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			Business Research: Contact Center Technology Research: Business Intelligence, Operational Intelligence Imperative Research: Performance Improvement, Process Improvement Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Enkata, Envision, HardMetrics, Informiam, Inova Solutions, KnoahSoft, Latigent, Merced Systems, Portrait Software, Symmetrics
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Summary
The latest research from Ventana Research shows that many companies have adopted voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which provides an affordable platform on which to virtualize their contact centers and distribute customer interactions to other parts of the company. This shifts the performance management focus away from the contact center to customer-centric performance management. Merced Systems was one of the first contact center performance management vendors to recognize this, and its latest product release will support companies making this transition.

Assessment
Over the years, handling interactions with customers, in particular in the form of phone calls, has become almost solely the responsibility of the contact center. But the latest research from Ventana Research shows that the situation is changing: Companies are beginning to distribute calls to other groups, such as field service technicians, experts in specialized business units and even home-based workers. We believe this change reflects a recognition of the increasing importance of customers in ever more competitive markets and that agents in the contact center aren’t always able to handle their complex inquiries. Companies therefore must broaden customer interaction-handling to other parts of the organization and with it their performance management programs, focusing more on customers than on the contact center and its agents. 

Merced Systems, an established contact center performance management vendor, recognized the importance of customer service early on. Its flagship product, Performance Suite, has always contained functionality to analyze the performance of both contact center agents and back-office workers who cooperate to resolve customer interactions. Its many extractors can take data from disparate systems, allowing the tool to turn it into meaningful information to help drive better performance. The latest version, Performance Suite 3.0, contains several new features that extend its functionality even further. In the new release, an integrated workflow engine enables managers to ensure consistent and coordinated behavior across processes in different business units and users. Reporting and presentation of information can be customized to suit users in various roles. The system tracks personnel-related information, such as hierarchies, attributes and targets, so that reports and information always reflect the latest status across in each business unit. And the analytics capabilities have been enhanced to provide online analytical processing (OLAP) that can deliver root-cause analyses that are both relevant and easy to use to front-line workers who deal with customers.

Performance Suite 3.0 has a Web-based architecture that can support many users and runs on most hardware and database platforms. It includes enhanced data management and administrative features that make it easier to modify dashboards, alerts and workflows and to create new reports that reflect changing business requirements. Other new features make it easier to manage the development, testing and go-live stages of new requirements.

Market Impact
Merced Performance Suite is an established product that from its earliest days had features to support both front- and back-office performance management. Release 3.0 continues and enhances that tradition and puts Merced in a strong position to maintain its stature. But the company can’t expect to have the market to itself. As the focus widens beyond the contact center, some enterprise vendors – Business Objects and Cognos are just two – look set to try for a piece of the action, though they will face issues in data extraction and cost of implementation. Other niche vendors, such as AIM Technology, HardMetrics and Informiam, likewise are entering the space with products that tackle other aspects of customer-centric performance management.

Recommendation
Research that Ventana Research completed in 2006 revealed that less than one-third of companies can produce a customer-centric scorecard. The number-one reason for this shortfall, according to survey respondents, was that no product on the market enables them to do so. Merced Performance Suite 3.0 meets that need. We recommend that companies wanting to become more customer-centric look at how it can help improve their operations.