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Summary
As usual, operational managers in the contact center are under pressure to cut costs. In the past they have responded mostly by reducing the number of agents or trying to drive more customers to use self-service. But as customers’ expectations of service rise, these measures, which tend to have negative impacts on customer satisfaction, become less acceptable. To find other ways to deal with the competing pressures of cost and satisfaction, managers need information about how well the center and its agents are performing. Until recently they have had difficulty in getting this information because it resides in many disparate systems and there have been few software products that deal with the unique requirements of the contact center, such as events happening in real time, the large number and variety of systems producing data, the team dynamically changing to meet inbound call volumes, and the different reporting and analysis needs of the various levels of management. In the last 18 months, however, several vendors have brought new products to market or enhanced existing ones to help contact centers implement performance management. Yet many companies remain unaware that these products are available.

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Recent benchmark research by Ventana Research shows that performance management in the contact center and associated back-office functions remains immature. Most companies continue to use antiquated key performance indicators because it is too difficult to access the data that would enable them to create new measures appropriate to today’s business challenges. To cope, typically they rely on the basic reports supplied by their existing infrastructure, they build a solution in-house which is time-consuming and expensive, or they manually copy and paste raw data into spreadsheets that they use for analysis.

Best, of course, would be for the contact center to be able to access a full picture of a customer, but that would require accessing many varied data sources. Some of these will have been created by proprietary systems and so will require data extractors that cost time and money to develop. Along with reporting and analysis, companies need alerts and workflows designed to make it possible to manage and improve performance.

Most companies, we found, simply aren’t aware of what products and capabilities are available that meet these requirements. In the last 12 months, vendors such as AIM Technology, Enkata, Informiam (recently purchased by Genesys), Merced Systems and Symmetrics all have brought to market products aimed at the contact center. These offerings address the issue of data extractors by supplying tools to make development easier or modules that extract data from the most common contact center systems. Each product comes with prebuilt reports and analysis, and the more advanced ones make it easier for companies to customize these or build their own. Vendors such as Merced Systems supply workflows that link front- and back-office employees who need to cooperate to resolve customer issues such as claims.

Assessment
Given the availability of these new products, companies have one less excuse for not implementing performance management in the contact center. Ventana Research believes they should leave the excuses behind and turn to identifying what in their contact systems needs improving and what the best performance measures are to assess progress. Then they should evaluate products to see which include the necessary extractors (for unstructured as well as structured data) and the baseline reports and analysis that can be easily adapted to meet their needs. If they adopt one of these products, end users ultimately will be less dependent on IT and more able to modify the system to keep up with the dynamics of change in the contact center. We believe that to succeed companies must improve the performance of their contact centers and that these products have value in enabling them do this more quickly, with less risk and cost, and with more flexibility to meet changing requirements.