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			Business Research: Contact Center Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Apropos Technology, Aspect, BMC Remedy, Cisco Systems, Enkata, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, Informiam, Inova Solutions, Jacada, KnoahSoft, Latigent, Merced Systems, Mercom Systems, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Noetica, Nortel, Onyx, Oracle, Par3 Communications, Pipkins, Quality Plus, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, Saratoga Systems, Symmetrics, Syntellect, Verint, Witness Systems
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Take
Performance management in contact centers has been restrained for two reasons: insufficient understanding of the appropriative key performance indicators (KPIs) that should be used to monitor performance and a lack of software tools to deliver those measures. In both areas the annual International Call Center Management (ICCM) trade show, held in Chicago earlier this month, showcased encouraging developments.

The agenda included a full track dedicated to business intelligence (BI) in contact centers. Not only did several vendors present cases studies of how their tools have been used to improve the performance of centers, but some lively audience discussion suggested that operational management is beginning to change the way it assesses and monitors performance. From these debates we take hope that the era of just measuring the number and average lengths of calls, queue lengths, number of calls abandoned and other similar efficiency measures is giving way to adding business dimensions to KPMs. These changes are likely to affect not just agents on the job but also customers and the overall business.

This is occurring as established vendors such as AIM Technology, Enkata, Merced Systems, Opus (now part of Verint) and Performix (now part of Nice Systems) refine their products and a new set of competitors emerges. Hardmetrics, Informiam and Symmetrics all have made inroads into the market, giving companies a wider choice of products. In choosing among them, the biggest issue remains the data sources from which a center needs to extract data in order to derive the required KPMs. One or another of these vendors has built an extractor for most of the data sources present in the marketplace and most can present the results in a variety of formats, so it is a question of finding the product that best matches your requirements most closely. The final criteria are performance and scalability, which are particularly relevant to vendors offering their solutions on demand. All in all, technology is no longer the constraining factor; making the cultural and process changes is.