a fragmented delivery system and lack of true care coordination. This simply will not be sustainable going forward. One of the areas that can positively impact this is at the contact center level which handles and serves patients, doctors and healthcare providers.

New call quality monitoring tools are helping contact centers within these healthcare organizations make a contribution to improve the overall experience of patients and healthcare network participants. They have helped to make significant costs reductions in training dollars through targeted coaching which helps the overall process improvement effort. All of these elements of patient care dictate renewed focus on the quality of communications among all parties – patients, healthcare plan providers, hospitals, specialty physicians, pharmacists, social services, home health, nursing homes, and a variety of ancillary providers. Periodic, intelligent capturing and assessment of information from patients, their employers, the insurance providers, the physicians and all other pertinent data sources leads to executive insights into operational effectiveness, as well as options for activities that would help address rising cost and eliminating defects. As a result, these healthcare providers are embracing innovative contact center quality monitoring tools that enable them to pinpoint critical business issues with laser-like precision. The latest-generation interactions recording and quality monitoring systems come with built-in analytics, which helps automatically sort out recorded communications according to their type and value – the financial value and the recording’s potential to provide insights into operational inefficiencies or errors. Gone are the days of hunting and pecking through all calls to identify issues.

This new generation of evaluation systems can present quality metrics automatically based on the multi-dimensional information that is automatically captured with each recording. Plus, they drive management attention to high value calls for detailed evaluation, while still providing objectivity for periodic evaluation of each agent. These systems can automatically trigger alerts or notifications when thresholds are crossed or errors occur – based on metrics that result from detailed quality evaluations, as well as data that is collected at the time of recording interactions. These early warning indicators could also be in the form of real-time dashboard graphs or desktop tickers that alert employees when certain thresholds are missed and targets are not met. Actionable nature of this monitoring system is further enhanced with automated training delivery. Coaching and E-learning content can be automatically assigned to the agents according to their individual quality scores, in addition to encouraging their progress with new learning opportunities. This has proven to help improve morale and increase agent satisfaction. These are some of the practical innovative solutions that help answer the very real challenge of managing healthcare contact center problems - in a systematic, disciplined, and productive way - the collective potential of individuals to continuously enhance the value delivered to patients, their families, and the communities in which they provide healthcare services.

It is that time of the year where contact centers are gearing up for the holiday season over the next couple months. Traditionally, this means hiring and training more agents than usual, based on forecasted volumes.  Due to the seasonality of contact center work, expectations and stress placed on contact center resources rise  - this affects especially team supervisors and their agents who are more prone to turnover during higher-stress periods. In fact, multiple  factors contribute to turnover - the most significant variable is the nature of the work the agent does and how they perceive their role within the center. 

While recently visiting an outsourced contact center, I was able to observe how training was delivered to a new hire training class. It turns out that my high school sports coach was right   - coaching and teamwork matter, especially today when selecting the right  agents from a pool of candidates, training them and getting them certified to be on the phones must be done in less than a month. I witnessed extraordinary collaborative effort expended to get the job done. However, the impressive enthusiasm of the contact center team clashed with their process design and technical challenges.
 
Dave, the Director of Operations advised me that it costs approximately USD $12,500 before an agent is competent enough to satisfactorily handle calls. He was perplexed with why in spite of this significant investment, he was experiencing a large turnover of his new agents within the first 30 days on the floor. When  we visited the contact center floor,  I noticed that the agent to supervisor ratio was rather high - around 1:25. I have immediately noticed that call center management was insufficient, as was mechanism for providing agents with timely, intraday feedback on their performance or guidance for improvement.  It looked like the agents were “abandoned” after their initial training. There was call recording equipment and workforce management software in the IT room. However, the center had no visible individuals who actually owned the metrics or were responsible for the generation of scorecards that would provide information to Dave on how the center was doing in the course of a day or, for that matter, a week.  This tough situation was further complicated by the fact that Dave only had four Supervisors to manage a team of hundred agents AND each Supervisor had  less than one-year tenure! . And as if that weren’t hard enough, one Supervisor was on vacation and  another called in sick. Sadly, it is an experience all too familiar to contact center managers today. Successfully managing a multi-channel contact center is one of the most difficult roles in business today due to the dynamic nature of the environment and all the intricacies woven into the equation. 

The contact center is often the only place that customers turn to when they require assistance or to purchase products and services. As shown in our example, working as an agent in a contact center can be a rather stressful job. As a result, turnover can be as high as 50% annually. That is a significant number that directly affects the operating costs of a center. But my question is - what is the real cost of this common phenomenon within a contact center?  Clearly, it will be  reflected in hard-to-measure ways each Monday morning to start with. Agents are likely to develop apathy and grow ever less engaged in their work due to the unsupportive environment that has been created for them. They will be less receptive to new ideas and more importantly, less willing to follow the coach or go the extra mile for the customer or the team. All of this triggers a cascade of  consequences for the business - reduced customer satisfaction, high agent turnover, and negative impact on  profitability.  And that’s exactly the opposite of what the holiday season promises to deliver for the business. Contact center managers must do their homework in order to understand the causes of their challenges as well as available options for addressing them.

Research at VPI has shown that agent and supervisor satisfaction and productivity can be dramatically improved through  an effective strategy of keeping everyone in the loop at all times.  You can achieve this by using call center performance management software that presents real or near-real time scorecards and other forms of status updates - personalized for each employee role according to their responsibilities, goals and needs.  Better yet, tie real-time call center performance management with intelligently triggered e-learning and coaching to help front-line agents learn and grow, supporting their individual skills and talents, giving them the tools and knowledge to please customers.  You will be soon rewarded with higher job satisfaction of the contact center staff and related cost savings. Customers will respond with increased trust and loyalty – so that you can be on the forefront of their choices during the holiday season and beyond.

Real-time Call Center Performance Management - Sample Agent Desktop Ticker


Real-time Call Center Performance Management - Sample Agent Web Scorecard

Measuring performance is fundamental to contact center operations of all sizes. The call center quality assurance (QA) measurement process is often one of the main performance data collection vehicles for management. However, few contact centers have implemented a program or have adequate resources in place for meaningfully tracking and improving performance, let alone providing feedback from customers to the rest of the organization to enable strategic-level business improvements. Many contact center managers operate with a haphazard collection of uncoordinated and often irrelevant performance statistics that require too much time and error-prone manual work to interpret, which often leads to misguided decisions. In these conditions of ad-hoc “analysis”, wasteful utilization of resources can go undetected for long periods of time and business objectives may not be achieved, as managers take ineffective actions to correct deficiencies which are aimed to attack symptoms instead of root causes. The problem is deepened by the fact that most quality and performance measurement tools are rigid or inflexible to change. Some efforts focus on compliance-driven performance tracking and call center reporting - in accordance with internally developed standards and procedures that are outdated, outmoded, or even assuming that the contact center is already providing the right products and services to its customers. What’s more, many contact centers have not discussed the business strategy with their front line agents or supervisors. Consequently, there is often a great need to go back and revisit their goals and objectives and to adjust the functions of their department in order to ensure that the right products and services are being provided by the agent.

To start recovering from this situation, managers must first recognize that measuring of performance in a coordinated, systematic, standardized way that provides true insights and direction for achieving business objectives is a basic need of an organization - and a fundamental responsibility of management. It is the key to any organization’s survival.

To achieve high-value business insights as they track performance, contact center managers should focus data collection, interpretation and analysis on a set of measures that answer the following questions:

·         Are we providing the correct services to our clients, using the most skilled agents?

·         Are we able to resolve customer issues and overcome objections in a timely manner?

·         Are our agents providing a positive and memorable experience to our customers?

·         Do our agents and their immediate supervisors really understand what is expected from them?

Using VPI Empower, you can consolidate all data that is periodically collected from disparate source systems in your contact center. Once you have all data in one place, apply real-time performance tracking tools, intuitive graphical call center reporting dashboards, and business rules-driven alert system to monitor key performance indicators. Now you can measure progress towards meeting business objectives for the contact center, gaining insights that can be acted upon in an effective and timely manner – for optimization of service delivery. Call center quality assurance goals can then be subordinated to the overall strategy, so that they support the mission and objectives of the organization. The specific call center quality assurance goals defined in this process should be strategic, tactical, and operational, depending on the level of service channel that is being supported. They may include the definition of quality, timeliness, resource utilization, or customer satisfaction from the customer’s point of view.  

Call center quality assurance processes should be guided and supported by performance measures as they define specific standards that allow the calibration of performance and overall quality, which, when made actionable and acted upon, ultimately leads to more business from happier customers. Performance measures should be selected carefully and funded proportionately to their value, in order to support corporate goals and strategy, contact center objectives, and critical success factors for an effective call center quality assurance program. Review them regularly to evaluate how well the delivery system is performing and whether the correct products and services are provided. The value of adequate recruitment, selection, training and education of line managers to execute these objectives should not be underestimated. Success ultimately rests on their coaching effectiveness and their ability to cultivate skill while inspiring their staff to higher levels of performance.
 

I was at a conference with a group of educators and policy makers who were lamenting at the state of funding from the Federal Government for additional classrooms to an already crowded high school system. In addition to the space limitations, they were concerned on how these students are not being responsive to basic foundational concepts involving the 3 R's - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. A leading Canadian author and senior lecturer on technology and emerging trends at the University of Toronto, Don Tapscott feels quite differently on this issue. He feels that educators must embrace technology and change the way they teach in the classroom to elicit passion and engagement from students because the current system does not serve the digital generation well. According to him, the old model was based on lectures and memory which is a model that is flawed and inappropriate for a newer generation. It is a one-way, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach where students are isolated in the overall learning process. This condition as I prefer to call it, is similar to situations that most contact centers are encountering today.
 

Ovum Research recently authored and published a great new white paper titled '5 Secrets to Contact Center E-Learning and Coaching Success.' You can download your complimentary copy of the white paper to:

• Understand why contact centers must develop specialized training strategies.
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• Read customer case studies detailing ways in which training is used in innovative contact centers.
• Gain insight into factors to consider when implementing training solutions in the contact center and maximize value from both technology and agents.

Early this year, I went behind enemy lines. Actually, I was on vacation with a client in Manila and took up her invitation to visit their manager Betty who manages several help desk centers for large global organizations. I spent a few hours inside the contact center and Betty noticed that I wanted to listen to calls the moment I walked into this high tech facility. I sat next to Dave who spoke very good English and listened in on a few calls as part of my research. He seemed eager to speak with me on what he does on inbound and outbound calls. It was refreshing to see data and information providing analytics with real-time performance information displayed on monitors above the clocks with the times of all the locations that they serve. Surprisingly what was missing were the "coaching moments" which one would assume happens frequently in the course of a day in the role of a Supervisor at a contact center. Unfortunately, that did not happen much to my surprise as I wanted to be able to observe and give feedback to the Supervisor. In the vast real-estate that I covered there, less than 10% were allocated for specific coaching and training of the agent. Did someone miss the memo here during the design stage? Was this intentional or was there lack of rooms for coaching and ad-hoc meeting rooms?

For most people, a job in a contact center is a foot in the door, a starting position in an extremely competitive market for talent. Some of the work can be repetitive and boring like the one I observed. Hence it is no surprise that attrition in some cases can be as high as 50% for agents in the contact center. It is probably the same for Supervisors however there is a correlation to this phenomenon. The churn rates and the lack of a coaching environment in which these young men and women work in could be root causes to these symptom. I know it can be relentless and unforgiving in the best of times. Aside from the compensation, most agents like Dave agree that they would like to spend more time honing their skills and move up in the organization but Supervisors have no time in their day to coach, develop and build trust with their people. They are so busy putting out fires and managing the low performers that the mid and high level performers are often ignored.

What is this relationship between a Supervisor and an Agent? It is not about buying pizzas or sharing personal stories after work (although that is important too). It is about building confidence and trust in these fragile relationships at the workplace. These elements starts the relationship, sustains it through coaching interactions and becomes the foundations of success in a contact center. It is a proven fact that teams that take coaching seriously have better results in attrition and career development of their agents. Employee and Customer surveys increase and most of all, customers stay loyal through the good and bad times, just like our agent Dave or Betty. I know I stuck around long enough with Heather (my first Supervisor, God Bless Her) in my early years because of her commitment to my personal and professional development while under her supervision. Coaching takes less effort once it is done effectively, with the right tools and the right supervisor. It is one of the key enablers in the knowledge economy where time is money and money is created by agents who are engaged, motivated and well coached. Enhancing their confidence by focusing on skill development in the contact center with meaningful metrics designed to build customer (and agent loyalty) should be a key priority especially in these tough times.
 

In today’s challenging economic climate, analytics is changing the way companies do business and dramatically improving contact  center operations, managers want quick and  accurate insights into the effectiveness of their contact center operations in order to make prudent, timely decisions, but they don't have the time or resources to listen to and review  the vast amount of customer interactions  handled by the agents every day. 

In addition to this there is no shortage of performance metrics available from their PBX and ACD. These days there seems to be more sophisticated tools including multimedia recording, desktop analytics, instant chat, self service options in the IVR, cloud computing,  etc. Managers and supervisors today are able to choose from a myriad of options to manage performance but where do they start to do their quality evaluations in a systematic manner using complex algorithmic mathematical formulas combined with scientific methodologies and their own intuition? Therein lies their dilemma. So little time, so much to accomplish in the course of a day...

Quality monitoring systems offered today are not only to evaluate agents but also to evaluate a contact center reputation. Yes, reputation, might sound obvious but too often contact centers seem to miss this critical view point. A customer's perception of service captured in a call recording or video file says a lot about the culture of the organization. Call Center Reporting and Call Monitoring Systems are a means to an end in that one has to learn from the information and who else to translate these to actions and outcomes than the Supervisor. This has to be one of the most critical and unforgiving roles within the contact center next to the agent. Sort of being a start quarterback being called in to throw a touchdown on each attempt when the offensive team is on and the line backer when the defensive line is on.

The role of the supervisor and their agent has been so devalued over the years that it is not a surprise the attrition rates for these roles are in double digits. This is not a malaise or a disease or caused by the recent global financial crisis or globalization. We did this to ourselves. We have become part of a culture that communicates via a keyboard than by voice skills and the traditional skills that our parents taught us about being polite and respectful. We complicate the connection with our customers and prospects through voice prompts and boring scripts to keep the agents from really having a connection with the customers.

Enter VPI and it's Empower suite of products. In my humble opinion, this product is a god-send for managers, supervisors and front-line agents. VPI has truly defined the new expectation of a customer through a fresh set of lenses. It shatters the level of "mediocrity" to "excellence" in quality and performance from the customer's point of view. The power of the data can now be turned into knowledge which in turn can be turned into wisdom for coaching to excellence and that translates to actionable analytics and outcomes.

Quality Assurance is everyone's responsibility and by giving power to the people who  influence agent behaviors, then the Supervisor should be the quarterback that determines the outcome of the game. Like they said in the movie, if you build, the customers will come. VPI has started this movement by building on a framework that is supervisor-friendly for QA success. If we synthesize all these goals, the aim of QA and Call Monitoring becomes a matter of linking outcomes of calls to a customer's behavior not only the agent's behavior. As a result, contact centers can also learn what effects, if any their approach to training and coaching agents have on customers and ultimately the outcomes.

Being proactive and giving agents a larger stake in the pie by identifying areas of strength, best practices and also key training to be used for modeling success. In this way, a contact center can leverage the VPI Empower suite of products and establish guidelines and standards for handling calls instead of dictating what agents should or should not do. In the larger picture, the role of the supervisor and the agent has to be supported through all levels of the organization. As a result, success and a best practice model will show up sooner than later!