Businesses spend millions of dollars annually on call center capital expenses and human resources to drive down customer service costs and increase the total revenue per customer. Even though many companies have successful improved some call center efficiencies through advancements in Access Control Devices (ACDs), Workforce Management Software (WFM), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or other technologies, many call center and line of business managers at America’s largest and most technologically sophisticated companies surmise that the actual value of their current investments has not yet been realized, and they are right. They are still unable to drive the next level of efficiency, as well as identify and leverage the behaviors, processes, incentive programs, and other key factors that make the call center most effective – efficient and profitable – on a sustainable basis.
There are three ways companies can maximize their current investments:
- Leverage information across operational applications
- Enhance individual systems; and
- Improve the decision making effectiveness of team leaders and analysts.
The included white paper describes examples as to how all three of these goals can be achieved so the most profitable best practices can be aggregated throughout the call center.
Driving Business Value across Systems
Given the high costs of setting up, managing, and maintaining call centers, organizations have necessarily focused on upgrading internal process efficiencies. One way of measuring efficiency is to monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), but most organizations are unable to correlate the metrics from different data sources and prioritize them in a manner that is calculated and directly improves business effectiveness. While it is clear that specific sets of KPIs influence the achievement of key efficiency and business goals for the call center, it is often un-clear as to the relative importance of those metrics. Data-centric call centers today might capture as many as 400 or more metrics to help drive a goal such as revenue or improvement of the customer experience. While admirable, the challenge remains in understanding the relative weighting and relationship of these metrics. Moreover, managers must guess as to which are the most critical metrics to use to motivate team leaders and agents. Certainly, it is unreasonable for agents and team leaders to have to track and manage individual and team performance across hundreds of operational measures.
Improving the Value of Individual Systems
In addition to driving huge value by correlating data from across operational call center systems and business applications, performance management significantly improves the return on investment and value of individual applications such as ADCs, WFM, IVRs and Quality Systems. By providing an online ability to compare real-time events and performance exceptions with historical trends and operational tendencies, significant increases in value, speed, and insight can be achieved. All of the above systems benefit from an informational and analytical capability, merged with an action-based process and policy system, that can not only uncover insights into the operation, but enable immediate action based on best-practice process and policy to drive overall center improvement.