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Witness Systems

Robust workforce optimization systems – that combine customer interaction recording, performanceanalysis and e-learning as a suite of integrated solutions – help companies keep an accurate pulseon their business.

Have you ever wondered why some people perform better than others, particularly in certain situations? The answer essentially boils down to one common denominator: motivation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contact center, the lifeline to your customers. That’s where motivated, effective customer service representatives (CSRs) can make all the difference between a satisfied customer and a lost one, between new and missed revenue opportunities, and between cost savings and increases.

Motivation is the driving force behind workforce effectiveness, not just in the contact center, but also throughout the enterprise. Even if ability is high, when motivation is low, performance is less than expected and optimal. For example, an unmotivated CSR in the contact center who knows exactly how to upsell your services but isn’t getting it done due to lack of motivation represents missed revenue opportunities. Yet when motivation is high, even if ability is low, performance is greater than expected. In the contact center, we’ve all seen a well-trained, motivated agent do more than we thought possible, perhaps through selling more of your products or satisfying a customer need on the first point of contact.

What if your staff, including CSRs in the contact center, had the power to make adjustments to processes or procedures within the company by having the awareness to discover the root cause of an issue based on recorded sample customer interactions? Truly motivated employees can have this significant of an impact on your business.

Exceptional performance happens when you’ve created a sound match between your employee’s needs, capabilities, values and expectations and what the company and a specific job have to offer. It’s also important that the CSR or other employee has the know-how and desire to perform. Companies that improve these matches and conditions enhance the probability of achieving superior performance repeatedly. Workforce effectiveness in the contact center must be aligned with business strategy and support organizational growth.

Performance Improvement Throughout Customer Service Value Chain

Performance improvement throughout the customer service value chain has become one of the top priorities of leading companies around the world. As more organizations aspire to elevate customer service from an isolated part of the business to a strategic enterprise asset, the view of customer service is changing from a detached business function to an integrated set of business processes. Business plans for most organizations call for creating positive customer experiences across channels, which is revealing customer service as a true enterprise interest that spreads across many functions of the company.

Traditionally, the customer contact center has served as the hub of organizations’ customer service strategies. In recent years, the focus on this function has only continued to evolve. If the entire organization grasps the strategic value of optimizing customer interactions, it can have a commanding effect on the bottom line, not to mention customer satisfaction. Studies show that even what seem to be small metric advancements actually translate into significant results. For instance, a 1 percent increase in first call resolution can drive up customer satisfaction more than 6 percent. One hour of training can drop the cost per customer contact more than 3 cents.

While the bulk of customer sales and service has been and will remain in the contact center’s domain, companies now recognize the other outside departmental influences that not only impact the contact center, but also the customer experience. In this day and age, customer service extends into a number of areas of the business, including backoffice environments – those focused on order fulfillment, claims processing, billing and data entry, for example – that can have a significant impact on customer service and satisfaction.

As professionals in the industry, we are well aware that breakdowns and inefficiencies in any of these areas can have a direct impact on customers, driving call volumes and CSRs to respond to such issues as improper order fulfillment, incorrect claims and inaccurate invoices. Not only are these calls non-revenue-generating, they also signal declining customer satisfaction. That said, disconnects between front- and back-office functions are becoming more apparent now than ever before.

The tough reality is that many companies underestimate the interdepartmental contributions back-office functions have on customer experiences and, in turn, their contact centers. They often overlook the root causes that drive customer contacts, which by nature are felt as call volumes rise. Successful customer service can’t be built on speculation, which is why some of today’s forward-thinking organizations have already started taking a long, hard look at what has worked well in their front-office contact centers in order to replicate the success and apply it to their people, processes and technologies in the back office. Some early adopters have even realigned the contact center and back office to report to the same vice president; and a few have gone so far as to physically house the two under the same roof.

Take Quality Assurance To The Enterprise

More intelligence flows through the contact center in one day than in any other part of the organization. How do companies take advantage of this? It all begins with the quality assurance (QA) group. Traditionally, the QA group has had the responsibility of monitoring contact center agents and rating them on their skill sets in different areas of their interactions with customers. Whether it is done manually or through an automated quality monitoring product, the QA agents fill out a call evaluation form. This form is usually passed on to the front-line supervisor who then has the responsibility of reviewing the information with his or her agent.

This is where the breakdown begins. The supervisor points out a skill area in which the agent didn’t perform well. The agent becomes defensive and disputes the rating given by the QA agent. The supervisor becomes defensive and says, “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I didn’t listen to or rate your call!” At that point the credibility of your QA program is at risk. This also brings up another important question. If the QA agents are monitoring and filling out the agent evaluation forms, then what are the supervisors doing?

Expecting different results by doing things the same way will never make for a successful formula. If companies want to mine the gold that they have sitting in their call centers in the form of valuable information and business intelligence, then the process must change.

Forward-thinking companies are taking contact center QA from simply monitoring individual agents on call-handling skills to measuring against established corporate and center goals, strategies, initiatives and business value drivers. Analysts estimate that in 2005 there will be 2.9 million agents in the US. If we take a conservative 30 percent agent attrition rate, that means corporate America is going to spend somewhere around $9.5 billion restaffing contact centers due to agent attrition.

If supervisors focus on coaching and review with agents, then QA will be freed up to help optimize other processes throughout the business. That means that the supervisors’ main responsibility should be to protect the company’s investment in people. Their No. 1 mission is to monitor, coach and develop their agents. According to BenchmarkPortal, which collects and warehouses the world’s largest database of performance metrics for customer contact and support centers, contact centers that have a strong monitoring and coaching program experience, on average, a 26 percent agent attrition rate, while those centers without a strong program have a 42 percent attrition rate.

In the complex and ever-changing contact center environment, a critical key to success lies in the ability to accelerate time to proficiency for newly hired agents and provide continual learning and training opportunities throughout the agent life cycle in order to keep pace with ever-growing demands for world-class customer service and revenue generation.

By recording customer interactions, companies also can gain valuable insight into how well their processes are working. If management finds that average call handle times are continually up across the board, they might quickly learn that staff performance and training aren’t the issues at all. Rather, their business processes might need an overhaul. The effectiveness of screen navigation systems is a great example. If CSRs are struggling to find pertinent information while assisting a customer, perhaps they need more training on the technology; but another possibility might be that the navigation needs to be revamped so it’s faster to get from point A to point B.

Probably the most important monitoring category will be root-cause analysis. For example, the QA team can look at customer calling patterns over a certain time. They may see that some of the higher-revenue customers are calling in four times, on average, in a 30-day period when they used to call in two times in the same time span. By drilling down to the corresponding calls, they can identify the symptoms prompting those additional interactions. It could be the fact that payments are not showing up on the customers’ billing statements. The root cause of these calls has then been identified, and corrective action can now be taken. This is going to be a major step in moving from a reactive environment to one that is now proactive and full of empowerment. It becomes a win-win for the customer, as well as the contact center and organization.

Following are areas that enterprise quality assurance departments should focus on:

• Execution of strategic initiatives;
• Branding through service;
• Return on information;
• Market intelligence;
• Competitive intelligence;
• Process evaluation;
• Multichannel delivery;
• Root-cause analysis;
• Internal collaboration and execution;
• Trend analysis; and
• Behavioral trends.

As a starting point, here is a list of things to consider when thinking about re-engineering your quality assurance team:

• Identify who the executive champion will be;
• Identify all company stakeholders (marketing, finance, product development, etc.);
• Identify all channels and languages to be monitored;
• Establish attributes that will be monitored;
• Create business rules for recording specific customer contact types;
• Develop an internal communication plan – who, what, when and why;
• Identify business drivers to be measured;
• Create an evaluation form with these business drivers;
• Train supervisors on the art of coaching; and
• Establish quarterly executive overview meetings to discuss ongoing findings.

Optimizing Performance In The Back Office

Companies are turning to quality monitoring, or customer interaction recording, for extended value throughout the enterprise. Such solutions can have a rapid and significant impact, enabling organizations to capture customer intelligence and optimize workforce performance in the back office by applying the very same principles and methodologies that are proven to work in front-office environments. Contact centers have leveraged quality monitoring technology for years and experienced tangible benefits that have resulted in rapid ROI and a host of other paybacks, including increased quality performance scores, improved training/career pathing among staff, stronger sales through cross-selling and upselling and, importantly, higher customer satisfaction ratings and retention.

With a true performance management strategy in place, companies are well positioned to succeed in their ability to streamline business processes, which in turn can improve productivity and data quality, as well as audit capabilities to ensure adherence to processes, such as regulatory compliance and fraud reduction. Focusing on performance optimization in the back office can help identify barriers and breakdowns – such as where and why errors occur – so a company can make adjustments before their customers are ever impacted. It also can help them determine what’s causing customers to pick up the phone, become dissatisfied and stop buying their products or services altogether.

For example, a pharmaceutical provider has been able to identify and leverage best practices by capturing desktop activities and evaluating recorded transactions both in its customer care and pharmacy contact centers. Using this type of technology, it has focused on enhancing quality through streamlined process optimization, regulatory compliance adherence and auditing of prescription dispensing to ensure fulfillment accuracy. In another instance, a leading provider of broadband services estimated that it was able to save more than $2.8 million a year by capturing customer interactions and focusing on the root causes of billrelated calls into its contact center. By making the necessary adjustments to simplify its invoices generated in the back office, the company decreased inbound billing-related calls by 5 percent. What may seem like small jumps translate into significant savings and impact on the bottom line.

Customer interaction recording is clearly entrenched as an effective technology for optimizing workforce performance – and, importantly, delivering strategic value to companies and their bottom lines. For every assisted- or self-service customer interaction, capturing and analyzing contacts are crucial to ensure consistent, quality service. Equally important is having the right staff and a system that effectively links performance and business goals to what is being monitoring and how that captured customer intelligence is being used. Using robust workforce optimization systems – that combine customer interaction recording, performance analysis and elearning as a suite of integrated solutions – helps companies keep an accurate pulse on their business: what’s working, what’s not, what opportunities exist and what trends can be leveraged. These systems are the only true methods available to provide that critical window into customer feedback, allowing businesses to grow, improve and continue to build customer confidence and loyalty.