Article : 360 Degree Contact Center Performance

This morning I was hit at-once with two of the predominant trends in Contact Centers – Voice Recognition and Off-Shoring! I had some problems with the DSL line at home and I called my local service provider's toll free number for support. The Voice Recognition interface was much smoother than the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) they had the last time I called them for support about a month ago. I did not have to wait for the voice to complete all the choices available – I could interrupt and the "Barge-In Processing" capabilities (allowing the user to interrupt with voice) that got me to where I needed to go quickly. Next came the second predominant trend in contact centers these days, Off-Shoring. I think I was connected to a representative, I guess, in India.

Contact Center Trends - The following trends seen to be impacting Contact Centers profoundly:

Call Centers to Contact Centers - Call Centers used to be the place you called if you had any question about a product or service a company provided. They are becoming contact centers instead with many new kinds of multimedia touch points with the Customer

Telephone – Agent, IVR, Voice Recognition, Conversational Voice Response (like Tuvox)

E-Mail, Web, Text Chat, Fax

Customer or Prospect Uses Cross-Over Business Processes – A customer or prospect may initiate contact through the Web using e-mail or text chat with a company representative. The contact center agent may call back with clarifications. The customer places an order online. Email is sent when the order is confirmed and again when the order is shipped along with tracking information. When the customer has a service issue, they may use crossover business processes like the above to use different modes of communication with the company.

In-bound or Outbound Call Centers to Multi-purpose Contact Centers – Dedicated inbound or outbound call centers are becoming multi-purpose contact centers requiring agents with crossover skills. They execute a potpourri of contact center business processes like inbound sales enquiries, inbound support, outbound telemarketing, collections, etc. These contact centers may gear up for short-term bursts in say in-bound calls because of a new advertising campaign or a product recall. During lean times, the same crew may be asked to do outbound telemarketing calls if they have the necessary skills. Alternatively, they could be pressed in to service answering emails or doing text chats with customers and prospects.

In-House to Outsourced Contact Centers – Many companies are outsourcing all or significant portions of their contact center operations. This may have the most significant impact on contact center metrics and reporting. If I outsource my contact center operations, I may be as interested in customer satisfaction and process completion metrics, as I am in traditional call center and workforce analytics. Contact center outsourcers may have multiple engagements with many different business processes being executed at any time. Some may be dedicated teams, others may not be. Most important of all, outsourced contact center operations need meaningful service level objectives and agreements since many agreements have incentives for good performance and penalties for non-performance. If I am outsourcing my customer support contact center to a vendor, the customer satisfaction factors and how long it took a customer problem to move from Initial Contact to Level 1 Support to Level 2 Support to Call Close is just as important to me as the time they spent on the phone with the customer! Traditional performance measures of the contact center are important to the outsourcing vendor but the outsourcing buyer may need other performance measures that make sense to them from a business point of view.

360° Contact Center Performance
360°Contact Center Performance or Full Spectrum Contact Center Performance integrates traditional performance measurement criteria with new ones. The various components of performance somewhat follow the evolution of contact centers.

Figure 1. 360° Contact Center Performance

Technology Metrics & Optimization - These are the traditionally popular metrics when the Telephone/ACD was the predominant medium. These are Abandonment Rate, Service Level, Average Hold Time, Average Handle Time, Average After-Call Work Time, etc. New and appropriate metrics for E-Mail, Text Chat, Faxes and the Web may need to be collected and merged meaningfully with those of the ACD. Optimization of traditional metrics has led to the use of IVR and Voice Recognition to take care of as much interaction with the customer as possible before a person talks to her.

Workforce Metrics & Optimization - Efforts at balancing the unpredictability of call arrivals with agents available have led to Workforce Management solutions (WFM). WFM solutions also help keep labor costs down with predictive scheduling balancing the number of agents on a shift to meet the predicted demand by the hour, if needed. They also provide additional metrics such as Schedule Adherence for evaluation of Contact Center and Service Representative Performance.

Customer Satisfaction Metrics & Optimization - Quality monitoring, on call or recorded, random or routine, has help produce quality performance measures. Computer Assisted Telephony (CAT) and post-contact web-based surveys help in measuring customer satisfaction.

Business Process Metrics & Optimization – Abstracting business processes that the customer and the contact center personnel execute helps align business goals of the company with that of the contact center. Businesses want business processes executed – whether they are solving a customer support issue or initiating an outbound sales call that ends in a sale. Some of these processes may initiate and terminate in a Contact Center but may extend beyond it for various intermediate process steps as in the DSL provisioning example. Process metrics that measure how long it took for these business processes to complete are just as meaningful to business groups as the other traditional ones, if not more. Recent technologies like Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) have made it possible to measure the execution of these business processes even if they span multiple departments and internal software systems like Call-tracking, CRM, ERP, Order Processing and Logistics.

Why 360° Contact Center Performance?
360° Contact Center Performance makes sense when you consider the following:

Labor Cost Trends – The loaded cost for a contact center representative is estimated to be about $50 to $60 per hour in the US while that of a contact center representative in India is about $15 to $18 per hour. With increased automation with the use of Voice Recognition, IVR, Web self-service, etc, the effective labor costs are coming down even if a company does not outsource its contact center. The traditional metrics were geared towards Call Center Efficiency because of labor costs before. Now Call Center Effectiveness may be given its due!

Multimedia Process Execution – If I get my customer support issue solved using a combination of Telephone, Email and Live Chat Interactions, ACD statistics alone may be inadequate. What might be more meaningful is abstracting the various steps in a typical interaction as a contact center business process and measuring how long it took. In addition, measuring Customer Satisfaction in terms of an Overall Score as well as Friendliness, Subject Knowledge and Solution Effectiveness may be just as important as other measures. Thus both the efficiency and effectiveness of any contact center business process would be covered in any analysis.

Business Processes that Extend Beyond the Contact Center – I could order a new DSL line with my service provider with a call to their contact center. I may be following up with them using the telephone, e-mail or text chat if it is delayed or there are other problems. Internally, the contact center may be coordinating with Billing, Provisioning and Field Support departments to get the DSL line working. The customer may be interested in only when the initial request was made and when the line was available for her use. However, the business groups may be interested in seeing where the bottlenecks are in the full end-to-end internal business process, tracing the process steps from the contact center through the various departments responsible.

Incomplete Business Processes Just as Important as Completed Ones – If a customer sends in a request for information about a product or service, then calls the contact center with questions but never calls back or logs in to place the order, an abandoned business process results. Here incomplete processes are just as important as the completed ones. Abandoned business processes may be as relevant as abandoned calls! Following up on these abandoned business processes may be important just as how many e-commerce web sites analyze abandoned shopping carts. This kind of analysis is facilitated by abstracting what happens in a contact center as end-to-end business processes and tracking them diligently.

Technology has and will continue to improve interactions of prospects and customers with companies. Call Centers are evolving into Contact Centers. Other trends such as outsourcing will also impact what is being measured because of changes in what is meaningful to each party; the Customer, Contact Center, The Outsourcing Buyer, The Outsourcing Vendor or The Business Groups. Contact center performance criteria and measurement methods also need to evolve with these trends. 360° Contact Center Performance promises to provide a more comprehensive set of measures and methods in the never ending quest for efficiency and effectiveness.