White Paper
Moving from Zero to 90 in 60 Seconds
Your Contact Center on the Fast Track to Efficiency, Productivity, and Profitability
Executive Summary
If your operations are comparable to those of the typical multi-channel
contact center, you’re currently spending 60 to 70 percent of your budget
on personnel expenses. People represent your highest cost; however, as
frontline representatives to your customers, these same people are your
most valuable assets. Your competitiveness, revenue growth, profitability,
and reputation are significantly impacted by your agents and their abilities
to deliver consistent customer service in sync with your organization’s
overall business objectives.
At the highest level, your company is focused on increasing sales and reducing costs. To map to these
overall corporate goals, your contact center should be focused on maximizing effectiveness and enhancing
performance. Top- and bottom-line improvements in customer service, sales and collections will lead your
company to win new customers, intensify customer loyalty, and increase revenue.
Performance optimization can help you achieve all of these goals through the combination of three important
contact center elements:
-- Workforce Management – actively managing technology in an effort to meet your service and overall contact
center objectives at a minimum cost. Workforce management software can help you most effectively manage
your workforce, enabling you to heighten scheduling efficiency; maximize agent productivity; lower operating
costs, allowing you to maintain a healthy bottom line; and streamline tasks, empowering agents to contribute
toward your organization’s overall customer objectives.
-- Quality Management – establishing quality performance targets which you can measure agent performance
against. This allows supervisors to provide real-time feedback, suggestions for improvement or even
recommend additional training. Productively managing the quality of your agents’ interactions with customers
can enhance your agents’ effectiveness, improve your customer satisfaction ratings and result in increased
revenue.
-- Performance Management – reporting that combines contact center statistics with business data, focuses on
the information most relevant to business goals, matches that information to specific tasks inside the contact
center, and gives users the ability to analyze root causes and take corrective actions. By automating the
reporting process, performance management enables the easy extraction of crucial interaction data necessary
to secure customer relationships and identify opportunities for cost-cutting.
This white paper explains in detail the elements of performance optimization, and outlines how your contact
center can use technology to increase agent efficiency and productivity, and positively impact your company’s
bottom line.
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© 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
WHITE PAPER
Sales and Customer Service Focused Contact Centers
Customers use various channels of communication to connect with companies on a daily basis. Whether they
make contact via telephone, email, or online chat, today’s consumers expect immediate and courteous service
coupled with quick problem resolution. They demand the same positive interactions when they are approached
by companies for collections or sales purposes.
How is it possible to provide optimal service while minimizing costs and maximizing revenue generation?
Deploying scalable technologies to automate some of the more grueling and labor-intensive management tasks
such as forecasting, scheduling, and analyzing data, leads to more efficient operations and leaves more time for
supervisors to focus on quality monitoring, coaching, and teaching. Managers can use technology to target topperforming agents for recognition and identify struggling agents who need additional training to enhance their
skills and performances. And, they can do it all in real-time.
One enterprise-wide solution implemented from a single server or across locations enables a tight integration of
various channels, providing for smoother transitions between online and telephone interactions and reporting.
And, empowering agents via a Web browser allows them to take more ownership of their daily activities,
resulting in higher job performance ratings and ultimately better customer interactions.
In a nutshell, adopting the right technologies means drastic improvements in the management of contact
center operations and more accurate planning for future growth and change. This translates into reduced costs,
maximized customer relationships, and reinforced brand identity.
To ensure proper staffing to meet target service levels, contact centers need to correctly forecast the demand
for work to be accomplished. This can be difficult as volume can fluctuate on a monthly, weekly, daily, or even
hourly basis. There is a fine line between having enough agents available to quickly and efficiently handle
contacts, and incurring unnecessary costs from inappropriate overstaffing. In the past, forecasting was an
arduous, manual process that included research and an equal dose of instinct.
Today, forecasting is much more scientific and technology-based. With the help of workforce management
solutions, managers can quickly and easily predict contact volumes, calculate staffing requirements, make
budget projections based on historical or seasonal data, and identify patterns to smooth out the random
variations and allow more accurate, long-range forecasting. Data parameters and “what if” scenarios can be
created to evaluate policy changes, modify routing configurations, determine the necessary trade-offs between
available staff and service-quality goals, or vary the mix of agent skills. Incoming contacts can be forecasted
for various intervals so that staffing requirements can be defined for specific time periods, established servicequality goals can be met or modified, and net revenue can be maximized.
The most effective way to serve customers is to match them with agents who have the knowledge and skills
to best meet their needs. If automatic call distributors (ACDs) are tied to back-end customer relationship
management (CRM) or other customer information systems, they are able to identify a customer from their
phone number, predict what the customer’s query might be based on their history, and pass that contact on to
the available agent with the most appropriate skill set to help the customer. Alternately, more and more centers
are using interactive voice self-service to determine the nature of an inquiry before the customer even speaks to
an agent, in order to route the call to the best available resource.
In other words, once workforce management is incorporated and forecasting is completed, the contact center
must be staffed with an appropriate number of agents who have the skills to handle specialized customer
inquiries. Scheduling is one of the most difficult managerial tasks as there are several factors to consider. In
addition to meeting service-level goals, scheduling requires the consideration of agent preferences, agent skill
levels and types, time zones, and language differences, among other elements.
Today’s software can accommodate agent preferences inside the framework of a contact center’s needs. This
allows agents to view their work schedules and easily request shift changes, vacations, and other schedule
adjustments via Web interfaces; and to manage their own schedules online based on pre-set rules. Submitting
tasks such as vacation requests; overtime assignments; schedule drops, additions, and trades; and sick or late
calls all become time-saving, automated exchanges between supervisors and agents.
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A workforce management solution applies complex algorithms, simplifies the scheduling process and ensures
that the appropriate number of agents is available to manage voice contacts, reply to emails, and conduct Web
chat sessions. It also enables supervisors to develop several models and quickly create numerous trial schedules
before selecting the one they’ll actually use. Schedules can be adjusted on the fly for single or multiple
agents. Break and meeting requirements are easily optimized and training sessions and special projects are
accommodated.
The scheduling process is analogous to walking a tightrope. If scheduling is too tight, efficiency and employee
satisfaction drop; if it is too loose, productivity and customer satisfaction plummet. Scheduling has to be
just right as poor workforce management can lead to abandoned contacts and unhappy customers, equaling
inadequate interactions and time and money lost.
Quality management systems help contact centers establish individual and group goals against which
performance can be measured using pre-determined criteria such as politeness, professionalism, and
successful resolution of customers’ problems. Organizations can employ this interaction data to evaluate
agent performance against previously stated goals, provide feedback and recommend additional training as
appropriate.
Quality management systems also allow supervisors to listen to calls; assess agent activity in real-time; provide
tips or advice via instant messaging; and, when necessary, actively participate in interactions that are already in
progress. Recent advances in this technology include the use of speech analytics to mine recorded call data for
keywords, the ability to assess call flow, and the use of emotion detection.
With recording tools, organizations can compile audio samples of real-time calls to see how agents are handling
various types of customer contacts. Once a baseline has been established for contact center performance,
emphasis can be placed on providing better scheduling, analyzing call quality and improving best time to call.
Through the implementation of effective quality management, companies can enhance agent efficiency and
effectiveness, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction ratings and increased revenue.
After efficiency tools are in place, systems must be tied together to enable managers to evaluate performance
and ensure the overall effectiveness of their organizations.
Traditional contact center reports, derived from disparate data sources, help supervisors to identify “what”
performance was, but they do not identify “why.” For example, a workforce management system can show
that a specific agent’s performance was sub-par for a particular day, but cannot provide other relevant data
to determine what factors contributed to substandard performance. Further analysis could be completed by
manually compiling a number of reports from various contact center applications such as quality monitoring and
ACDs. However, this process would take an inordinate amount of time and result in a significant delay between
analysis and action.
With traditional contact center reports, information is analyzed via many ad-hoc methods and there is no basis
in clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs). As a result, using these reports often means costly and
inconsistent management of performance within the contact center, and the inability to align the various levels
of the organization to meet corporate business goals.
Performance management eliminates these problems by consolidating enterprise and contact center
performance data and reports from disparate sources. These technologies allow managers to quickly and
accurately assess centers’ performances and ensure that they are aligned with key business drivers such as
reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing revenue. When adjustments need to be made
in order to meet corporate objectives, the analytics tools present in performance management applications
empower supervisors to easily and efficiently manage, track, and identify root causes for performance shortfalls
and take timely corrective action.
Data consolidated from key contact center applications, such as workforce management and quality
management systems, is presented in the form of KPIs. Some examples of KPIs for sales or customer service
interactions include revenue per call, schedule compliance and service level.
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White Paper Moving from Zero to 90 in 60 Seconds
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Today’s best performance optimization software offers a built-in library of KPIs with the option to systematically
add customized indicators for individual centers over time. KPIs are displayed on “dashboards,” which are
tailored to job requirements of specific agent groups such as customer service, billing, technical support, or
sales. Each dashboard displays function-specific information and offers each user group the right degree of
control. For example, an agent may see his or her own schedule, but is not able to see the performance of other
members of the workgroup. Analytical tools can take the form of dashboards or sophisticated analysis tools that
allow users to interact with data to understand the reasons for lackluster performance.
Clearly defined performance goals allow analytic tools to provide “red light/green light” views at every level of
the organization. Users can choose between numeric and graphic displays, and readily accessible menus enable
them to change views, drill down, and quickly pinpoint root causes. Managers and supervisors can use the tools
to monitor contact center agents in real-time, communicate with staff, and take quick corrective action when
performance does not adequately support enterprise goals. This process arms agents who are not meeting their
targets with the information necessary to adjust their performances or talk to their supervisors about causes
and solutions. Supervisors can set appropriate individual and group goals, as well as coach and motivate agents
based on real knowledge of their unique needs. Managers can focus on enterprise level strategies rather than
daily tasks.
Performance management applications save time and money by eliminating the manual tasks of sorting and
arranging statistics, and giving staff across the organization accurate, detailed, real-time views of performance
so they can monitor their own productivity and take responsibility for it. A workforce management solution that
incorporates robust analytics allows contact center managers to optimize performance, schedule appropriately
for coverage and cost control, match staff skills to the nature of tasks, and use feedback from all levels to
continuously improve productivity.
Whether a contact center is using dashboards, sophisticated integrated analytics tools, or both, performance
management technologies help align center performance with organization-wide goals. By allowing users to
compare actual performance against targeted results, they:
-- Reduce time to identify issues and trends;
-- Decrease overhead costs;
-- Facilitate quick, effective staff management decisions;
-- Help agents understand and optimize their own performance; and
-- Reduce shrinkage/unproductive time, increase schedule adherence, and enhance productivity.
Collections and Telemarketing Contact Centers
Now that we’ve made the case for sales and service performance optimization solutions, the leap to collections
and telemarketing isn’t far at all. When an outbound dialer identifies a live party, it is crucial that an agent is
available to take the call or else it will be abandoned. Abandoned calls are just bad business: telemarketers with
too many abandons face stiff government fines, and others risk seriously irritating consumers.
Collections and telemarketing centers can create greater efficiency by deploying the workforce management
modules of performance optimization solutions to ensure that as predictive dialers connect with live parties,
there are enough agents at their stations to field the calls. As with inbound centers, these solutions must have
a means of anticipating when “right parties” will be home to answer their phones and forecasting staffing
requirements based on this expectation.
Many of the other aspects of performance optimization outlined for sales and service centers again apply. If a
center is running a campaign to cross-sell credit card customers on a new identity theft prevention service, the
agents scheduled during the campaign must have the requisite skills to effectively execute this promotion.
When analytics technologies are integrated with other contact center technology, such as predictive dialers
and campaign management tools, calling campaigns are markedly more precise and centers more efficient. This
efficiency leads to increased revenue opportunities, enhanced contact center performance, reduced operational
costs, mitigated risks such as business continuity and data security, and the assurance of compliance with
increasingly stringent industry regulations.
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WHITE PAPER
For example, best-time-to-call analysis software, which monitors the results of calls
over time, uses the data gleaned from predictive dialer call reports to calculate the
optimal timeframe for reaching a specific customer. Based on this intelligence, the
software places specific campaigns into time slots when parties are most likely
to pick up the phone and passes the optimized list back to the predictive dialer
to execute. With the help of best-time-to-call software, this process is entirely
automated and doesn’t require managers to sort through information during dialer
optimization. Predictive dialers are renowned for their ability to rapidly execute
calling campaigns, but “best time to call” software adds a new layer of precision to
a dialer’s performance. Working as a team, predictive dialers and best-time-to-call
create a marriage of speed and accuracy that can improve campaign results, lower
telecommunications charges (as fewer calls are needed to reach campaign targets),
and increase revenues and agent retention as agents find themselves engaging more
with right parties in live interactions.
Using statistics such as average call handling times and right-party contacts,
performance optimization solutions can create more powerful outbound demand
forecasting. For instance, the performance optimization solution can assign staffing
based on call connect patterns for a telemarketing campaign, ensuring that agents
are available to handle the calls of the newly optimized dialer. After all, what’s the
point of an optimized dialer if there are no agents on the other end?
Keep in mind that performance optimization is an iterative process. Predictive
dialers and best-time-to-call software can be configured to remain in constant
communication, so that the solution knows how many calls have been executed and
how many calls remain in each calling hour.
Armed with this data, the system can match the amount of work with the available
staff resources. The benefits of implementing strong analytics tools are evident in
a variety of applications. For example, collections agencies can increase the dollars
collected per agent hour, absorb portfolio growth without staff increases, and raise
agent productivity by implementing predictive dialers with optimization features.
If a situation arises in the contact center, such as an outage, the software can
create new job distributions if it senses that the dialer is not adhering to the original
schedule. The contact center may need to reallocate some collections agents
to handle customer service inquiries, thereby diminishing the number of agents
working on the telesales campaign. Working together, the dialer and analytics
technology maximize the productivity of an outbound center’s available resources.
Performance optimization technologies have the power to transform a contact
center. They help ease the pain of the complex process of ensuring there are
a sufficient number of agents available to handle phone, email and Web chat
interactions for every type of customer interaction, be it customer service,
collections or sales and telemarketing. The efficiency gains lead to more productive,
happier agents, higher service levels and razor-sharp calling campaigns—which
ultimately translates into more satisfied customers and increased revenues. Can you
afford not to optimize your organization’s performance?
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aspect.com
About Aspect
Aspect builds customer relationships through a combination of customer contact software and Microsoft platform solutions.
For more information, visit www.aspect.com.
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© 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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