Join VPI and Straumann for an exciting webinar showcasing the powerful reporting solutions for Cisco UCC Contact Centers. You'll learn how Cisco and VPI helped Straumann develop and award-winning real-time contact center performance reporting solution.

Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM ET, 10:00 AM PT
Register here.

Now you can get even more value from your Cisco UCC Express (UCCX) or UCC Enterprise (UCCE) investment. VPI, a Cisco Solution Developer, VIP and SIP Partner, has integrated its award-winning VPI Performance contact center reporting and performance management software application with Cisco. This functionality complements and enhances the UCCX and UCCE platforms greatly by consolidating data and presenting actionable, real-time information in the form of Web dashboards, interactive reports, scorecards and desktop tickers to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents to make better, quicker decisions.

Learn how Cisco and VPI customer Straumann, a global leader in dental implant solutions and restorative dentistry, enhanced the capabilities of its Cisco Unified Contact Center system and operations with VPI’s award-winning real-time Cisco reporting software solution.

Register to attend the complimentary Webinar, hosted by subject matter experts from Straumann and VPI, to learn how you can:

• Create and report on metrics based on Cisco UCCX, UCCE and other contact center data (CRM, ERP, QA, WFM) to meet business objectives.
• Report across multiple teams and queues, locations and Cisco UCCX/UCCE systems to get a holistic view of contact center operations.
• Perform true historical reporting with unlimited data collection – get insights into trending over time and a historically accurate representation of your agents’ group assignments.
• Create flexible grouping structures to report on groups and teams in any manner that makes most sense to your business.
• Drill through layers of data for root cause analysis and trigger targeted alerts, notifications and Coaching assignments based on performance thresholds to promptly correct performance gaps.

Scheduling Conflict? Register for the Webinar and we'll send you the recorded version.

Presenters:

Carlo Wise - IT Specialist, Straumann

Carlo Wise serves as a senior IT Specialist at Straumann, a global leader in dental implant solutions and restorative dentistry, leveraging his strong background in all facets of telephony and network systems integration. He is an experienced IT and Contact Center professional with over 16 years of experience in supporting and implementing Contact Center technologies in small to large Contact Center environments. Mr. Wise holds a variety of industry certifications, including Cisco, CompTIA and Redhat.

Delee Shields - Channel Sales Director, VPI
 
Delee has been instrumental in working closely with Cisco in developing VPI's Cisco Developer Network (CDN) Solution Developer, Value Incentive (VIP) and Solutions Incentive (SIP) partnership programs. She is responsible for working hand-in-hand with Cisco customers and channel partners through the entire sales process. She has extensive knowledge of Cisco Unified Communications product platforms and is highly experienced in Cisco reporting software, Cisco call recording software, workforce optimization, VoIP, LAN, WAN, MAN and wireless solution design. Prior to joining VPI as a sales engineer in 2007, she worked in sales and sales engineering capacities promoting Cisco solutions as well as earning her Cisco CCNA and CCNP certifications.

Just like a home that sometimes needs to be refreshed, traditional quality assurance has reached a fork in the road of its 30-year life. Now's the perfect time to re-evaluate the way we monitor and measure our call center agents and “cleaning house” in the Quality Assurance (QA) department to make room for analytics-oriented QA tools and best practices. By implementing this makeover in your contact center, you can radically reduce manual steps required by most QA applications by more than 60 percent. And, who among us can’t use 60% less manual work?

Get started with these key items of focus in the new article 'Extreme Makeover: Contact Center QA Edition' authored by Patrick Botz, VP of Workforce Optimization at VPI, featured this month’s issue of Contact Center Association’s Inbound Magazine:

• Random Selection = Random Results The focus is no longer just on recording calls or randomly checking on how well agents adhere to scripts and policies, but rather upon prioritizing customer interactions according to their business value – so that every minute of the in-depth quality evaluation is optimized by its potential to deliver business insights.
• Embrace the New Generation of QA The new generation of QA goes far beyond internal agent compliance – representing a rebirth and evolution of the concept of QA designed to meet the needs of today‘s contact centers. The new, intelligent QA systems rapidly identify and deliver insights into critical business issues and opportunities to improve the customer experience and revenue.
• Using Analytics to Focus QA on Desired Business Outcomes Tagging data directly from desktop screen analytics enables you to focus your QA resources on calls with outcomes such as: Was the call put on hold? Was it transferred? What level of employee was it handled by? Was it a VIP customer? Was there a sale or no sale? What was the value of the sale?
• Re-evaluate your current QA Evaluation Forms As your business evolves every year, so should your QA forms. Ask questions on your call center quality assurance forms that are interesting to your business. Any question that makes the form should be owned and some should be held accountable for that question. For example, if “Upselling” falls below a certain threshold, who is accountable for making sure that agents are being properly coached and trained on upselling? And consider using different QA forms for different call types to get more valuable information from your QA program.
• Rapidly Close Skill Gaps With an automated QA solution, instead of flying blind, every agent, supervisor and executive gets their own personalized desktop ticker, dashboard and scorecard displaying all the metrics or KPIs on which they’re measured in real-time. This level of transparency often leads to improved agent satisfaction and supervisor efficiency.

Spring cleaning may not have been enough this year. Is it time for an Extreme Makeover: QA Edition in your contact center? Check out the full article here. What are you doing to keep your contact center quality assurance program fresh?

Renowned contact center market research firm Pelorus Associates just published a new and exciting resource guide on the use of analytics in the contact center. In it, they discuss 7 problems that can easily be solved with desktop analytics:

1. Measurement and analysis of first call resolution (FCR)
2. More effective agent evaluations
3. Optimizing call handle time
4. Campaign analysis
5. Identification of at-risk customers
6. Collections optimization and compliance
7. Achieving PCI-DSS compliance

Chief analyst and author Dick Bucci does a great job of illustrating the power of contact center analytics by describing the challenges faced by the contact centers of a fictional cable company. By digging deeper, desktop analytics like VPI Fact Finder can, for example, identify outstanding agents out of seemingly poor-looking call handle time statistics by uncovering call types, processes, and policies that are unnecessarily increasing handle time. Other compelling examples include the poor results of a marketing campaign that were turned around once analysis showed that agents were having to return calls due to lack of training. Once the agents received proper training, the campaign met its revenue goals.

Another powerful capability of call center analytics is providing more effective agent evaluations. The primary aim of these evaluations should be to improve performance by identifying specific target areas for coaching and training support. Call center analytics software allows for selection of call monitoring on the basis of several criteria, including call type, call length, repeat callers, customer type, disposition code, credit score, account balance, and many others. You can even combine criteria to track very specific types of calls.

Finally, desktop analytics is a critical factor in increasing collections while maintaining compliance with federal regulations.  It can help to identify best practices that help speed collection of overdue accounts and ensure that all contacts made are within compliance guidelines.

Download your complimentary copy of the guide 'How to Solve 7 Everyday Contact Center Problems with Analytics' now to learn how you can put this powerful tool to work in your contact center.

• It is timelier and less costly
• It enables companies to prioritize the review of the interactions by categorizing interaction recordings by business issues and outcomes
• It has a more unified structure
• It is more objective, so all participants can trust the outputs

I always appreciate sitting down and chatting with leaders in the contact center industry. It gives me the opportunity to learn about new trends or issues and I get to share how VPI is helping solve those issues.  Patrick Botz, VPI’s VP of Marketing, recently had such a chat with Rich Hand, the Director of Membership and Publications for Contact Center Association (CCA). The topic was the critical nature of analytics in the performance and success of contact centers. Listen to the Queue-Talk podcast on the CCA Web site to learn how leveraging analytics improves not only the customer experience and quality of the contact center, but ultimately the business overall.

But wait there’s more! Patrick will also be speaking about the importance of analytics at CCA’s Contact Center Conference Fall 2011, Oct 3-6 in Phoenix, Arizona. His session, “Analytics-Driven Quality Monitoring and Coaching: The Next Generation in Contact Center Quality Management,” will be held on Wednesday, October 5 at 2:30 pm. This is an outstanding conference for anyone involved in the management of the customer experience and success of your contact centers. Hope to see you there!

Will you be attending the Contact Center Conference? Let me know!

Recently, VPI teamed up with Ovum Research, a premier analyst firm in the technology and telecom sectors, on a new white paper titled “Getting Workforce Optimization Right: How to Align Your Agent Training and Management with the Needs of Your Customers.” It was a great opportunity for us to learn firsthand what Ovum Analyst, Aphrodite Brinsmead, sees as the “must haves” for best-in-class contact centers to use as Workforce Optimization Technologies (or WOTs as she calls them). She specifically focuses on the many advantages of levering an integrated workforce optimization suite, like VPI EMPOWER suite.

As I’m sure you’re painfully aware, contact centers are under immense pressure to improve customer satisfaction while at the same time, reducing costs. It seems that the mantra for businesses these days is “Do More With (much) Less.” This is challenging in any enterprise, but the contact center is unique in that its performance metrics and satisfaction scores are usually separated. It’s tough to know where to cut back or where to add staff when you can’t pinpoint the problems! Ovum believes that enterprises need to connect those traditionally siloed customer satisfaction metrics with agent performance, and tailor training accordingly. Makes perfect sense, right? But, in many cases, easier said than done!

This is where WOTs clearly provide a clear competitive advantage. This white paper shows you how to harness the power of these unified solutions in your own contact center. I really liked the graphic Ovum created to illustrate how the tools work together and the role each plays in the overall success of the contact center:

1. Quality Monitoring + Analytics: Desktop or speech analytics can be integrated with quality monitoring/call recording to automatically select important calls or call from a particular category to be monitored.
2. Quality Monitoring + Performance Management: This enable managers to combine quantitative and qualitative information for a complete assessment of contact center productivity and its contribution to the bottom line.

Leading industry analyst firm, Gartner, predicts that employees will account for up to 80 percent of contact center budgets in the increasingly demanding world of customer interaction. Such a substantial investment cannot be left to chance, yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and rarely reviewed by managers.

Like many other industries in which employee performance is crucial to the customer experience, the utility industry provides an essential commodity to the public. As they are often under intense scrutiny, utility companies must also take steps to minimize their exposure to liability issues. For utilities that provide direct service to retail power customers, the large volume of customer service calls they manage demands both courtesy and accuracy on the part of call center agents. And, consequently, their contact centers need reliable and effective quality monitoring and training solutions. Similarly, "upstream" energy providers specializing in transmitting power to other utilities need interaction recording systems to accurately record 100% of their service and event calls to and from their technicians (and other utilities) for liability protection and to recreate major incidents.

By now, most successful utility contact centers have already adopted baseline call recording and quality monitoring solutions –  the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution. However, although useful, these solutions can be of limited value if they are outdated, early generation quality monitoring applications,  and may be due for review and reevaluation..

The good news is that quality assurance technologies have evolved significantly. They have now reached  the point where they can enable contact centers to focus the entire process on what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance – all without losing objectivity in the assessment of agent performance.

Anticipate and Plan for Agent Satisfaction to Maximize Operations and the Customer Experience

Customer service and help desk environments have traditionally been known as high-turnover environments, where employees tend to consider their positions to be transient or temporary. There are many things that contact centers can do to overcome this challenge.

To anticipate and reduce  turnover, it is best to give agents some time away from the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling. Allowing agents to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills of becoming expert contact center professionals makes their jobs feel more fulfilling and enables them to provide a better customer experience.

It is also crucial to provide ongoing training. This will keep agents engaged, alert and empowered to quickly and accurately resolve customer issues. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent.

The Right Technology Can Help

In addition to process improvements, implementation of the latest technologies can be crucial to the continued success of utility contact centers. When liability and accuracy are the challenges, it is vital to adopt an interactions recording solution that can record 100 percent of calls and data interactions. Using an advanced telephone call recording solution, utility companies can determine what to retain, for how long, and on which storage device by implementing flexible, intelligent business rules. Recordings can be unified across audio and data sources and multiple locations while users can freely search, locate, playback and share using instant searches and filters.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is the interoperability. Each technology application – recording, QA, performance management, analytics, coaching, E-earning – has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvements in contact center performance and lowering operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making, which helps resolve customer issues.

By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer service — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact center tasks — utility companies can dramatically improve performance and profitability. The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on the specific utility’s needs, goals and circumstances. However, with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

2011 is certainly shaping up to be VPI's year - VPI Quality Pro recently received the 2010 Product of the Year Award from Customer Interaction Solutions (CIS) magazine! Even better, this is the second consecutive year we've won the award. And while our most valued praise always comes from our customers, it never hurts to receive recognition from the industry. We know that selecting a call center Quality Assurance solution is a big decision, and most people rely on industry resources such as TMC and CIS magazine to help guide their decisions.

So, you may be wondering what this award is all about. Each year, CIS presents its Product of Year awards to products and companies in the contact center and CRM industries that help users deliver an enhanced customer experience. Why did CIS choose VPI Quality Pro? First, it's built on our secure and powerful VPI Empower platform. This gives users confidence and reliability. Plus, VPI Quality Pro allows users to automatically categorize and prioritize recordings by customer names, products offered, transaction values and more -- across multimedia communication channels -- so that contact centers can focus on their most critical business issues instead. Now managers have these crucial recordings at their fingertips and can act quickly to resolve issues, improve performance and increase productivity. We're proud to deliver this innovation to our customers and the industry.

Does your contact center use VPI Quality Pro? We'd love to hear what you think! Or click here to learn more about VPI Quality Pro.

Life has been very exciting around VPI lately. We recently launched our VPI Empower Suite 5.2 and several new capabilities, especially our Smart Evaluations and have received rave reviews from Ventana Research, DMG Consulting and our customers.

Quite frankly, Smart Evaluations is unlike anything I've seen to date in the contact center quality assurance marketplace. Managers now have the power to assign automated actions to QA forms based on customized triggers. Actions like training, coaching, emails and actionable alerts that immediately appear on an agent's screen. To give you an idea of the impact Smart Evaluations can have on contact center performance, let me give you a quick scenario:

Susan is a manager responsible for quality at a 300-agent contact center. She sets up triggers based on specific agent behaviors. For instance, did the agent state his name and the company name clearly and politely when answering a call? Or, did the agent confirm the spelling of the customer's first and last names? Obviously, for both of these questons the answer is either Yes or No. Susan can set up specific actions for the system to follow in the event of either answer. And depending on the question result, she can select the type of action she wants to take – suggest training, schedule a coaching session, send an email to his supervisor, send a reminder message to the agent on their desktop ticker, or even send an immediate screen pop-up alert. 

Now imagine establishing dozens of triggers and actions that all work automatically! The possibilities are seemingly endless, and you can even replace previously manually answered questions with metrics about that call. The impact on the productivity and performance of an entire contact center is huge. And, because the Smart Evaluation interface is designed specifically for non-technical users, it's easy to start using it quickly. Click here to see a brief demo video of the Smart Evaluations feature in action and share in our excitement. 

How do you think Smart Evaluations could change your contact center? 

So many of our customers today are conducting business over the phone, which frequently includes processing credit card transactions. We all know how crucial it is to keep that personal data safe and secure – protecting the identities of the buyers and the reputation of the companies taking their sensitive information.

What some companies don’t know, however, is that in October 2010, the Payment Card Industry Council made a major update to the PCI Data Security Standard that tightened the rules for recording and access to sensitive credit card data. Like many other regulations, the requirements are detailed, the information is overwhelming and it may be hard to discern whether or not you are truly prepared.

PCI DSS version 2.0 went into effect on January 1, 2011. Organizations that do not take action to ensure compliance with these new requirements by December 31^st, 2011 could face costly fines and possibly even revocation of their rights to process credit card transactions.  Larger organizations will be required to pass PCI security audit to prove their compliance. VPI is here to offer insights and guidance.

For a limited time, you can download your free copy of the Call Recording Guide to PCI DSS Compliance authored by chief analyst, Dick Bucci, from Pelorus Associates, to learn:

• How the new PCI DSS requirements will affect your organization
• Important PCI DSS requirements that impact telephone call recording and call center quality assruance
• How to protect against breaches of sensitive card and personal information without sacrificing performance management, quality assurance call monitoring and call center coaching and training
• Six alternatives for preventing unauthorized recording, storing and access to sensitive credit card authentication data
• Best practices for securing at-home and remote employees

We know how difficult it can be in today’s highly competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace to find time for call center coaching to equip your agents with the appropriate skills to respond to customers effectively and efficiently.

Call center coaching and E-learning tools are proven to help mitigate agent churn, reduce staffing shortages and improve performance. And there are some surefire ways to make sure you succeed in your e-learning and coaching initiatives.

Check out this white paper to see what premier industry analyst firm, Ovum, has to say about the five best ways to deploy and maximize call center coaching and E-learning solutions in the contact center. You will gain insight into why contact centers need to develop specialized training strategies, learn how call center coaching and E-learning can best improve agent performance, and read case studies that detail how innovative companies use training.

Download your complimentary copy of the white paper here.

First contact resolution (FCR) is one of the most important metrics in contact centers today. It speaks volumes about how effective your systems are, how on target your agents are, and ultimately, how satisfied your customers will be.

We can all use to learn a thing or two about improving FCR so watch this complimentary training Webinar on 'Accelerating First Contact Resolution with Analytics' presented by 20+ year call center industry veteran, Penny Reynolds, from The Call Center School, and Patrick Botz from VPI.

Improved FCR rates lead to substantially reduced operating costs, increased opportunities to sell, and improved employee productivity. However, many today’s contact centers struggle to find the best ways to track and improve this elusive metric. The good news is that new, affordable analytics tools are making the quest for enhancing FCR much easier.

View complimentary on-demand training session at here to learn the pros and cons of the various methods used to measure FCR; how tp make measuring FCR more accurate and actionable with analytics; how to identify the root cause of repeat interactions and how to prioritize tracking, analysis and improvement of FCR to maximize your business benefits. This is a jam-packed educational session you should be sure not to miss!

You may have felt the pain yourself. For three decades now, the Quality Assurance (QA) process for most contact centers has been a cumbersome undertaking. But there is a light at the end of this tunnel. New research reveals that the next generation of call center quality assurance solutions is here and can seriously streamline your QA processes.

Among the findings are that workflow automation and contact center analytics can reduce the manual steps required by most QA applications by 60 to 80 percent, while ensuring that you still hear the very important voice of the customer (VOC).

There is so much to learn about what's next for call center quality assurance, and you can get your complimentary white paper with all of the details at http://www.VPI-corp.com/New-QA.

The paper discussed how this new generation of call center quality assurance and workforce optimization (WFO) solutions automate low-value tasks that do not require human cognitive capabilities. It illustrates the differences between the 'old' way of doing QA and new closed-loop automated processes, and how those processes can enhance the customer experience, increase agent satisfaction and improve QA specialist productivity by 15-20%.

It's time to see how you can adopt a new approach to contact center quality assurance today! Download your complimentary copy of the white paper now.

Are you interested in keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in contact center call recording, quality monitoring, analytics, performance management or eLearning technologies?

As organizations look to optimize the performance of their contact centers and the vital role agents play in providing customers with the right experiences as they handle interactions, the demand for thorough research into vendors and products that support agent performance management is becoming critical. Ventana Research has just released this ground-breaking independent research report on Contact Center Agent Performance Management solutions.

You can download your complimentary 2010 Value Index for Agent Performance Management Research Report by Ventana Research at http://www.VPI-corp.com/2010-Value-Index to learn:

• What tools can help you more effectively manage of all the business activities associated with handling customer interactions to ensure an optimal customer experience and alignment to a common set of customer and revenue goals and objectives.
• A framework for buyers to thoroughly review technology vendors as they seek to purchase new systems to support their efforts.
• How 13 agent performance management software vendors and their products were ranked in several categories.
• Why VPI achieved the highest 'Hot Vendor' rating and was rated #1 in Customer Assurance.