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Summary
Managing the employees who interact with customers is a complex process that crosses the boundaries of several business units, including the contact center. It involves a variety of functions such as recording calls and capturing information about the systems agents access while they are handling a call; managing agents’ schedules and work plans; assessing, training and coaching them; managing incentives to motivate them; and producing performance reports and analysis. Software applications are available to support each of these tasks, but benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that most companies don’t use many of them; we believe that this impedes efforts to get optimal performance from this important human resource. No one application supports all these tasks, so companies must try to integrate a range of “best of breed” products or look to vendors that sell an integrated suite that includes several of the applications. Our research also shows that companies believe that agents play an important role in improving the customer experience. In light of this, we advise them to focus on how they can improve the performance of their agents and as they do so to investigate software options that can help them.

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Benchmark research by Ventana Research during 2007 showed that a number of business units handle customer interactions; as well as the contact center, sales, customer service, marketing, knowledge workers in specialist business units, finance and to a small degree manufacturing all participate. Nevertheless, despite this shift of interaction-handling to employees outside the formal contact center, our latest benchmark research shows that companies continue to recognize the importance of contact center agents when it comes to satisfying customers. The results show that the two actions companies take most often to improve the customer’s experience are to improve agents’ training and to improve the process of monitoring the quality of agents’ work. Furthermore, the technique research participants said most improves the customer’s experience is routing calls to the agent most qualified to answer each inquiry.

Achieving this successful pairing requires an integrated set of actions:
• Use information about past calls to forecast how many skilled agents likely will be required to meet anticipated call volumes and patterns.
• Use these predictions to create work schedules that take into account the skills of the available agents, shift patterns, breaks, personal needs of agents, training times, coaching periods and holidays.
• Monitor call-handling performance in real time so managers can make immediate adjustments to network and agent profiles to reflect events as they occur.
• Listen to recorded calls and examine the systems used during them to assess how agents performed and how customers responded; a small minority of advanced companies use speech and text analytics techniques to do this.
• Conduct post-call customer surveys to further understand customers’ reactions and degrees of satisfaction.
• Use information about the performance of agents to determine training and coaching required for various agents.
• Adjust the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to assess agents’ performance and link them to how agents are rewarded.

To be effective, each of these actions requires information. Each type of user needs the information presented in a way meaningful to his or her function for it to be actionable; indeed, where possible it should include recommended actions such as, for example, what to do if a KPI falls outside set targets.
 
Assessment
Business and contact center managers need tools to help them manage all the actions related to the performance of their customer service agents. Our research shows that companies choose from two options for sourcing the applications they need to support the full spectrum of tasks involved in managing agent performance. The first is to bring together “best of breed” products that support specific functions: call recording devices; screen-capture software to see what agents do with their computers during calls; workforce management applications to produce forecasts and develop work plans and schedules; products to manage agent training and coaching; quality monitoring applications to assess agents’ performance; speech analytics software to automate the analysis of recorded calls; incentives management applications; and agent-focused business intelligence, analysis and performance management products. Going this route adds the challenge of integrating the applications so that tasks created in one application are easily reflected in other applications and necessary information can be shared among them easily.

The second option is for companies to look at the increasing number of vendors that through acquisition or internal development now provide a suite of products that include most of these types of applications. Ventana Research believes that for many companies an integrated package will suit them better because it is likely to be less expensive and easier to deploy and will provide common management interfaces.

Products typically are offered today in two forms: As traditional on-premises-installed software or on-demand as software-as-a-service, or SaaS. The latter offers the benefits of requiring less upfront investment, having a cost structure more aligned with usage, and potentially requiring less resources to implement. However, companies considering this avenue should examine integration requirements (especially with legacy systems), data security and accessibility, and the willingness of the vendor to customize its product to meet specific company requirements.

Our research shows that companies have to date been slow to take advantage of the latest products developed to support these essential tasks. We recommend that companies seeking to improve their competitiveness in this area determine their needs and explore how available products can benefit them as part of their efforts to improve performance of their contact center agents.

Related Research Notes:
Managing the Customer’s Phone Call Experience

Listening to the Customer Experience