"The most impactful solutions encompass closed loop capabilities from real-time performance monitoring at the agent and supervisor / manager level; integrated recording and a set of Quality Monitoring (QM) Tools used to give insight, feedback and where needed, coaching. Linked to the strategy of the contact center, these elements embrace and determine the success of an agent’s (and contact centers) working day and beyond."

"In my experience workforce management and knowledge management systems would have the biggest impact."

"I believe one technology that offers tremendous promise toward an optimized workforce along with an improved customer experience is the Unified Agent Desktop. Remember the old CRM adage, Know your customer? A unified agent desktop can enable the 360 degree view so agents can easily view a customer’s profile, products, preferences and recent history with your company. It integrates with telephony systems to enable seamless and intelligent handoff from the IVR or ACD to a live agent. These systems can be configured with features such as knowledge management, customized automation and workflow tools to streamline processes. How much time is consumed by agents searching through different applications for the right information? Unified agent desktop solutions can consolidate and reorganize information from backend systems to provide a more intuitive agent interface. Providing a unified agent desktop can be one of the best ways to impact resource utilization while improving customer satisfaction."

"Workforce Management and Self Service. More and more contact centers are analyzing the importance of such tools in order to enhance the overall CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE from different perspectives."

"Knowledge management is relatively new and has yet to be explored. Communication systems and time management are common and has proven to be very beneficial despite its shortcomings. Self service is the most difficult to implement despite the very strong influence to optimization result."

"Interactive Analytics. If you dont truly understand what motivates your customers, and how they convey their needs, the rest is moodt. Interactive Analytics captures the information and tags it for review. By setting "traps", the organization can learn as quickly as possible what the right thing is to do and how to deliver it."

"Workforce Management - since personnel costs represent approx. 70% of the typical contact center budget, these solutions allow a center to maximize the use of their agents, avoid overstaffing (reducing costs) and avoid understaffing (negatively impacting customer service). Knowledge Management - these systems help optimize an agents time on the phone, allowing training to be delivered to the agent without removing them from the phone to put them in a classroom. They also provide the agent with the knowledge they need in an easy to consume fashion, improving their ability to resolve customer issues quickly and accurately, reducing average handle time and increasing first call resolution.
Voice of the Customer - in the recession, customer service is becoming key in retaining customers and differentiating yourself from competitors. VoC programs provide a direct line to the customers and how they are feeling about your service allowing companies to better align with their needs."

"Knowledge management is changing the call center to a paperless environment where everyone has access to the same information and thus providing consistency in service. In my call center (an in-house call center for a large tour operator) tour itineraries and policies are constantly changing. It would be unrealistic to think my agents could keep up (noting in their brochures) with all the changes. Knowledge management software has been a saving grace for my call center."

"Mainly it depends what kind of service you give. If it is outbound business, you need predictive dialing systems to optimise agent time. If your business is help desk, than you need knowledge management systems. For both type of business you need workforce management and IP based communication sytems."

"It is the bringing together of these technologies that usually offers the benefits - approaches which treat technology in functional silos is less effective and should not be encouraged. Also the engagement of front-line teams is fundamental - and therefore web or agent desktop funcationality is often a key enabler of change."

"All of these have value if they are used properly...What the issues become are execution and proper use of those technologies. Just as one example you have a new predictive dialer, you are in the collections business and you load these numbers to start dialing from your customer base. You should be projecting to use the dialer at the periods of the day that you are getting the most hits, not just to occupy time during the day. Study and understanding of the process will improve the validity of the technology."

"Recording and WFM are having big impact on optimizing workforce. CC's can increase performance and customer satisfaction by using quality management by recording systems, and setting right amount-right skilled agents for the right call via WFM.
Those activities directly impacts to KPI's ratings. Quality management, performance management and WFM system are merging naturally therefore. These systems are the core of a successful call center that is optimizing the work force."

"Workforce management definitely. Recording technologies are for compliance purposes and leads to better accuracy. Workforce management ensures that available time is optimised and also matches the manpower requirements with the work load, hence bringing cost optimisation and only when bundled with other systems such as customer satisfaction surveys, call recording, bring about quality improvements."

"Our ticketing tool and skill based CMS tool is having the largest impact on optimization. The ticketing tool has been redone to allow us to capture data at a high level and then report back to our Leadership Team efficiently and quickly. Too many times companies build a long tree of subjects or categories that technicians or representatives never use. We have taken the tree information and categorized at higher levels and given basic information a free hand. With this, we can quickly see what areas of the Centers are being impacted and then perform business analytics on the category and make suggestions to either the customers, devlopment teams or business owners. Once this is done, we can measure to see if the impact of change is working. ROI all the way around. Driving down contacts in our Service Desk and making sure we are providing good service in our customer sites is critical. If we miss the mark, call volume goes up. Being able to identify these issues quickly allows us to be proactive in getting resolutions out to teams and fixes in the hands of our customers quickly. Even if it is the relationship between the sales team and the customer that needs some tweeking."

"Predictive dialers help and have a impact as it deals directly with the process of routing and managing call flow for outbound calling. Workforce management as the name states is a key application for rostering and scheduling of resources. Recording plays the role of analysis for calls recorded and saved which helps for quality control and right feedback."

"Workforce management technology is the base to start with as well as a real-time management tool managing both advisors as monitoring the volumes. Depending on what customer support is delivered, extra technologies like predictive dialers can be used. Most of the current service departments require a solid, flexible knowledge management tool in order to support FTR & reasonable AHT."

"At the simplest level, the ContactBabel ‘The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide (2009, 7th edition) determines that the ability to change schedules quickly is seen as very important, especially amongst large contact centres, where 85% of respondents said this was the case, for fulfilling service levels while managing costs. Within contact centres, giving the agents the ability to have some control of their shift patterns (through ‘electronic bidding’) can have an enormous impact on morale and therefore attrition. The informed use of call recording and quality monitoring is important in facilitating high quality coaching to enhance the customer experience. Last but not least, cost effective speech analytics is increasingly important in providing a speedy understanding of what is happening within the contact centre and focussing remedial effort."

"In our company we use all those common tools. One is needed for setting personal goals of having the possibility of a bonus system. Therefore the scorecard is the system with the most increase in efficiency and creates self monitoring without additional workforce. We raise the productivity up to 160 percent."

"The biggest challenge at the moment is the integration of data derived from different streams. It is bad enough at the moment that many systems require customers to input the same data several times during what ought to be a simple single agent call transaction and which both frustrates customers and wastes agents time. . However more and more customers first access services via the web and only use a contact centre when things go wrong. for them it is bad enough that the web system is problematic, but they are appalled when the contact centre is unable to access that information. I feel that webchat based applications must be the area with the greatest potential impact on optimisation."

"In the industry of contact center, knowledge management and workforce management I believe play a major impact because we deal mostly on information and the use of this information to guide us in our future decisions and futher improvements. On the otherhand, people or human resources and its proper management also plays a key role, the ability to adress individual needs for employee engagement and retention."

"Products like QBIS, because they can make such an impact."