Rethinking Contact Center Applications
In the past decade, the term silo has moved beyond its agrarian usage to acquire another meaning the organizational fiefdom devoted to a particular subset of corporate processes and procedures.
Widely regarded as obstacles to greater efficiency and effectiveness, corporate silos were addressed 10 years ago in Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, a groundbreaking book by Michael Hammer and James Champy. The authors advanced the idea that in order to effectively harness the power of software technology and take full advantage of new software tools, it is necessary to rethink and redesign organizational processes. They proposed a reorganization of work processes to avoid the negative effects of siloed operations.
Silos in the Contact Center
In the contact center domain, the word silo has more often referred to enterprises that operate multiple contact centers in a totally standalone mode.
Although common in the past, stand-alone centers have become increasingly rare as intelligent call overflow among multiple ACDs (automatic call distribution), network-level call routing, and voice over IP have broken down the physical barriers among geographically dispersed contact centers. The result is the advent of virtual centers that provide much greater efficiency and effectiveness.
This, however, raises an important question: If breaking down silos is such a good thing for enterprises in general and multisite contact centers in particular, then why arent we aggressively pursuing the breakdown of silos among the applications that support contact center management?
Barriers Between Contact Center Applications
The primary support applications for contact centers are forecasting and scheduling also known as workforce management (WFM) quality monitoring, e-learning and performance management. Although the functionality provided by these systems differs greatly, the information collected by each is valuable and can shed new light on contact center operations if harnessed by the other systems.
Of the four, WFM and quality monitoring are most widely deployed, and yet, there are almost no linkages between these applications. In fact, within the contact center the two groups responsible for WFM and quality monitoring rarely interact with each other. Occasionally, if an agent disputes an adherence violation, a member of the WFM team may reach out to the quality team to see if the agent was being recorded during the adherence event in question. This request is seldom met with enthusiasm on the part of the quality team, which usually loathes the task of wading into the recorded conversations, searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Similarly, the quality team may occasionally interact with the WFM team to schedule individual agent reviews to provide feedback on the agents quality scores.
But these linkages however rare are accomplished through people. The applications they use in their day-to-day work are totally disconnected from each other. Hammer and Champy would be unhappy. So should we.
The Clash Between Efficiency and Effectiveness
Historically, the goal of virtually all applications deployed in the contact center has boiled down to a single concept: efficiency. Delivering everfaster, cheaper service has been the Holy Grail of the industry for so long that a new trend the need for effectiveness is necessitating a reinvention of the processes, procedures and applications that contact centers deploy.
Although the need for efficiency and traditional ROI will never go away, the requirement for effectiveness has created a new ROI: return on information. Not only must contact centers continue to create value through workforce efficiency, they must also capture value for the company through workforce effectiveness.
How will this be accomplished? The key support applications must be interwoven to promote synergistic capabilities. Data gleaned by one system must be harnessed by another. And therein lies the genesis of a new application framework: workforce optimization (WFO).
From an ideal perspective, quality monitoring, performance management, analytics, e-learning and workforce management should be united under a single WFO framework to present a holistic picture of the contact center. A single user interface would control all functionality, data would reside in a central database for use by whomever needs it within the enterprise (with the appropriate permissions), and system administration and reporting would be centralized and simplified. With access to data from multiple systems and a meaningful way with which to present it, contact center managers could get a true picture of operations and make adjustments to processes, procedures and staffing as necessary. They could also deliver information to other departments or to senior executives for strategic decision making.
Siloed contact center applications make this level of insight improbable, if not impossible. The barriers between the applications quite literally prevent an enterprise from getting the full benefit of the data it collects. In todays increasingly competitive economy, how many companies can afford to continue this practice?
Bringing It Together With Workforce Optimization
One new focus for WFO solutions emerges from the fact that forecasting and scheduling require the manipulation of a significant amount of performance data from ACD systems. Since agents are becoming familiar with using WFM functionality to view and swap schedules and make vacation and time-off plans, it is logical to provide them with similar visibility into their performance.
Best practices from human behavioral science suggest that effective performance feedback should occur daily, be data-driven and private, yet also be provided within a larger context so that employees clearly know what is expected and how they are performing in relation to their goals and peers. Feedback with these characteristics tends to confer greater ownership and responsibility for performance upon the employee.
Unfortunately, performance feedback has been a perennial problem for contact centers. This is because of the nature of ACD reports and the time-consuming burden they place on the front-line management staff, who must transform them into meaningful information.
ACD reports are snapshots of performance. As such, they utterly lack context. Since agents have different total sign-on hours, the data in the ACD reports cannot be used to compare agent performance directly, one with the other. Moreover, a snapshot report cannot be used to determine whether one agents performance is improving or deteriorating unless a prior period report is also reviewed. Additionally, ACD reports themselves cannot be distributed to the agent population, since privacy concerns preclude such a heavyhanded practice.
For these and other reasons, WFO solutions are being expanded to include performance feedback in the form of scorecards. Familiar ACD measures such as average handle time and the number of incoming calls handled are displayed to agents within their browser application. The WFO solution itself can add to the performance feedback by including adherence to schedule measures. At the most fundamental level, agents can see how they are doing in relation to these familiar measures. In advanced centers, agents also can see what goals have been established for all elements of their performance, as well as learn how their peers are performing against those same goals.
This is a tremendous benefit to agents and center management. Unambiguously knowing what is expected and how one is doing within the context of ones peers is truly empowering. To know on a daily basis the unvarnished truth about your performance separates agents into two groups: those who care about and take ownership for their performance, and those who do not. Successful centers have more of the former and fewer of the latter.
For example, a desirable outcome of WFO is that agents will demand more coaching time from the front-line management teams to address clear performance shortcomings. The key problem is that coaching time is already in short supply, and new demands for coaching may well go unmet. While pieces of WFM functionality exist to help free managers from administrative and other low-payoff tasks, there is nothing inherent in WFM solutions that addresses agent development or increases the coaching output from supervisors.
This is why WFO solutions provide a renewed focus on the frontline management team, the second-most important group in the center. Your agents are branding your company with every interaction, yet conventional WFM solutions do nothing to address effectiveness. In fact, many center management teams find that their WFM solutions do a great job of efficiently scheduling agent teams that are decidedly mediocre.
Given that todays hyper-competitive business environment leaves little room for mediocrity, it is clear that the success that contact center managers must strive for requires both efficiency and effectiveness. By stripping the front line of administrative chores and eliminating the wasted time spent serving as process linkage points, a WFOempowered, front-line management team can focus on developing the agents and improving the centers effectiveness.
From Tactical to Strategic With WFO
Therein lies the next step in contact center evolution its transformation from purely tactical to a more strategic role in the enterprise. This transformation will be driven by the blurring and disappearance of the boundaries between previously disparate software applications used within and beyond the contact center.
This will take a number of forms. For example, scorecards can inform agents about their performance while apprising team leaders and supervisors about the skill gaps existing within their teams. With both agents and supervisors informed and motivated to improve performance, the success formula simplifies into filling the identified skill gaps. The admonition to simply work harder and find the required coaching time is merely sloganeering and not a solution. Fortunately, new capabilities in quality monitoring fit neatly into e-learning technologies to provide the answer.
Quality monitoring is undergoing its own dramatic evolution, including the capability of using a recording of a high-quality interaction as an e-learning clip. The captured customer interaction is easily transformed into a short learning session that can be assigned to agents whose performance profile suggests they would benefit by its content.
In this way, team leaders and supervisors can leverage and multiply their available coaching time. After much trial and error, it is now apparent that certain subjects are taught successfully through electronic means while other subjects require one-to-one coaching. E-learning is very well-suited for supplemental training on some soft skills and certain aspects of product/service-oriented transaction elements. One-to-one coaching is better-suited for addressing issues such as attitude, phrasing and general behaviors. Instead of all agent improvement efforts being dependent upon one-to-one coaching time, e-learning offers a way to expand, enrich and multiply the effective coaching time of the front-line management team.
Benefits of Integrated Applications: Specific Examples
There are a number of areas where WFM and quality monitoring applications ought to interact and inform each other. Consider the following examples culled from typical, day-to-day contact center operations:
Accommodating Agent Scheduling Preferences Most WFM software systems support agent schedule preferences. Here, the agents individual work preferences are defined in terms of start time, days off and other work parameters. Since not every agent can be granted his or her preferred schedule, a priority scheme needs to be established. What better priority scheme than using individual agent quality scores? By granting schedule preferences based on quality, contact center management sends a powerful message and incentive to the agent force. And while this process could be handled manually, it would be tedious at best, particularly if large numbers of agents are involved. Frankly, there are better uses of time among the WFM team. Why not have the quality application automatically inform the WFM application?
Balancing Skill Sets and Experience Across All Shifts In centers with extended hours, rookie agents typically overpopulate the less-desirable shifts. Less-experienced agents tend to have longer average handle times and a lesser ability to deliver high-quality interactions with customers. Longer handle times usually mean that service level targets are missed, adding to even greater customer distress and dissatisfaction. With frequently updated quality scores in the agent database, WFM applications could create schedules that consider the quality element. The WFM team could ensure that some minimum number of high quality agents are included in each shift, avoiding service level fluctuations and customer dissatisfaction. In addition to equalizing the quality of service delivered across all shifts, this scheme would provide the rookies with the opportunity to see the experienced agents in action and learn valuable pointers that could help them develop their skills.
Gaining Insight Into Adherence Many contact centers record all conversations for compliance purposes while others record a very large number of calls (but not all) based on business rules. From the supervisors perspective, it would be convenient if the schedule adherence screen could identify whether each agent flagged as being out of adherence was recorded during an adherence violation. This would allow the supervisor to review the call easily and determine whether the adherence violation was positive or negative. From the agents perspective, such a feature would reduce the number of annoying, adherence-related queries from the supervisor.
Correcting Skills Deficiencies Through E-Learning Whenever the quality-monitoring process generates a low score for an agent, it would be convenient if the system automatically informed the e-learning system about the nature of the deficiency. And going a step further if the e-learning system had an inventory of learning clips (i.e., prerecorded lessons) and could map a specific lesson to the skill deficiency, imagine the convenience if the e-learning system inserted a training session into the agents work schedule at an appropriate time so as not to impact service level.
These are just a few of the examples of the advantages that enterprises can realize by eliminating the application silos within their contact centers. As the application silos begin to fall, the inventiveness of frontline managers and support teams will develop new linkages that relieve people from performing mundane administrative tasks that a single WFO framework can accomplish.
