NICE NEWS : Spring 2008

Today's Contact Centers Move Beyond Cost Control, by Keith Dawson, Senior Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

The driving force behind contact centers has for so long been cost-control that many people have lost sight of just how powerful an operation a contact center can be. When finely tuned for high performance, a contact center is the key to providing a better customer experience - and that leads to a stronger, more profitable company overall.

But achieving high performance means being collaborative with the rest of the enterprise. The latest-generation tools on the market are masterful at kicking a center into high gear.

If you compare what we consider “high performance” today with the call center of the 1990s, you see a stark difference. In the past, centers had a very call-based, activity-based idea of what superior performance was. Call center metrics defined success in terms that focused on cost reduction and incident mitigation.

By contrast, today we see a much more interesting (and useful) range of possibilities for understanding performance. We see contact centers focusing on metrics that involve value, revenue and the customer experience. This is still a work in progress, but it represents a significant step forward in integrating the activities of the call center with the goals of the enterprise it’s a part of.

The one constant over all that time, though, has been the fact that the call center is home to a mountain of information, most of it generated internally. The problem in defining performance high or low has been in picking the threads of information that are most meaningful in the context you’re examining.

For example, if you look at the output of a quality monitoring system (whether automated or manual, individual or group), the idea of how you approach the outcome and what you do with it depends on what your short and long term goals are. Do you want to maximize the performance of a person in a seat, based on call data? Or the product line, based on revenue? Or the customer experience, based on satisfaction or first call resolution scores? And conundrum is just the starting point, since we’re just considering QM. What happens when you add in all the other data streams?

The upshot is that there are too many competing information streams that mean different things to different constituencies within a company. Making effective use of those information streams is step one to achieving high performance.

From a strategic vantage point, the contact center data is critical. It’s the grease that lets all the other operational parts work together to form a coherent customer management strategy. But it is data that is traditionally kept in silos, away from executive level managers that make strategic decisions.

Vendors of performance management software tell us that as the vast majority of PM deployments originate in the contact center – 90% or more. That makes sense given the emphasis the tools have on aggregating the data with the goal of specific improvement in agent activity.

But they also tell us that contact center executives are beginning to push that information outward (and upward) – using it to inform marketing executives, for example, about the impact of campaigns on calling patterns and on customer satisfaction. Once that barrier is breached, marketing begins to look at customer calling data as an important component in their plans for allocating resources.

The contact center is the place where all the other corporate information comes into play every day (about customers, products, prices, shipping times, whether something is in stock or backordered, whether one problem is like someone else’s problem and what your engineers figured out to fix it). The real value is not necessarily in all that output data. Rather, the value is in the intelligent inferences you can make about the data, and what you then decide to do about it. Being able to discern patterns, turn quickly and make adjustments – that’s essential to high performance.

So what are some of the common threads that distinguish high performance centers from their run-of-the-mill brethren? One important quality is that managers set specific goals for reasonable expectations with an efficient allocation of resources. And at the same time, agents know what is expected of them, and how what they do impacts the goals of the company as a whole. This communications gap is very common. Too often, managers express their agents’ goals in terms of call handling statistics, instead of in terms of product promotion or corporate health.

High performance means going full throttle with no wastage of resources when everything is happening as expected. It means turning on a dime in the face of the unexpected. And it means that information, in understandable format, is presented to executives and managers who need to know when conditions are changing. Again, this applies not just to call center conditions, but to business conditions.

The paradox of being a contact center manager is that if you have a narrow, cost control view, you may be achieving “high performance” according to a narrow ACD definition, but you won’t be particularly relevant within your company.

Fortunately, today’s call centers have access to tools and techniques that can help them make that transformative leap from a narrow cost-focused operation to being a critical and profitable engine of corporate growth.