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			Business Research: Contact Center Imperative Research: Performance Improvement Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Aspect, BMC Remedy, Cisco Systems, Enkata, Envision, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, HardMetrics, IBM, Informiam, Inova Solutions, Jacada, KnoahSoft, Latigent, Merced Systems, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Noetica, Nortel, Onyx, Oracle, Par3 Communications, Portrait Software, Quality Plus, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, Saratoga Systems, Symmetrics, Syntellect, Verint, Witness Systems
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Summary
Recent research by Ventana Research shows that for most companies, improving the handling of calls is the number-one priority within their contact center. Because companies put their centers under strict cost constraints, operational managers try to meet this objective by handling as many calls as possible with as few agents as possible. To achieve this balance, they require detailed information about how calls are being handled. But most companies have to rely on standard reports available from their call management system because only 34 percent of respondents to our survey said they are able to derive analytics from additional data sources. Informiam offers a product that addresses this issue for companies running Cisco’s contact center software.

Assessment
Most customers prefer to speak with an agent to resolve an issue with a company. This preference is illustrated by the research finding that 47 percent of centers in our recent survey receive more than 1,000 phone calls per day, whereas only 15, 11 and 5 percent, respectively, receive more than 1,000 daily e-mail messages, pieces of postal mail or faxes. This makes agents the largest cost item in a center because there is close correlation between the number of calls received and the average length of a call, on one hand, and the number of agents required to handle the calls on the other. If you drive down the average length of a call and drive up utilization of agents, your costs will go down. 

Therefore, information about how many calls are received, how long on average they last and how agents are utilized is vital to the efficient operation of centers. The source of this data is the call management system – the automatic call distribution (ACD) system in a traditional telecom environment or, in a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) environment, the VoIP supplier’s software, such as Cisco’s Intelligent Call Manager (ICM). Either resides in mysterious gray boxes, and extracting data from them ranges from difficult to almost impossible. Thus, operational management has had to rely on the standard reports provided by the system or pay highly skilled, expensive consultants to develop new, company-specific systems. For companies running Cisco’s ICM and IP Contact Center (IPCC) products, Informiam changes that.

Working with Cisco, Informiam has developed extractors that interface with ICM and IPCC so that call record data can easily be extracted and loaded into their database. It provides a customizable metadata model that allows the data to be modeled into business-related entities that match the operational environment, showing, for example, which calls to which dialed numbers are handled by which agents or groups. This process feeds two components of Informiam’s product suite, Call Analyzer and Frontline Advisor. 

Call Analyzer displays information based on business rules (such as by agent group, region, call center, call type or product type), which is easier for business users to understand. The presentation is mostly in straightforward tabular form with a few bells and whistles. The rules can be associated with triggers; for example, when a metric falls outside a defined range, it can be highlighted, pointing to where operational managers need to drill down to investigate further. Data can be refreshed at different intervals, down to near real time, which means managers get earlier warning of problems. Some of the metrics can be scaled up, such as to the center level, and the required metrics can be displayed on a map to give another early warning of where problems are occurring.

Frontline Advisor takes the same data sources and displays metrics at an individual level, for example, showing agents how they are performing against their targets and their team. This information can be used as input for agent training and coaching, if, for instance, an agent is taking longer on certain types of calls than other agents.

The third component is Workforce Utilization, which receives data from an agent workforce management system, either Aspect eWFM or IEX. Again the data is placed in the Informiam database, and similarly to call data, it can be displayed in a business-related form. The two sets of data can be analyzed in conjunction with each other and can be combined with business triggers to show how actual performance is deviating from plan, for example, showing the effect on queue lengths of having fewer than expected agents available.

Market Impact
Users of Cisco’s contact center products have in the past had to rely mainly on the reporting capabilities provided by Cisco. Informiam provides an alternative that is more oriented toward business users and ease of configuration. It helps business users to understand, in the business context they understand, how customer calls are being handled. It also provides rules-based triggers that give users an early warning when business-related performance measures are not being met. For example, when an IT manager needed to provide his business and technical users with information comparable to what they were used to receiving from their Aspect automatic call distribution (ACD) system, Informiam provided the solution in the form of “traffic light” displays to warn users when trigger points have been reached.  These, and the supporting reports, provide them with needed information in a timely way.   
 
Recommendation
Gaining insight into contact center performance has been an issue for companies because of the difficulty of extracting the data on which to base the analysis. Informiam provides a solution to this issue for users of Cisco’s contact center products. Analysis is displayed in a format relevant to business users as well as technical staff. Triggers provide early, business-related root cause analysis, which Ventana Research believes is fundamental to improving the efficiency of both the contact center and wider-ranging processes. Ventana Research recommends that companies looking to improve their efficiency in handling customer contacts consider Informiam.