Assessment

The Contact Center Performance Management Mandate - Historically, Contact Centers have had two conflicting objectives; increase customer satisfaction but at the lowest cost. At Ventana Research, we see the latter objective changing as organization begin to mature their centers from simple call centers, deployed to mask back office departments from customer enquiries, into multi-channel centers that are a part of a strategic imperative to deliver improved business performance. In order to achieve this objective, organizations are looking at some of the performance improvement techniques traditionally used throughout the business, such as business intelligence, analytics and score-carding. These can be used to identify areas of process improvement that can be enabled with emerging technologies. Equally importantly, organizations need to evaluate these emerging technologies to determine what is now possible given the availability of new features, functions and embedded best practice. However, change cannot be brought about through technology alone. One major area of change required in Contact Centers is a re-examination of appropriate measures and aligning these more to business strategy and process change. The days of just measuring call-handling performance are gone. Our research will explore ways of maturing the centers and the techniques used to bring about this change.

Improving Effectiveness and Efficiency - To date, the major initiatives within Contact Centers have been based on the need to automate transaction handling, automate contact routing, automate case management, automate contact management, automate self-service, etc. This has led to the introduction of new, more automated channels of communication in a drive to reduce costly one-to-one conversations with agents. Many of these have been at the expense of customer satisfaction, since for the majority this is still the preferred channel. Very little attention has been paid to driving effectiveness and efficiency through a process of defining a strategy, developing an enterprise-wide plan and then executing the plan through a series of process changes, re-education, IT changes and new measures. Our research will examine how these new channels of communication can be used effectively and in a timely way so as not to deter customers.

Innovation in the Contact Center - One of the most effective ways to improve business performance and drive down the cost of the Contact Center is to eliminate the root cause of customer interactions. For example, if customer invoices were clear, understandable and correct then the number of queries and complaints would fall dramatically. Another would be to do things differently, such as in a joined-up manner where all customer interactions can be seen in the Contact Center so agents can improve the number of interactions closed during one call. The Contact Center is the ideal place to start and close these loops. An analysis of inbound contacts will uncover root causes that can then be corrected in the back-office before providing cross department information that can change the way inter-actions are handled at the point of customer contact.

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Ventana Research advises organizations to step outside of the day-to-day operations of their Contact Centers and examine what is now the "art of the possible". One of the biggest challenges has always been the number of islands of technology required to build a contact center. As vendors begin to increase their footprint, either by development, acquisition or partnering, the number of islands is steadily reducing. This removes a lot of the duplication data, which abounds both within the center and between the center and the back-office, and the amount of integration effort needed to produce a total solution. However, the number is never likely to reduce to one, so it is important to define a clear strategy for the center, examine the required process changes, consider the impact of the center organization and then select the most appropriate IT to support the new operation.