Reflections on the Call Center Optimization Forums 2009

By Mike Garner

I was fortunate enough to attend several Call Center Optimization Forums this year; the first in St. Louis and the last in Anaheim. Representatives from practically every line of business - profit, non profit and government got together to share stories from the front lines. From fashion to medical supplements. From airlines to automobiles. Although the industry and company purpose varied, the challenges and ideas discussed by the attendees, tended to center around 5 key areas this year. Mentioned in no particular order, here are my abridged comments on the conversations that took place:

Voice of the Customer

The big deal - customers decide who wins and by how much in practically every market today, so having a good handle on how they perceive your company, your products and your service has become mission critical, especially in a down economy when growth is expensive without a brand promoting customer base.

Current State - most attendees said they had some form of customer survey process in place yet many lacked actionable insight

Trend - invite every customer to speak their mind. Ask them often and make it very simple for them to give feedback. The hardest part: deciding the few questions that really matter to ask your customers.

Work force management

The big deal - most contact centers still report “days met” for service levels when economical staffing and excellent customer service delivery happen 15 minutes at a time.

Current state - contact center professionals are working hard to find models for hiring part time and split shift employees that can perform at a high level when the amount of time they spend in the craft is often that of a full time employee.

Trend - work at home model explosion as the quality of the workforce coupled with the ability to more accurately staff intervals is leading more and more practitioners to “find a way” through some of the HR and security concerns once holding back the non brick and mortar play.

Hiring

The big deal - turnover strands and destroys the huge time and monetary investment in building the muscle memory needed to deliver a consistently differentiated level of service. Every person lost costs an organization several months of lost productivity.

Current State - the best way to avoid turnover is to identify, attract and hire a better FIT for your center. Many attendees mentioned they had a formalized hiring process aimed at finding employees that will fit their particular culture, work type and schedule. And many of those same people didn’t know if it was working.

Trend - Shocking news but news you can use: it turns out the best way to hire is to take high performance contributors in the center, test them and then look to hire close to the model. Then test the speed to performance and retention of those hired using the instrument and feed back their results into the model so it can “learn” and continue to help you hone your hiring target, message and approach. One novel idea I heard - put job ads on pizza boxes in the area you’re trolling for talent. Clever way of getting your job opening noticed on campus.

Interaction Insight

The big deal - the experience is the differentiator in most highly competitive businesses and yet it is rare to find good, objective and subjective feedback on how well tuned the interaction machine really is.

Current State - most attendees claimed a voice monitoring/recording solution in place. Some have screen capture to go along with voice. A growing yet smaller number suggested they are using screen analytics to tag certain field entries (like customer id or account number) to the interaction recording so they can respond to the customer if warranted post call.

Trend - more frequent and intelligent use of interaction tags such as products ordered, credits applied, account status and account ID so you can filter and focus your monitoring and review efforts to those types of calls or situations where there is real money on the line.

Intelligent Desktop

The big deal - The avalanche of scattered information to be combed through at the desktop is costing companies employees, customers and money.

Current State - some attendees are trying to go uniform first and optimal second. Typically that means trying to migrate to a new CRM system or application suite to retrain all their people on how to use the new application and then they will tweak it to fit their needs over time. Still others are trying to get a few applications pushing and pulling data from one another to try to cut down on duplicate work using desktop or surface integration tools.

Trend - there is growing agreement that much of the customer experience and productivity gap left in customer contact is driven by complexity at the desktop and finding a way for the technology to take more of the burden off the individual employee can have a significant positive ripple effect on the organization. A customer interaction management system can reduce long training paths, cut down on employee frustration and turnover, shorten handle times and ensure the customer knows about solutions relevant to his or her needs. So more and more, attendees are looking for ways to automate manual work processes, guide agents to the next best action or offer, present relevant information about the customer, product or process all on one screen and then tie what’s happened on the desktop to IVR or switch data so they can isolate cost, revenue and quality metrics by call type. Getting a customer routed to the person that can best serve them was yesterday’s dilemma. Making sure that person can deliver a brand-positive and profitable interaction during the moment of truth is where today’s winners and losers of markets will be determined. And that’s precisely why contact professionals are looking to customer interaction management (CIM) solutions for a competitive edge.

Cicero Certified as a Windows 7 Front Runner

We’re delighted to share that Cicero has completed testing and certification to qualify for the “Compatible with Windows 7” title. This certification is based on extensive analysis, input from domain experts and feedback from Microsoft’s OEM , ISV and IHV partners on the challenges they and their customers face. Windows 7 testing targets specific, commonly identified application issues to ensure that Cicero is compatible and reliable on Windows 7. Cicero is also one of the first companies to support our customers in the Windows 7 environment, making us a Windows 7 Front Runner. We’re excited to add yet another operating system to the vast list of applications that we already do support and look forward to leveraging Window 7 support on behalf of our customers.

Cicero Wins American Teleservices Association Technovation Award!

Cicero has been honored by the American Teleservices Association (ATA) with a Technovation award for the Cicero Platform. During the three-day National ATA Convention and Expo, Cicero was judged by a panel of representatives from the software and contact center operations industries to have provided an innovative solution for a problem facing the majority of contact centers; namely the need to bring together data from a variety of applications in a rapid, cost-effective manner.

The Cicero Platform is a leading framework for organizing, integrating and enabling an organization's various enterprise software applications to operate seamlessly on users' desktops. Cicero goes beyond the more typical server-based solutions by non-invasively exploiting the interaction between the applications and the platform on which they run. A set of tools and a structure ("Framework") makes it simple to integrate applications that aren't typically designed to work together onto one desktop, eliminating incompatibility issues while creating operational efficiencies.

We're delighted to have received this award and we're looking forward to continued "technovation" in the future!

Cicero to Present Frost & Sullivan eBraodcast

Today at 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT, Cicero will participate in a Frost and Sullivan ebroadcast titled "Is Reduction in AHT the Holy Grail? How Improving Processes Can Yield Bigger Results!"

Reducing call time has become the Holy Grail of cost savings in call centers. Although some managers have been successful in shaving a few seconds on calls, many others are falling far short of reducing AHT, improving customer satisfaction, or, in general, improving operating costs.

A better approach is to focus on process improvement where it makes sense - at the customer service reps desktop. By focusing on process improvement at the desktop, call centers can improve customer service reps effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction - faster than other approaches.

Join Frost & Sullivan, Customer Relationship Metrics and Cicero for a fun, interactive eBroadcast to learn how process improvement should be the goal of call centers and how it can yield results faster than focusing on AHT alone. You will learn:

-Why it is important to focus on reducing the complexity of the work environment for customer service representatives -Why the customer service rep as the focal point is the key to process improvement -How to understand the CSR work environment, their challenges and areas of process improvement -How companies focus on process improvement as the primary goal and the impacts on CSR effectiveness, efficiency and costs -How desktop integration allows you to use your existing technology investments and can be implemented in a matter of weeks and pay for itself in a few months -How well you remember facts through fun trivia from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”

To register, visit www.ebroadcast.frost.com/holygrail and join us as we discuss call center process improvement where it makes sense – at the CSR desktop. Share and exchange your experience and viewpoints with our panel of experts during our live, interactive Q&A following the presentation.

Happy Labor Day!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday, and if you're headed to the beach, watch out for sharks! Our Director of Systems Engineering & Professional Services Clint Babcock ignores this advice every time. Here are some pictures he has taken of his fearsome swimming companions!

Back Office and Front Office Application Integration

Enterprise organizations have two sides to their operations systems; the back office and the front office. The front office comprises the various consumer facing departments including sales and marketing, finance, investment, customer service and so on. These are the elements that are projected externally, those that define an organization, what it does, and how it benefits its customers and users. The back office applications, on the other hand, are the systems that work beneath the surface, providing the backbone of an organization. These include IT, Accounting, Manufacturing, HR and Administrative, among others. Each of these elements usually relies on one or more applications to house its proprietary information, and yet none may exist in a silo. Back office applications not only support the functions of the front office, but they also support each other. Administrative usually touches elements of HR and accounting, IT is usually a layer of every department; as such, these systems and applications are inevitably required to speak to each other, information must be shared and accessible, and perhaps most importantly, it must be a seamless process.

This is where application integration comes in: at the point of contact, at the desktop. A desktop solution provides the common ground for each of the back office and front office applications to share information as necessary, and those who need to access that information can do so on an integrated environment, rather than jumping back and forth between programs. The time saved, not to mention the ease and convenience, is of immeasurable value on a large scale when it comes to efficiency and employee satisfaction, which ultimately translates to better productivity and customer service.

Why BPEL?

BPEL builds on existing infrastructure. It does not attempt to change existing applications and systems. Rather, existing service points are front-ended with a Web Services veneer. Once this occurs, the implementation of each service-point can be changed, adapted, modernized at the leisure of the organization that controls it.

Consider that a doctor’s office needs the copy of an x-ray for a patient from a hospital. The hospital’s x-ray administrator receives the request, including the requester’s credentials and billing information. This starts a process where first the requester is validated. If successful, first a digital store, containing digitized versions of all x-rays taken in the last three years are kept, is queried automatically. If the x-ray is found there, it is transmitted over the Internet to the requester. If it is not found there, the request is conveyed to a position where older, non-digitized x-rays are kept. In this case, a manual search of existing x-rays is performed. If found, the x-ray is conveyed to the doctor’s office by messenger. Finally, the x-ray administrator charges a credit card supplied for the order. Note that this action triggers a business process on the system of the credit card processor.

It should be possible to change any step without effect on the whole process. BPEL promotes this. For example, a new requester validation method might be introduced for affiliated physicians, or the requester validation may change as result of regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA. The billing step can change to allow for a new payment method. It is not reasonable to expect that the doctor’s office or the hospital will modify all participating IT systems before reaping the benefits of BPEL-driven processes.

Individual steps provide services that make up the Business Process. Some of these steps are by nature manual. Searching for a physical x-ray in a storehouse is always manual. In other cases, while the long term goal is to have the step automated, it remains manual until it can be automated. Automating a step can take a long time, and this should not hold up the automation of the overall business process through BPEL.

That a step is manual means that it is performed by a human operator. The human operator not only reacts to the request received, but while doing so, also needs to consult and investigate using a number of applications and databases. Having all these applications work together and operate as an entity greatly enhances the operator’s efficiency and reduces the possibility of errors. This is where Cicero makes the human operator part of a BPEL-driven process. While doing so, it also provides the human operator with all the advantages of a Cicero integration.

Cicero is, like BPEL, based on and uses standards such XML, XPath, SOAP, WS, WSDL. As a Web Services Provider, Cicero is particularly suitable to be integrated in BPEL architectures and to be used in BPEL nodes in a number of scenarios, such as:

• Nodes that include a human operator.
• Nodes where the systems that need to be accessed are hard to integrate in n-tier architectures, or need to be integrated using GUI mechanisms.
• Nodes where the implementation timeframes make n-tier architectures unsuitable. Remember that Cicero integrations are much faster than competing three-tier architectures.

Cicero implements a human services architecture. Within the context of BPEL, this makes it an indispensable part of any BPEL-driven business process that needs to include humans.