Quality Monitoring Captures Center Stage in the Enterprise
By Kevin G. Hegebarth

Industry analysts estimate that nearly two-thirds of all interactions with customers occur through the contact center. Today’s contact centers are more than just places where customer sales/service representatives (CSRs) take calls from or make calls to consumers. Increasingly, they are in the spotlight as sources of valuable information about customers, products and services, and even competitive offerings. As centers have advanced, embraced more robust technology and began interacting with customers through multiple communications media – such as email and the Web, in addition to the telephone – a whole new class of contact center has emerged.

With these advancements, however, come a host of new challenges for today’s Internet-enabled call centers – further underscoring the importance of capturing and analyzing multimedia customer interactions to optimize corporate performance. With captured samples of the customer experience, companies are able to share sales, service and satisfaction feedback throughout the enterprise. Enterprise collaboration technologies that provide for shared customer interactions, proactive management and more open communications lines company-wide are empowering the contact center and transforming it into a hub of first-hand, corporate business intelligence.

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.

Customer Contacts Translate to Valuable Business Intelligence for the Enterprise
Making the most of this ocean of information from customer interactions is a growing imperative for contact center management. Sifting through the sheer volume of interactions to find those that contain the most valuable information can be a daunting task. To ease this burden, the enterprise collaboration concept enables business users to specify profiles of the types of contacts most critical to their businesses. For example, interactions about a specific product may interest a product manager so he/she can glean information for future product enhancements; a sales vice president may be interested in contacts that have resulted in a “no-sale” in order to provide additional training to increase sales conversion rates; and an executive may wish to sample interactions from high-value customers to ensure they are receiving top-notch service. By extending the information gathered in the customer contact center and sharing it throughout the organization, enterprise collaboration, information sharing and improved communications become a true reality.

Through multimedia customer interaction recording software, companies can selectively capture the types of agent-customer contacts that drive their organizations. By recording complete customer contacts based on user-defined, advanced “business rules,” companies can focus on the types of interactions that directly impact their corporate- and customer-focused goals. When an interaction meets one or more established multiple business conditions, the system can record and catalog the call, email or Web interaction, making it easy to discern the types and number of contacts available for review. Storing and later retrieving these interactions allows for future evaluation, coaching, training and even information sharing with other groups and departments. Through this recording method, the system can capture contacts in their entirety either before, during or after the customer contact occurs, as long as the multi-condition business rules are fulfilled. The software only retains contacts that meet the specified criteria in designated contact folders. This is particularly effective in an outsourcing environment where each client’s contacts can be made available to them – and only them – for review and inspection.

For instance, if a marketing manager wishes to evaluate product awareness and customer comments after the launch of a new campaign, a business rule conforming to the parameters of the marketing program (i.e., DNIS of the call or campaign code provided by the customer) ensures that the system records interactions relating to the campaign. This provides a wealth of data based on customer comments and feedback, including guidance on how the campaign is working and what changes, if any, need to be made to make it more effective.

Making Contact Center and Customer Feedback Truly Collaborative
Enabling enterprise collaboration through recorded customer interactions helps companies ensure the information they capture is stored in a way that will further facilitate its use throughout the organization. Contact annotation, for example, provides a means to attach text or voice comments to customer interaction recordings. A manager may replay an interaction containing a customer objection that needs to be shared with product management, marketing, senior management or another department. Annotating that portion of the contact enables others to quickly find and focus on the specific part of the interaction for insight and action.

Another method of maximizing the value of customer interaction data is to notify relevant parties when certain events take place. A product manager, for instance, may wish to know when 20 or more customers call to ask how to use a particular product feature, so the company can update its literature and proactively send it to other customers; or a sales vice president may wish to be notified once a product or campaign has resulted in 100 or more sales. Customer interaction recording software can alert specified individuals, groups or departments by pager, email or mobile device when campaign and other business milestones take place. Designated people throughout the enterprise also can access the recorded customer contacts through email or Web links to the company’s corporate Intranet. With this enhanced view of the customer experience, companies are now even better equipped to make informed decisions.

The architecture supporting enterprise collaboration enables a variety of users to access a central repository of interactions through a common Web browser. This architecture facilitates access to contacts from virtually anywhere – from the contact center all the way to the executive suite, and even outside the enterprise in some instances. In the case of product management and engineering, department heads and managers can gain valuable feedback on product offerings and even defects. Executives can gain better perspective on revenue projections and trends. And marketing management can evaluate product awareness and customer feedback after launching a campaign to gauge its effectiveness. The feedback delivered helps identify efficiencies and even deficiencies in the product/service tied to the campaign – indicating a need to revise the offer, or in staff knowledge and quality of service – pointing to a need for additional CSR training.

Enterprises Credit Contact Centers as Customer Care Providers, Intelligence Sources and Revenue Generators
Many forward-thinking contact centers are being recognized for their new strategic role as business intelligence hubs. This position not only gives added responsibility and acknowledgement to center management teams and CSRs, it also helps diminish the outdated and inaccurate portrayal of contact centers as cost centers, rather than profit centers that serve as the “frontline” to customer service and satisfaction. Contact centers are now seen, recognized and valued for the important roles they play as information gatherers of customer feedback; as information gatekeepers that store some contacts, discard some contacts, and then decide who can benefit from the contacts; and as information providers that determine and alert groups and departments enterprise-wide to the valuable customer data, feedback and insight available and how to access it.

Today, organizations and their contact centers are beginning to invest in and benefit from the great intelligence and information that customer interaction recording technologies deliver – and in particular, how that information can be used strategically throughout the enterprise. By sharing information, companies stand to gain more perspective to make smarter business decisions, identify new revenue opportunities and cost savings, and increase customer satisfaction. The most enlightened organizations will succeed in growing their businesses by ensuring their contact centers continue to capture, communicate and collaborate
the most valuable feedback imaginable from the ones who matter most – their customers.

*Special Note: This article was originally published in October 2001 on RealMarket.

©2001-2003, Witness Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.