How do I maximize the performance of my staff, while at the same time provide a high quality customer experience? 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. To find the right technology solutions to help, most companies don’t view these goals as unconnected silos requiring different software for every area. One tightly integrated suite of software can simplify installation and administration to ensure your operational goals are met while enhancing your total cost of ownership. To help achieve this delicate balance, companies are increasingly looking to a single vendor to provide all of the software needed to capture customer intelligence and optimize performance.

Gathering insight into customer experiences, analyzing the information and then applying it to make necessary changes has become instrumental. As the strategic value of corporate contact centers have elevated and become a hub of captured customer intelligence, investments in this area have continued to rise. Paving the way for companies to acquire and leverage this type of business intelligence is technology that has long proved its value in coaching, training and agent performance optimization: customer interaction recording solutions. Multimedia recording technology, once visible only to those in the call center, is now leveraged enterprise-wide, and not in just a training capacity. Through enterprise collaboration, sharing captured customer interactions with groups, departments and even executives outside the contact center is a growing trend that can reduce costs and increase revenue, positively impact the customer experience, and raise the value the contact center brings to the rest of the organization.

Capturing customer intelligence and optimizing workforce performance has come to mean much more than simply recording and evaluating customer interactions. Organizations are now working to fully leverage their customer interaction recording software and extend that investment to include integrated solutions for contact center e-learning and analysis. Forward-thinking companies can have one solution to a multi-faceted customer experience problem. With a single solution, these organizations can ensure they’re coordinating the skills assessed in their evaluation forms with the training delivered through e-learning, while also tracking and analyzing against their key performance indicators. The result is better return on investment due to seamless integration points between applications, as well as reduced total cost of ownership through streamlined installation and maintenance.

It’s clear that when you improve your employee satisfaction, you’ll experience a corresponding upsurge in customer satisfaction. Closely linked to customer interaction recording, the promise of electronic learning has given way to a closed-loop performance optimization model that ties together the ability to trigger recording based on user-defined “business rules,” evaluate captured contacts, analyze for effectiveness, and deliver e-learning sessions to staff based on skill gap deficiencies identified through their performance scores. As the goals between multimedia customer interaction recording, analysis and learning have become intertwined, more companies are embracing the “suite approach” to optimizing their customer relationships.

Suite Benefits: A Checklist
Today, you can receive installation, training and support – as well as consulting services for initiatives such as establishing your unique business drivers, implementing quality-focused business processes and determining ways to measure performance against goals – all through one vendor. Here’s a quick benefits checklist for working with your software vendor to acquire the right suite of applications for your company.

Achieve Lower Total Cost of Ownership:
Companies that opt for the suite approach to software investment stand to benefit greatly in the area of pricing through a lower cost solution set with significant multi-product savings, as well as decreased annual maintenance and administration costs, and reduced professional services fees – all of which equate to a stronger investment and more value. When planning to implement customer interaction recording software as a foundation for retaining customers and developing contact center staff, companies are making a strong commitment to enhancing the customer experience. Investing in a complete performance optimization suite provides a full range of offerings. With a suite that ties together the ability to record, evaluate and analyze customer interactions, you can benefit from a solution set that can be easily rolled-out, quickly embraced and rapidly applied to ensure consistent, quality service.

Leverage Complete Maintenance and a Structured Upgrade Path:
The installation, maintenance and upgrades tied to multiple solutions can be alarming due to potential broken integrations. Suite offerings, all under a complete and single maintenance agreement, enable users to gain the support access they need, as well as benefit when new versions of the software are rolled-out. Additionally, upgrades to the entire suite are orchestrated to ensure all solutions are moving forward in a coordinated fashion, simplifying the process and requiring less resources and time.

Benefit from Targeted Business Consulting, Simplified Installation and Comprehensive Training:
Suite providers can offer an integrated business consulting, installation and training methodology that focuses on the suite as a whole, as well as individual solutions – allowing you to get the most out of your suite offering and recognize a rapid return on your investment.

Experience Deep Interoperability:
Many companies have first-hand experiences with multiple, independently installed and managed point solutions of little or no value because they lack ongoing integration. Interoperability is instrumental in deploying a performance optimization software suite successfully. Linking products together through tight integration from a single suite vendor provides advantages in pricing, service levels, features and functionality, and upgrades. Usability emerges as a top benefit of the suite approach based on the ability to link products together to create a desired outcome: capturing customer intelligence and then using it to enhance service, grow revenue and increase customer satisfaction.

Users of the suite can first capture customer intelligence by recording telephone, collaborative chat, email and Web interactions. They can then evaluate the quality of the communication based on the agent’s performance and analyze how quality scores link to other call center technology metrics, such as average talk time. The suite will then drive e-learning lessons to contact center staff at their desktops to focus on areas where their performance fell beneath the accepted standard. This type of interoperability among products enables process improvement and staff development to continue to increase as future interactions are captured, evaluated and analyzed. For organizations that run contact centers in multiple locations, and even around the world, enhanced interoperability becomes even more critical.

Secure Support from a Single Provider with a Dedicated Support Organization:
A single toll-free and Web support center for suite applications simplifies service requests. Users benefit from one source that provides the support they need – whether by telephone, email or the Web – and a direct path to gain insight and help 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week.

Shorten the Learning Curve:
Implementing a suite of performance optimization solutions helps ensure shorter learning curves though a common user interface. Suite vendors build their offering from an anchor product and core competency, such as customer interaction recording, that has been embraced and successfully expanded to include products such as performance analysis and e-learning. As the suite grows to include new solutions, your company benefits from familiar user interfaces and administration tools, such as a common Web-based architecture and pre-defined integrations.

Look Forward to “Suite” Success
According to analyst firm The Robert Frances Group, “Multimedia contact center software suites have proven their superiority and clear ability to outperform point solutions throughout the life cycle of a call center. Well designed and tightly-integrated, software suites facilitate effortless installation, management and maintenance, and empower the enterprise to optimize contact center applications and provide customers with the best service across all media.”

In the end, organizations today see the great value their contact centers deliver on a day to day basis. Many are turning to solution providers that are leaders in their markets, have customer successes to share with compelling ROI, and are easy to implement, use and maintain. Point solutions have a place in the market when no suite offering is available, however suite offerings are emerging as the choice of corporate IT and contact center executives for lower total cost of ownership and bundled pricing at purchase; complete maintenance with a structured upgrade path; unified consulting, installation and training; deeper interoperability; a single support organization; and shortened learning curves. As your company examines its technology providers, consider creating a “suite” spot for capturing customer intelligence and optimizing your workforce performance. Your employees will appreciate having the right tools and know-how to grow their careers, and your customers will thank you for the enhanced experience they receive when interacting with your company.

*Special Note: This article was originally published in the September 2002 issue of TMCnet.com.

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