1. There are several performance management systems on the market today. How do you differentiate your offering from your competitors?
Enkata’s suite provides companies with the ability to also stop unwanted calls, improve self-service, and increase revenue per call, as well as the traditional focus on agent productivity provided by other systems. We are the only company that offers analytics powered solutions for First Call Resolution, Call Reasoning, Cross-Channel Experience, and Up-sale/Cross-sale in addition to agent productivity-focused performance management. As a result, our customers expect to generate 2-3X more ROI than if they purchased a less comprehensive system.
In addition, being the only pure Software as a Service vendor in the category, our focus on customer satisfaction and ROI is unmatched – we earn our customers’ business every day.
2. Several performance management packages are being incorporated into vendors’ application suites. Some of the benefits these vendors are touting are the all-in-solutions approach and the integration of their performance management software with the other components of their suites. Please comment.
We find that the notion of an “all-in-one” solution is more hype than reality. In the contact center, with the myriad of vendors and platforms, no suite vendor has near 100% of a complete solution to offer a company. Companies that we talk to are focused on one thing – will this product help me solve my business problem and deliver a fantastic ROI. With Enkata’s Software as a Service business model and focus on actionable metrics, our customers have experienced measurable results more quickly and efficiently than they could otherwise.
3. What are the factors in determining an ROI for your software?
Our customers are very ROI conscious despite their focus on improving the customer experience. Besides AHT and agent productivity gains, our customers are able also reduce call volume by eliminating repeat calls and increase their sales per call. There are many softer benefits to performance management that while not as easily quantifiable are significant such as, improved customer satisfaction, agent retention, training/ coaching effectiveness, and report consolidation time.
4. What do you anticipate will be Enkata’s key areas of growth in 2008?
We see tremendous interest in our applications that focus on improving the customer experience and sales per agent. Given the slowing economy, companies are looking for ways to keep their current customer happy and to sell them more. In terms of products, we expect our First Call Resolution, Up-sell / Cross-sell, and Cross-Channel Experience business solutions to be our growth engines in 2008.
5. Enkata has released the results of a performance management survey. The results indicated that we can expect supervisors to do more coaching. Did the survey results reveal any issues that were unexpected?
Yes. Agent coaching, which is the number one way to improve both an agent’s performance and retention, was still given a surprisingly low priority relative to other tasks (approximately 30% of a supervisor time). We see best practice companies requiring supervisors to spend 50-70% of their time coaching. Conversely, we were pleasantly surprised that companies that purchased a comprehensive performance management solution coached 50% more than before the solution was in place – a clear indication that these companies were investing the savings from reduced administrative tasks into more coaching time.
6. One of the issues many contact center managers are groping with is measuring customer satisfaction. Any suggestions?
While customer satisfaction is an important metric, and most effectively measured by post call surveys, we have a strong belief that measuring and impacting the number one driver of customer satisfaction, First Call Resolution (FCR), is just as important – if not more. Despite FCR’s widely studied impact on customer satisfaction, we find that most companies fail to measure FCR for all calls so they are measuring only a small sample and producing a metric that is not actionable. If a company’s goal is to impact, and not just to measure customer satisfaction, my suggestion is to put an FCR program in place ASAP.
7. Your performance management software provides an analytics component. What is the adoption rate for the utilization of this type of software? How are contact centers utilizing the data?
Our core strength is advanced analytics where we provide the ability to consolidate data, trace the end-to-end customer experience, understand the drivers of performance, and expose root cause insights into how to improve contact center performance. Every Enkata product includes, and benefits from, our advanced analytics platform.
Enkata offers two advanced analytics products, the Analytics Workbench and packaged Analytics Modules (such as Call Avoidance, Self-Service, Customer Satisfaction/Churn, Agent Retention). Both products are designed for business analysts at the site level and/or headquarters. The Analytics Workbench provides analysts with unlimited freedom to conduct root cause investigations across any number of metrics or attributes. The Analytics Modules, such as FCR, offer best practice analytic views and reports.
Contact centers primarily use our analytics to identify upstream call drivers, process breakdowns, or marketing issues that are causing unnecessary calls, low self-service rates, or high customer churn. Because Enkata built its analytical tools specifically for contact center analysis, the analysts are able to leverage our Failure Point Analyzer, Process Viewer, Sequence Replay, and Data mining to quickly pinpoint the characteristics of calls, customers, agents, and products that are correlated to poor performance.
Every one of our customers have purchased both our Analytics Workbench and at least one Analytics Module.
8. There has been much discussion of KPIs. What are some of the KPIs that are most commonly used by contact centers? Are centers actually aligning their KPIs with their corporate goals?
We find that most centers track 20-30 KPIs with the top five being: cost per call, revenue per call, customer satisfaction, average speed of answer, and agent utilization. First Call Resolution is an important metric in many centers but is often not a top 5 KPI – although it should be.
In terms of corporate alignment with KPIs, this seems to vary based on the contact center’s role in the company. Companies where customer service is seen as an important contributor to company objectives for sales and customer feedback etc. have typically better aligned KPIs. On the other hand, companies that view customer service as a cost center are often misaligned with top level revenue, customer churn, and customer satisfaction objectives. Unfortunately, more customer service organizations fit into the latter category today, although this trend is changing. The contact center executives who are working most closely with their peers in other departments (marketing, product, etc.) to align to the highest corporate goals are the one who are making innovative changes in contact center practices and implementing more evolved KPIs, such as FCR.