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| Oscar Alban |
Answer: A Complete Performance Optimisation System That Meets Your Contact Centre’s Unique Needs according to Oscar Alban, Principal Global Market Consultant for Witness Systems
The benefits quality monitoring technologies deliver in customer contact centres worldwide are helping organisations truly streamline their business initiatives. With advanced recording solutions that synchronise voice and data – as well as record customer interactions though the Internet channels that have surged in popularity, such as email and Web chat – users are reaping great value in their ability to coach and train their customer sales/service representatives (CSRs); enhance service delivery and productivity; achieve calibration; retain employees; earn customer
loyalty; track performance and trends; reduce costs; and identify new revenue opportunities. Only by recording interactions and capturing the entire customer experience from beginning to end, can management gauge how well customers are sold to and serviced.
When you add the ability to trigger recording based on user-defined ‘business rules’, you gain another impactful dimension that allows you to specify the types of interactions to record based on the criteria your organisation has defined as most critical to its operating performance and business goals. Examples include capturing interactions with key customers, those tied to sales/support of a particular product, and communications associated with the launch and effectiveness of a new campaign. With these captured contacts, you can now share complete customer feedback and insight with your colleagues outside the contact centre – such as product management, marketing and your support/help desk – who may play a key role in the launch of future product/service offerings, new programmes and special campaigns.
In addition to specifying the types of interactions a company wishes to focus on, new technologies in the electronic learning realm are taking contact centre agent and staff development to the next level. Using the evaluation reports tied to your quality monitoring system, you can now track the quality and consistency of a CSR’s customer interactions and use those performance scores to quickly identify skills gaps and learning opportunities that can be addressed through elearning delivered directly to the agent’s desktop.
Supplementing one-on-one agent-supervisor coaching sessions, e-learning allows CSRs to learn at their own pace, any time, and from anywhere thanks to the browser-based nature of the solution. Empowering agents to become active participants in their own development, e-learning helps raise the level of information they retain, allowing them to better apply their knowledge and skills effectively in real-world customer situations. And now, for the first time, contact centres have the ability to develop true career pathing for their staff, as well as accurately measure how effective their training processes are working. Quality monitoring has come full circle since the new millennium with the ability to exercise a complete ‘closed-loop performance optimisation model’ that continually records, evaluates, analyses and directs learning – a process that keeps quality top-of-mind and helps ensure an ongoing focus and commitment to your number one assets, your customers and your CSRs.
Because customer retention has been identified as one of the top goals of corporate management across the country, organisations are increasingly focusing on the tools necessary to help them achieve the consistent, quality service levels and customer satisfaction rates that will keep their business growing, healthy and prosperous. Once the need for performance optimisation and quality monitoring technology has been determined, however, your job has just begun. Finding the solution that will best fit within your infrastructure and deliver the features, functionality, reliability and service/support from a vendor that has complementary business philosophies is a tall order, but a very achievable one. Knowing the questions to ask along the way can make the process a smoother, more succinct endeavour.
Investing in Workforce Optimisation Technology
Companies have found that the technology behind customer interaction recording offers even more than training and development for agents, which years ago was its primary focus. By recording customer interactions, companies can also gain valuable insight into how well their processes are working. If management finds that average call handling 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 option might be that the navigation needs to be re-vamped so it’s faster to get from point A to point B.
Robust workforce optimisation software suites that include customer interaction recording, performance analysis and e-learning have triggered a revolution in the contact centre – taking it to a new level and making it much more valuable and respected by the organisation as a whole. Because these technologies have evolved to a browser-based architecture, the ‘silos’ contact centres once embodied are no longer. Now, the contact centre serves as the strategic hub of business intelligence into the enterprise. More information flows through these centres in a single day than through any other part of the company – raising their importance and strategic value. As customer interactions are captured in the contact centre and shared throughout the organisation through the browserbased technology, individuals, groups and departments outside the centre now have access to first-hand customer feedback. With this valuable intelligence, executives can make more accurate projections, engineering can respond more effectively to product issues and document future requirements, and marketing/sales can better gauge the success of their campaigns and special offers.
With a higher commitment now than ever before, companies are looking for ways to strike the fine balance of revenue growth, cost reduction and customer satisfaction with an acceptable ROI. To do this, they’re having to look at their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy in a whole new light. The key is to invest in technology that yields greater value. Customer interaction recording or quality monitoring, systems address the people side (staff training, development and career pathing, as well as retention), the process side (gauging and measuring business process effectiveness) and the technology side (ensuring the effective use of available systems). However, there’s much more they deliver in the way of strategic value, such as access to customer intelligence and competitive information. Today, companies are looking at the bottom line, which means getting intimate and measuring what really matters.
 | www.witness.com |