Lately it’s been tough to find much positive news about business and the economy. However, the latest report from the National Association of Call Centers (NACC) shows a very positive outlook for the contact center industry. The benchmarking report shows that the contact center industry has rebounded from the recession and has been steadily growing over the past couple of years. In fact, 95% of the respondents felt that economic and business conditions in 2011 will be the same or even better than they were in 2010. Download the North American Contact Center Industry 2011 Mid-Year Update and Forecast research report now to learn more about how our industry has weathered the tough times and come out smarter, stronger and prepared for the future.

In this report you’ll learn what the NACC sees as some of the contributing factors to the industry's resilience, including:

• Advances in Workforce Optimization technology, including quality monitoring, performance management, E-learning and workforce management.
• Growing interest in Social Media
• High interest in Desktop Analytics solutions
• How First Call Resolution is being tracked
• Key Unified Communications trends
• Contact Center Hiring patterns and trends

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!

August 7^th, the start date of this year’s APCO International Conference and Trade Show, is approaching fast - we are looking forward to seeing you in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!  We are particularly excited about this event as APCO selected our customer City of Edmond to share the best practices for latest-generation communications recording and quality assurance at a Training Session that has been scheduled for 4pm on Monday, August 8^th. This is a must-see presentation that breaks the barriers of what was once seen as too much to ask from recording and quality assurance technology. As a bonus, we are certain that you will enjoy the dynamic, engaging presentation style of Matt Stillwell, Director of Emergency Communications for the City of Edmond, Oklahoma and senior advisor at APCO.

In the meantime, or if you're unable to make it to the APCO Conference this year, we invite you to watch the video here to learn about:

·      Smart new ways of the City of Edmond's 911 center and other departments to record and share communications.

·      What you really need in recording and multimedia incident recreation technology.

·      How to implement an effective QA program to get better insights in less time and prepare for upcoming new standards.

If you have any questions about this video or would like to schedule a private meeting or demo with us at the conference (our booth number is 1001), please contact Patrick Botz at pbotz@VPI-corp.com. Thanks and hope to see you there!

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.

Think contact center analytics may improve your operations and customer experience?

The latest research indicates it can – and will.  

Today’s toughening business landscape dictates that contact centers revamp their goals, processes and performance measures to improve the profitability of customer interactions.  This requires strong leadership and a clear view of the path to progress.  Both can be profoundly supported by contact center analytics technology that captures performance data and generates the metrics needed to drive improvement.

This major research on Contact Center Analytics, the latest from leading business technology research firm Ventana Research, analyzed input from hundreds of organizations around the world to assess the maturity and direction of their efforts. Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to acquire real-world information about maturity, trends and best practices in how contact centers use analytics. It explores how they do this now, how their people feel about the current processes and tools, plans they have to change or improve them, and benefits they hope to gain by doing so.

"Organizations are advancing in their ability to apply analytics to improve both the operations of the contact center and its contributions to the organization's performance, but there is substantial room for improvement," said Richard Snow, VP of Ventana Research and head of its Customer and Contact Center Research practice. "This benchmark research shows that companies can still do more to improve the way they provide efficiency metrics and that most have yet to devise effectiveness metrics. It indicates that a narrow focus on cost is obstructing improvement in customer service and the customer experience. Moreover, the research makes clear that the timeliness of both metrics and the underlying data is increasingly an issue for companies."

Download your complimentary copy of the Contact Center Analytics Benchmark Research executive summary to learn about:

• Today's most commonly measured contact center metrics.
• How leading contact centers are using contact center analytics today.
• 15 strategic recommendations and best practices for use of contact center analytics.
• How contact center executives, managers and front-line employees feel about their current processes and tools, the plans they have to change or improve them and expected benefits.

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.

In an already competitive and crowded marketplace, organizations today are continuously seeking ways to lower operating costs and increase revenues. The landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade. Organizations  are closely scrutinized by regulators and consumers who have high expectations from outsourced partners and 3^rd party vendors. In the wake of  the global financial crisis that has negatively impacted some of the world’s leading economies, organizations are starting to revisit their strategy, in terms of outsourcing contact center contracts, and demanding more than just cost savings. This mindset is now creating concerns among outsourcers and 3^rd party vendors, who can no longer attract and maintain their customer base just on the basis of their ability to provide a cost savings advantage.

The role of the contact center has undergone a dramatic shift from that of a cost center to that of a profit and value center. In light of this new pressure to provide greater value, outsourcers are now responding to their clients’ raised expectations by implementing increasingly complex solutions.   Despite the proliferation of e-commerce and digital technology, one fundamental principle remains consistent: Outsourcers are key strategic partners for organizations to deliver value by focusing their operations on attracting, fulfilling and retaining high value and loyal customers. As a result, the fragile relationship in which the outsourced operation manages its entire resources is critical to the client and their customer base. Outsourcers are beginning to recognize the positive correlation between customer experience, employee engagement and increased revenues, even in a stagnant condition within the economy.

Today's unpredictable, volatile and increasingly competitive economic climate continues to add to the pressure to decrease costs and increase revenues while simultaneously delivering higher than normal levels of customer service. Following are five ways for outsourcers to reduce contact center operational costs while at the same time “delighting” clients with superior levels of service. Think of each recommendation as an idea worthy of consideration and capable of standing on its own merit, yet part of an overall strategy addressing the optimal performance of the contact center.

1) Make agent attrition rates a KPI – The management of retention in an outsourced contact center has the most significant impact on payroll costs and profitability. While HR may be generally involved with the recruitment, selection and hiring of staff, the key driver in agent satisfaction lies in the knowledge and capability of their line managers. High performing outsourced operations invest in the training and development of their team leaders and supervisors to ensure that they have the necessary tools and resources to support agents. As a result, high performing outsourced contact centers build scorecards and other intervention tools to ensure that the overall strategic goals of the contact center are met.

2) Ensure that you're measuring the metrics that really matter – It is crucial to select meaningful and effective metrics necessary to enhance performance that lead to customer satisfaction. It is important to maintain the discipline of reviewing these metrics using a rigorous methodology that is adopted across all levels of the contact center and links desired behaviors necessary to meet organizational objectives. A sample list of metrics for outsourced operations should be reviewed as business needs change and fluctuate. Typically high performing providers link their operational objectives to their clients and review these over Business Review Meetings and Quarterly Reviews for alignment.

3) Eliminate guess work by implementing real-time reports, tickers and scorecards – Outsourced operations that implement rigorous, regular performance scorecards and analysis consistently outperform mediocre centers due to their speed and reaction time advantage. Weekly or daily historical reporting in a dynamic, ever-changing environment is neither effective nor efficient for the purpose of determining the tactics needed to address a particular situation where calls spike unexpectedly. If managers receive real-time reports on the performance of their operations by agent group or skill, they are able to rapidly make strategic decisions without impacting service levels. Often, these tactics are overlooked and end up costing contact centers more money than they had forecasted. Avoid red flags and those repeated frantic calls from clients by being proactive to daily operational issues with real-time information and data.

4) Tighten the span of control between Managers and Agents – Numerous surveys and a great deal of research point to the fact that, due to costs, outsourced operations are guilty of having an unusually high number of agents relative to the line managers. One of the reasons that agents quit is the level of contact or the lack of coaching or leadership they receive from their line manager.. Typically for optimal performance the span of control should be between 1:10 or 1:15 to generate the desired results within a contact center.

5) Automate e-Learning, coaching and virtual classroom training – The emergence of the internet and the proliferation of innovative electronic learning and coaching courses have enabled high performance outsourced centers to bring training to the agent desktop during low call volume moments.  Team leaders and supervisors can also use quiet time to enroll in critical mandatory modules for compliance and product or process knowledge. This can create enormous opportunities for contact center training teams to focus and deliver other mission-critical courses and modules that require classroom training during those scarce resource hours. The combination of these methods will drive down costs while at the same time increase proficiency of agents while building a training team that is highly effective.

When implemented properly, each of these ideas offers the potential to deliver anywhere from a small benefit in a short period of time to much larger benefits over a period of a year. While any one idea may provide some short-term savings, the effort to optimize the performance of the contact center is best undertaken within the context of a continuous improvement program with regular reviews of all the components of the solution prescribed for the contact center.

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

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.

Credit unions and community banks are increasingly coping with federal and local legislation, interest rate hikes and volatility in capital markets, all of which entails placing greater emphasis on local and regional customer retention, quality assurance, internal controls, as well as more careful compliance and risk management. Although these smaller banks share many common challenges with large contact centers, they have unique needs that can be addressed using today’s modular, highly customizable call quality monitoring and workforce optimization solutions.

Small- to mid-sized financial services contact centers face a number of operational challenges relatively unknown to the larger contact center. With limited resources and shrinking budgets, a Branch or Regional Manager for smaller contact center needs to carefully keep an eye out for inefficient practices to find opportunities for cost reduction. He or she needs to carefully plan capital expenditures, and training investments, while keeping up with significant hardware and software investments within their broader organization.

Traditionally, customer service and help desk environments are known as high-turnover environments. This is rather typical for smaller financial services contact centers as well, where employees tend to consider helpdesk positions to be transient or temporary. To anticipate and reduce the impact of this phenomenon, it is best in the early days of their careers to give agents some time off the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills to becoming expert contact center professionals.

Another necessity is ongoing training to keep them engaged, alert and empowered to resolve customer issues quickly, while they answer phone calls during their careers. 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 and simultaneously targeted directly at business goals of the contact center as well as the broader home organization. Gartner predicts that staffing will account for up to 80% of contact center budgets in the new world of customer interaction. The need for such a substantial investment just cannot be left to a chance. Yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and not really routinely reviewed by managers.

Regardless of size, every contact center must provide excellent customer service, reduce costs and maintain a healthy profit margin to thrive in the new economic model. By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer-service and contact centers — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact-center and customer-service tasks — mortgage companies and credit unions can dramatically affect their performance and profitability.

By now, most successful contact centers have already adopted at least baseline grade digital call recording and quality monitoring solutions. They are the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution, but they are just a start that may be due for review and re-evaluation, especially if they come from early generations of quality monitoring that couldn’t see beyond the horizon of individual agent compliance with (possibly outdated) internal rules and policies. These older technologies did not really have a good way of connecting standards for customer/agent interactions with evolving business objectives of the bank, let alone being able to incorporate voice of the customer into any part of the quality management process. The good news is that the call center quality assurance technologies evolved to the point where contact centers can focus the entire process onto what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance, without losing any objectivity in assessing agent performance. In fact, evaluating agents based on their quantifiable contributions to the contact center’s business success supports their drive to do well, succeed in their jobs and avoid defection.

The proverbial “needle in a haystack” is now rather easy to find – with the implementation of advanced desktop screen analytics, supervisors can easily identify and evaluate the calls that resulted in a customer cancelling their account and taking their business elsewhere. Or the calls where agents attempted an upsale successfully or unsuccessfully, or where they saved a customer by resolving their issue during the first call – even without unnecessary concessions. Instead of wasting time and adding costs with reviewing completely random selection of low-value calls, why not concentrate on evaluating those calls that provide insights into the bank’s business practices every time, so that something could be done about it before opportunities are missed or lost forever?

Real-time performance management and automated E-Learning tools are the latest additions to the workforce optimization family of solutions that can be closely tied into quality management processes, to provide options for action mechanism whenever a manager needs to be notified or agent supported by just-in-time help.

The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on a company’s needs, goals and circumstances, but with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is interoperability. Each individual solution has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvement of contact center performance involving operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making which in turn helps resolve issues for customers. Easy access to call recordings can help contact centers give better customer service. Call records can be used to settle disputes quickly and with minimum inconvenience.

Recorded calls provide excellent material for training purposes – real-life examples of good and bad agent-customer interactions. This helps the manager effectively intervene when agents are underperforming. The latest-generation solutions have the capability to automatically select and assign coaching and training through courses, tips, quizzes, training flashes, pre-shift announcements and bulletins according to individual agent needs, identified through quality evaluations or simply by monitoring their performance metrics. This tool allows you to set rules that send targeted coaching and training to individual agents or groups when they reach predetermined thresholds based on their performance scores, customer survey results and more. By targeting the right training to the right person at the right time, your agents will be empowered with personalized guidance that will make it easier for them to offer improved service, thus heightening customer satisfaction and ultimately increasing both, agent productivity and satisfaction with the job. Managers can track sales and address marketing and service challenges quickly.

Integrated workforce optimization systems can accomplish this in a cost-effective manner while decreasing expenses, increasing revenues and enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction – all of which can lead to strengthened market position, customer loyalty and long-term bottom-line growth.

Highly Anticipated 4th Annual Call Center Optimization Forum Will Provide Contact Center Professionals with Groundbreaking Strategies and Proven Best Practices to Boost Performance and Profitability

A full schedule of cities and dates was released today for the highly anticipated 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum (http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com). The fourth annual event, which has garnered rave reviews from industry experts and attendees alike, will be hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), and Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) and CRMXchange, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero, Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies. The nationwide series of educational seminars is tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. In an effort to maintain a free and open exchange, the Forum is open to end-users only – registrations submitted by non-sponsoring vendors and consultants will not be accepted.

“Over the last three years, we have been delighted by the remarkable success of the Call Center Optimization Forum,” said David Hadobas, president and CEO at CCNG. “We’ve diligently maintained contact with attendees in order to ensure that they’ve had the most rewarding experience possible and we’ve been deeply gratified to hear their success stories upon having implemented the strategies and best practices learned at our events.” Hadobas went on to explain that attendee feedback is crucial to the success of future events. “We listen to our attendees and act upon their opinions and advice. As a result, the agenda for the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum is more informative and engaging than ever before.” In addition to the event’s various educational seminars and workshops, attendees that register and attend will receive many additional benefits, including a one-year full CCNG individual membership (a $150 value), connection to a 90-minute Call Center School Online Training Class of the attendee’s choice (a $275 value) and a registration to the 2011 CRMXchange Virtual Contact Center Conference.

Attendees will learn how to fully maximize the value of key contact center solutions for pre-hire assessment and simulation, workforce forecasting and scheduling, quality monitoring and performance management. They will also discover the importance of implementing the latest solutions for customer experience management and post-contact surveying and customer feedback. With support from leading call center industry networking and educational organizations including CCNG (Call Center Network Group), The Call Center School, CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars will outline breakthrough strategies and techniques that can be used to exceed customer expectations, raise performance standards, intelligently reduce costs and achieve attendees' personal career goals. The seminars will reveal powerful new, cost-effective ways to hire the right employees, set and track the right performance objectives, accurately forecast workload and schedules, improve quality of service, measure and boost customer satisfaction, and win the support of top executives.

Due to limited availability, early registration is recommended in order to guarantee a place at any of the following Call Center Optimization Forum seminars:  

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA (April 7^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Charlotte

WASHINGTON DC (June 2^nd) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/WashingtonDC

OMAHA, NEBRASKA (July 14^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Omaha

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (August 8^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Boston

ORLANDO, FLORIDA (September 15^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Orlando

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (November 10^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Las-Vegas

To register or for additional information on the upcoming 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars, please visit http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.

About Call Center Optimization Forum

The Call Center Optimization Forum is a worldwide series of educational seminars tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. Hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies – the event is designed for executives, managers and IT decision-makers who need to stay informed about the latest industry trends, best practices, and rapidly evolving contact center optimization technology. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to learn about industry best practices from multiple experts in the field at one time and see demonstrations of the latest advancements in call center technology. To learn more and register to attend, visit: http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.

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.