Any company continuously strives to improve operations and optimize processes in a number of ways. Many managers focus on internal aspects such as eliminating waste and reducing costs, but today’s businesses are driven primarily by external factors: by customers and markets. Successful companies know how to listen to the customer’s voice.

Typically, sales people are sensitive to the wishes and requirements of their customers, but today’s customers more readily tell contact centers about their experiences, mostly by voice, but also through e-mail, social media and blogs. By analyzing customer communications, organizations can implement process optimization and improve product features. Suggestions for a better company, product or customer relationship can extend across the entire enterprise.

Deutsche Telekom provides an instructive example. One of the largest telecommunications providers in Europe, employing 260,000 people in 23 countries, its customer service organizationnow emphasizes business process optimization in its eBPM (electronic business performance management) program. The goals of this program include coaching, evaluation and analysis of communications to improve agent motivation and customer satisfaction, and to optimize both processes and systems.

Deutsche Telekom originally employed side-by-side coaching, but customer interactions varied widely. The method was also inefficient because it preoccupied supervisors during peak hours, and it took a long time to find a relevant call for evaluation of the agent. Sometimes, a dispute occurred about what was said and, with side-by-side coaching, no evidence existed. A fair assessment of agent performance became exceedingly difficult, especially given the large number of agents and locations. Maintaining the same standards across the enterprise also presented a problem, resulting in extensive travelling, poor quality control and an inability to see the "big picture."

A sophisticated recording solution and its flexible integration into the existing structure of Deutsche Telekom resolved many of these difficulties.

Recording in itself decoupled activities from time constraints. The ability of agents to listen to their own calls and the use of best practice calls improved quality significantly. Even though agents felt a little uncomfortable at first about voice and screen recordings, in the end, a suitable solution was found. Deutsche Telekom carefully introduced the eBPM process and communicated in a transparent way the exact reasons for recording, when and how often, and who could access the recorded calls.

The new quality management system for Deutsche Telekom incorporated an assignment module for call evaluation, thus ensuring a fair call-selection process based on predefined parameters instead of the supervisor’s predilection. In addition, a process management group inside the customer care organization of Deutsche Telekom is researching customer communications and is segmenting the available data using speech analytics technology built into the quality management system.

The system was installed and activated in 2009 and 2010 and is now fully operational for more than 10,000 agents in multiple locations. The eBPM project has exceeded expectations and represents an unqualified success.