by: Tony Hayward, CEO

Business executives and line-of-business managers in large, consumer-oriented organizations are changing the way they view and manage call centers.  Many of them have started improving call center efficiency by spearheading workforce management or other initiatives that optimize human capital resources for customer-facing activities.   However, leading organizations are finding that many of their strategic questions are still unanswered.  The most aggressive companies are taking the next step – adding performance management to the mix to drive further efficiencies and ultimately, to improve call center effectiveness.
Performance management provides unprecedented visibility into call center operations so line-of-business and call managers can make informed decisions about issues that are strategically relevant to the enterprise.  Through on-demand, event driven capabilities, team leaders, other managers and executives can rise above mere efficiency to understand how the call center affects the overall organization from business, financial, and operational perspectives. 
Team leaders can also visually monitor activity levels, observe changes in the quality of agent interactions, and take required action with greater speed and precision than is possible using individual call center applications with or without workforce management capabilities.

Moving Beyond Efficiency

Call centers historically have been viewed as costs rather than business assets, which explains the recent focus on operational cost reduction through workforce management.  Although some companies have significantly reduced call center-related operational costs, they are still largely unable to correlate the budget allocated for facilities, headcount, technology, and resources with bottom line contributions. In addition, global visibility across applications and functions is lacking, so improving business process effectiveness is very difficult.  Some organizations are improving business process efficiency incrementally, but to be competitive, much more is required. 
Performance management takes call center operations to the next level – effectiveness – by providing visibility and metrics across multiple call center applications and rich, detailed information about the overlaying business processes.  As a result, executives and managers can make both real-time and longer term informed decisions about operational changes and improvements.  Instead of solely making retroactive improvements based on historical data, they can also react to operational conditions on the fly based on real-time information that can be instantly compared with historical trends.

Taking the guesswork out of business decision making

A lack of call center visibility, analytics and process across applications and functions requires team leaders and other managers to make educated guesses about how to improve performance.  Users of ACD data and workforce management solutions may already have insight into metrics such as call length, number of calls per agent, and number of sales per agent.  They also know how long callers will remain on hold before speaking to an agent because they have metrics to prove it. 
For example, a leading cable company recently discovered that a large number of customers were terminating their in-bound calls because the wait times for customer and technical assistance were too lengthy.  The executives logically deduced that the company could shorten caller wait times (and more importantly reduce the amount of terminated calls) by hiring more agents.  What the executives did not know was whether or not the investment in additional headcount would actually improve call center profitability! 
This illustrates an important distinction.
The motivation for considering additional headcount was efficiency – answer customer calls faster.  However, if the added cost of more agents would not in fact be offset by a proportional degree of profitability or customer loyalty improvement, then the decision would not be cost effective.  Further, the cost of the headcount also might not be offset by increased customer satisfaction, higher sales volume, or increases in cross selling or up selling.

Taking your systems investment to the next level

Performance management provides organizations with deep insight into call center effectiveness by providing the ability to visually monitor and compare multiple key performance indicators that monitor staffing, service levels, revenue generation, and other factors in real time, as well as enable immediate comparisons with historical trends to determine if current service level exceptions are out of bounds, or simply a periodic trend.  Performance management also provides new insights into organizational behavior by providing shared visibility across job functions, departments, and applications such as CRM, quality monitoring or the IVR.  In the event of an out-of-bounds condition where an activity exceeds or falls below an acceptable range, root cause analyses can be performed with greater precision using drill-down and event-driven capabilities enabling the continuous improvement of call center operations.
From a corporate perspective, executives and business managers can use performance management to quantify the effect of the call center from a profit and loss perspective because they have access to a unified view that correlates data from all the underlying applications.  For the first time, call center-related costs and customer effectiveness can be balanced in a manner that optimizes both.