|
|
|
For more than 30 years, call centers have used quality monitoring
to ensure that their agents handle customer interactions properly.
Although traditional quality monitoring has served enterprises
well in the past, it falls short in today's internet-enabled business
world, where customer demands — and defections — are
necessitating a new way of doing business. This paper addresses
the shortfalls of traditional quality monitoring and discusses
how quality monitoring is being reinvented to meet the needs
of successful enterprises now and in the future.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
With the emergence of new technologies, companies are interacting with their customers in new and different ways. It's now inevitable that VoIP will be deployed in call centers of all sizes - and businesses of all types. Recording VoIP interactions is less expensive than recording interactions via traditional phone switches. More importantly, the business value of recording VoIP interactions can also be more substantial since business and workforce optimization efforts can impact customer service groups, but also sales, marketing, back office operations, and other areas of the business.
This paper:
• Focuses on the business drivers that make recording VoIP interactions a compelling proposition,
• Offers examples of how companies across various industries have discovered real value in VoIP interaction recording, and
• Suggests how you can optimize your business or workforce in ways you may not have previously considered. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
In today's information-rich business world, one area of the company is a virtual goldmine: the contact center. Information in the form of real customer feedback on your products and services is essential in today's fast-paced business environment. More executives realize the contact center's strategic value. It's the business intelligence hub that represents the customer's voice into the organization. More intelligence flows through the contact center in one day than in any other part of the company!
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
"The Reinvention of Workforce Management: New Implications for Today’s Enterprise" provides an overview of workforce management and its evolution. It addresses the new external drivers re-shaping contact centers today, details how workforce management has been "reinvented" to uniquely include performance management and e-learning functionality, and highlights the drivers around this movement. It also takes a look at the future of workforce management, profiling the benefits of investing in an end-to-end solution.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Six Sigma is a business philosophy made up of a group of methodologies that enable the highest level of quality and continuous improvement to achieve the greatest levels of customer satisfaction. The contact center is a key part of this initiative, especially in capturing "Voice of the Customer" (VOC), which is the first step in identifying Six Sigma projects. An organization’s strategic goals and values are aligned to its customers’ needs and expectations through the use of these metrics. Learn more about the contact center’s role in supporting this initiative and strategic focus that’s become a core focus for a growing number of organizations today.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
The age of the virtual agent, or home-based agent, is upon us. By some accounts, there are currently approximately 100,000 virtual contact center agents in the U.S., a movement that represents a growing global trend. In a recent report, four percent of the call centers surveyed in Britain cited that they are currently using virtual agents, with an additional 42 percent reporting that they expect to implement home-based agents in the near future. Find out more about the issues driving this initiative, the shift toward virtual contact center models, and the benefits it's affording organizations and a previously untapped labor pool - as well as how to optimize your traditional and at-home workforce.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
In the competitive and dynamic world of selling and supporting high-technology software, superior customer service is a critical differentiator. When many software products are sold in impersonal warehouses, telephone technical support or sales groups are important touch points, frequently serving as a customer's only contact with software vendors. Therefore, the response a customer receives over the phone leaves an indelible impression—positive or negative—of an organization.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Long-term planning lays the groundwork for all
workforce optimization activities. Hiring, training, and even weekly forecasting and scheduling all hinge on the quality
of the long-term plans laid out months earlier. In this paper, we explain best practices for long-term planning and how
they relate to tactical decision-making systems such as forecasting and scheduling software. In addition, we provide tips
for establishing a dependable, effective long-term planning process.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
The next step in creating nimble, profitable companies
in the hyper-competitive 21st century is to unleash the unrealized potential of the enterprise workforce. Performance
Management is a set of practices, founded in behavioral science, that supplants the old command and control management
style and with trained, motivated employees acting in the best interests of the company. This paper explores the science
behind performance management as it can be applied to the contact center.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
This paper discusses workforce management from the perspective of the small and
medium call center. The paper reviews the manual forecasting and scheduling process, identifies execution-oriented problems,
describes how many centers have tried to ease that pain by using spreadsheet techniques, identifies the shortcoming of
spreadsheet-based systems, discusses why there are usually hidden costs with either and why small to medium centers have
special operational challenges, and explains how a robust workforce management (WFM) solution has key features that are
particularly valuable to small and medium centers.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Contact Centers use "Workforce Management" to describe systems that help them manage demand forecasting and
staff scheduling. "Workforce Optimization" includes efficient forecasting and scheduling plus much more - strategic resource
planning, budgeting, performance management, skill-gap analysis and training, recruiting, activity management, and rewards
systems. This white paper introduces the concept of workforce optimization as the practice of aligning people and skills
with your business objectives to deliver increased customer satisfaction and improved business profitability.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Avaya Pulse presents the findings of the first ever detailed study of the health of the governments’ communications systems. The research was designed to provide ‘diagnoses’ and ‘cures’, based on technologies and processes that can be implemented today.
The following questions were addressed in a telephone survey of 700 consumers, conducted in April/May 2004. The sample was segmented by state, location, household income, age and level of government in the last contact.
• What do consumers think of their contacts with government? (‘government’ encompassing federal, state and local.)
• How and why do consumers contact government? (Identifying and taking into account different groups of consumers.)
• What are their preferred modes of contact and how are these likely to change? |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Analyzing the effectiveness of your contact center agents and the operations of the contact center as a whole is a critical job, requiring timely and accurate information. To perform effectively, contact center managers and supervisors require comprehensive information about agent productivity and customer service experiences, not only at specific sites, but also throughout the enterprise. This means they must have access to an enterprise-wide view of contact center data. Organizations with contact centers need to ask themselves: Do your customers receive the same quality service standards regardless of contact center site location? Does your central quality assurance team have visibility into a consolidated view of performance? Do you have an automated way to highlight areas that are falling short of goals for investigation? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you need evaluate your quality assurance program to ensure your corporate goals are being met. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Part I of II: "Point systems work best for contact centers."
A contact center performance optimization suite consists of several applications focusing on customer interaction recording, performance analysis and e-learning management. Sometimes a contact center, after implementing part of a suite to address a key need, will find appealing capabilities for a related area using another vendor’s "point" (not part of a suite) solution. Is this a wise move? |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Part II of II: "The Telemarketing Sales Rule applies only to outbound calls."
President Bush signed the National Do Not Call bill into law in March 2003. Consumers began registering their phone numbers on June 27, 2003, and within five weeks, more than 30 million Americans had opted out of receiving telemarketing calls. A genie of sorts is now out of the bottle. The huge public interest in the national Do Not Call registry ripped the veil off some relatively obscure FTC provisions dating back to 1995, when the agency adopted its Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR). |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
As the pace of today’s contact centers continues to accelerate, the need for immediate knowledge and skill transfer becomes increasingly important. And as customer service representatives are challenged with more complexities, supervisors and call center managers are charged with doing more with less. Agents are handling more sophisticated problems and questions, requiring continual training and education. Attempting to make more out of less also means agents must now up-sell and cross-sell products and services, which requires them to have thorough knowledge of the company’s product/service lines. This is where leveraging e-learning as a means to improve customer service effectiveness is emerging as a significant competitive advantage. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Today's enterprises collect and manage vast amounts of information from clients. Until now, valuable insight shared during a telephone call has not been as easy to collect and disseminate as data has been. Dramatic improvements would be seen if this information was made easily available to the right people in your business. Witness Systems' eQuality ContactStore IP, using Cisco Systems technology, allows businesses the opportunity to immediately record, categorize, annotate and store phone calls for review and action to more throoughly serve customers' needs. |
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
Today’s forward-thinking companies are aligning in-depth process improvement (such as “root cause” analysis and Six Sigma programs) and direct revenue-supporting efforts with their contact centers to help drive business objectives. The key to successfully integrating the enterprise with the contact center is to establish a core customer interaction recording foundation and integrate process improvement and direct revenue-supporting activities based on the organization’s customer service and intelligence gathering functions. |
| |
|
|
|
|
Call mining is an emerging application that employs speech technologies, statistical methodologies and datamining tools that uncovers hidden business intelligence in agent/customer calls. The technology enables enterprises to identify trends; gather meaningful information from calls and ultimately provide better service and support to respond rapidly to changing customer attitudes, preferences, and requirements. |
| |
|
|
|
|
To large multi-site enterprises with existing, but separate, voice and data networks for inter-site traffic, VoIP is attractive as it provides a means of integrating these two disparate networks – reducing costs and getting better utilization from a shared infrastructure. |
| |
|
|
|
|
The key to successfully integrating the enterprise with the contact center is to establish a core customer interaction recording foundation and integrate process improvement and direct revenue-supporting activities based on the organization’s customer service and intelligence gathering functions. |
| |
|
|
|
|
Forward-thinking companies are rolling out new performance improvement cycles that utilize recorded agent-customer interactions to promote self-awareness. |
| |
|
|
|
|
How do you maximize the performance of your staff, while at the same time providing high quality customer experiences? It’s a common question many contact center managers are being asked in today’s ROI-driven economy, in which your company is likely faced with finding new and better ways to capture customer intelligence and use it to improve performance across your organization. This means setting high standards designed to meet customer expectations, training staff to succeed, and establishing a method to track improvement and measure satisfaction in a meaningful way. |
| |
|
|
|
|
More contact center and executive-level management are recognizing a new reality: if they capture and analyze customer interactions and share them throughout the organization, there exists an enormous opportunity in understanding customer needs and expectations. By leveraging customer interaction recording software and collaborating on valuable customer contacts with those outside the contact center that touch the customer, companies stand to benefit substantially in their ability to track trends, identify opportunities, proactively address improvement areas, and impact performance at all levels of the organization. |
| |
|
|
|
|
The latest buzzword de jour in the contact center world is analytics. Most companies only look at analytics as they pertain to CRM and customer information, but what about the contact center’s and agents’ performance? Analytics are a
critical part of analyzing the effectiveness of your contact center agents and the operations of the contact center as a whole. The ability to combine and analyze data from multiple sources is critical to your ability to manage the business, because no one source has sufficient information to provide a complete performance picture. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
In order to efficiently share information across the enterprise, a customer interaction recording system must be supported by an architecture and software that makes such information dissemination easy, efficient and effective. With the introduction of the eQuality Enterprise Collaboration Architecture, Witness Systems has created a suite of advanced customer interaction recording and information dissemination capabilities that addresses the issues of quality assurance, information gathering and collaboration at all levels of the enterprise. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
On November 8, 2001, Witness Systems introduced eQuality® Discover, the latest addition to the eQuality suite of customer interaction recording and analysis products. eQuality Discover is designed to allow companies to record and review captured samples of actual customer Web self-service experiences. eQuality Discover brings to the web the same type of quality monitoring capabilities that, until now, have been relegated to voice and data capture during an agent transaction only. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
This abridged version of Kathleen Peterson’s Gold Paper, Lost in the Labyrinth, Customers Want Out, published exclusively for Witness Systems and our customers, highlights the challenges within today’s enterprises. It provides a context for leveraging our eQuality® software suite to optimize communication and enterprise-wide collaboration among the C-level, Cube-level and the customer. It also discusses the importance of capturing customer interactions to help create a shared vision of the mission and desired customer service brand that must exist among all facets of the enterprise. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
De plus en plus d’entreprises intègrent des solutions d'enregistrement à un système d’apprentissage dynamique, afin de servir au mieux leurs clients et de contribuer à la satisfaction et à la fidélité de leurs employés. Elles entendent ainsi augmenter leur rendement et leur rentabilité, grâce à une association optimale du travail des employés, des processus et de la technologie. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
"Aus- und Weiterbildung von Agenten sind seit jeher wichtige Themen in der Call Center-Branche, doch in den letzten Jahren haben sich die Prioritäten verschoben. Zum einen sind die Aufgaben der Agenten wesentlich komplexer geworden, zum anderen ist der Stellenwert der Agenten gestiegen. Um die Einschätzung von Trainern und Agenten zu den Themen Motivation und Weiterbildung einzufangen und den Status Quo im Bezug auf den Einsatz von e-Learning-Systemen einzufangen, führten wir eine Kurzumfrage durch. Weitere Themen waren Feedback, Motivation, Gesprächsaufzeichnung, Leistungsbewertung und Herausforderungen des Berufes." |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Mit den klassischen Trainingsmethoden allein lassen sich die hohen Qualitäts- und Effizienzansprüche häufig nicht mehr verwirklichen. Sie sind nicht nur sehr zeitintensiv, sondern erzielen allein oft nicht den gewünschten Effekt. Beispielsweise sind Schulungen in der Gruppe mit einem hohen Kosten- und Zeitaufwand verbunden und mehrere Mitarbeiter müssen gleichzeitig verfügbar sein. Da die Seminare nur begrenzt individualisierbar sind, ist der Schulungserfolg geringer als im Einzelcoaching. Das Mithören des Trainers am Arbeitsplatz des Agenten setzt die Mitarbeiter möglicherweise unter Stress und spiegelt nicht ihr alltägliches Verhalten wider. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Angesichts der hohen Kosten für die CRM-Software, langer Implementierungszeiten und der Komplexität des Vorhabens suchen voraus denkende Unternehmen nach Möglichkeiten, mit denen sie ihre Investitionen schützen und die Anwendungen optimieren können. Dabei geht es nicht nur um die Technologie, sondern auch um Menschen und Prozesse, denn die optimale Kundenbetreuung ist das Ergebnis des reibungslosen Zusammenspiels aller Komponenten. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Immer wieder zeigen es Studien und Tests: An der Qualität des Kundenservice im Call Center muss kontinuierlich gearbeitet werden. Doch angesichts eines stetig steigenden Kostendrucks in den Unternehmen müssen Serviceleistungen optimal gestaltet und kontinuierlich weiterentwickelt werden, um bezahlbar zu sein und zu bleiben. Neue Technologien ermöglichen dies in neuen Dimensionen. Eine vergleichsweise junge Technik zur Qualitätssicherung sind Qualitätsmonitoring-Systeme, die Telefongespräche und Bildschirminhalte wie eMails, Web-Chats und Web-Browsing sowie Eingaben des Agenten am Arbeitsplatz aufzeichnen und auswerten. Die Ergebnisse der Analysen sind die Basis für die gezielte Verbesserung der Qualität des Call Centers. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
In schwierigen Zeiten geraten die Call Center in die Kritik. Unabhängig davon, ob es sich um unternehmenseigene Abteilungen oder um Dienstleister handelt, in den Augen des Finanzchefs verursachen sie hohe Kosten und erwirtschaften keinen Mehrwert. Die Folge: intern soll gespart werden, Dienstleister müssen mehr Leistung bei gleich bleibenden Kosten erbringen. Das Schlagwort „from cost center to profit center“ geistert durch die Branche. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Die Qualität eines Contact Centers hängt zum einen von der Infrastruktur und den Prozessen ab, zum anderen von der Qualität der Interaktionen zwischen den Kunden und den Agenten. Während es für die Bewertung der technischen Infrastruktur und der Abläufe festgelegte Kriterien gibt, lässt sich die Qualität der Interaktionen nur schwer erfassen. Die Agenten bewältigen komplexe Aufgaben, kommunizieren nicht nur mündlich sondern auch schriftlich und arbeiten mit vielen verschiedenen Anwendungen, um dem Kunden den optimalen Service zu bieten. Da die Arbeit der Agenten komplexer wird, muss sich auch die Qualitätssicherung weiterentwickeln.... |
|
|
