by Richard Snow |
4/11/2008 | Article ID: V08-15 | Article Type: VentanaView
Summary
Even basic contact centers require complex technology, which may include automatic call distributors (ACDs), computer/telephony integration (CTI) software, interactive voice response (IVR) machines, call-routing software, and servers to handle e-mail, faxes and Web traffic, not to mention software applications for customer relationship management (CRM), legacy business applications, knowledge management and workflow. Each of these systems produces data about customers and the center’s performance, often large amounts of it. Companies have long struggled to access the data in these proprietary systems and typically have had to rely on separate reports for each. Now, however, products are available that can bring together this scattered data and produce more meaningful reports and analysis. Ventana Research advises companies to take advantage of it.
View
Benchmark research by Ventana Research in the last three years shows that companies haven’t significantly changed the ways they monitor and assess the performance of their contact centers. They still focus on efficiency measures, restricting their key performance indicators to throughput measures such as volume of calls, speed of answer, average length of a call and time spent on hold. They pay little attention to effectiveness measures that deal with outcomes, such as first-call resolution rates, lifetime value of customers, cost to serve a customer, agents’ skills at customer retention and the latest fashion, net promoter scores that indicate the difference between the percentage of customers that would recommend a company and the percentage that are detractors.
It’s hard to understand why companies pay so little attention to how effectively the contact center is serving the needs of the organization. But many, perhaps most, executives and managers view the contact center as a necessary but regrettable cost. This attitude is typified by a simple equation for estimating the cost of the center, which goes something like this: The volume of calls multiplied by the average length of a call yields the number of call minutes, which is divided by the number of hours the center is open to produce the number of agents needed; that number multiplied by the fully weighted cost for an agent equals the total cost. Looked at like this, the only way to hold down the cost is to reduce the number of calls – usually by sending customers to self-service through the Web or interactive voice systems – or to reduce the average call length, which is done most often by setting arbitrary targets for agents. At the extreme, the latter results in agents hanging up on callers just to meet time targets.
This equation is of course overly simple, but it illustrates the point that focusing on efficiency prevents companies not only from improving the performance of the contact center but also from improving business results in general. On the other hand, for example, if the company analyzed more closely the information about why customers call, it could identify and then improve the back-office processes that cause calls and thereby reduce the need for customers to call. One case in point was a cable TV company, where 70 percent of calls came because the billing system was producing incorrect bills; once the billing system was corrected, most of the calls stopped.
Ventana Research asserts that companies need to take a holistic view of performance management, extending what they measure from simple throughput measures to outcome measures and the root causes behind those outcomes, and subsequently developing action plans to remove those root causes. Though many potential users are unaware of it, there is technology to support this approach. Vendors of enterprise business intelligence (BI) software such as Business Objects and Cognos have packages focused on the customer; niche vendors such as AIM Technology, Enkata, KnoahSoft and Merced Systems offer products to collect and analyze information about performance of both the contact center and its agents; and new vendors such as HardMetrics, Informiam, Inova, Latigent and Symmetrics have emerged with products that focus on contact center performance. Each of these vendors has extended the view of the contact center and customer-focused performance in that they can access and include more systems that contain customer data. And this trend is continuing as vendors such as Nice Systems and Witness Actionable Solutions extend their products by including sources of unstructured data such as voice recordings, text and data capture as the agents input it.
Assessment
The contact center resembles other business units in that its managers try to solve their operational issues in pragmatic and isolated ways, often using limited tools such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. But as the competition to attract and retain customers intensifies, companies need to take new approaches. Today the contact center is just one business unit that interacts with customers, and the telephone is just one channel of communication with them. The challenge for companies is to create an enterprise-wide, multichannel customer service strategy that is supported by new processes and technology. To do this requires new measures that include the old-style efficiency measures but focus more on outcomes and effectiveness. The good news is that companies making this transition will find technology products that can help them reach these new goals.
Related Research Notes
Customer Performance Management Research Agenda for 2008
Customer Experience Management Can Refocus Contact Centers
Customer Experience Management Technology
Printer friendly version
Email this article
Send feedback to editor
