Articles

By Kevin Lake, director of call center operations, NICE Systems

Today's call center is a bottom-line growth engine just waiting to contribute to the organization's bottom line. With the right call recording and quality monitoring tools in place, organizations can generate significant ROI in the form of enhanced customer loyalty, improved business performance, increased efficiency and more.

Furthermore, these solutions typically pay for themselves within just 9 months by increasing management effectiveness, improving agent efficiency, providing more focused agent training, reducing agent turnover, improving customer satisfaction and by identifying and isolating business process breakdowns that can impede business effectiveness.

These applications fall under a strategy called customer experience management (CEM). Along the way to a more successful organization, CEM solutions help the company create a customer-first organization. It all starts with having the ability to capture, evaluate and analyze customer interactions which can lead to improved contact center and overall business performance.

Some of the things Call Recording and Quality Monitoring solutions can do…

• Save supervisors significant administrative time by automating review of customer interactions
• Increase agent efficiency and effectiveness by reducing handling time of calls, e-mails and web chats.
• Reduce agent turnover by providing more focused training.
• Drive improvements in customer satisfaction/loyalty by making agents more efficient and effective.

Let's now take a look at some of the specific areas of improvement within the organization that CEM can lead to such as:
FIRST CONTACT RESOLUTION (ABILITY TO SATISFY A CUSTOMER'S NEEDS DURING THE INITIAL CALL)

According to the Purdue Call Center Benchmark Study, contact centers resolve 78.3% of calls on the first contact, whereas the remainder -- 21.7%, required the customer to re-contact the company. Repeat contacts result from two factors: 1) the agent's inability to effectively bring closure to a customer service inquiry or sales related transaction and 2) a downstream process breakdown that occurred after the customer service call and beyond the agent's direct control such as when the inventory department fails to fulfill an order despite the agent's correct order entry. CEM can help to improve first contact resolution from these root causes.

Contact centers managers know that an agent's ability to bring closure to a customer service call is highly correlated with the agent's knowledge and skill set. New hires have notoriously low first contact resolution performance since they lack both the product/service knowledge and the ability to effectively communicate with the customer. CEM allows for precision agent evaluation that can pinpoint these skill deficiencies so the contact center manager can work to enhance first contact resolution skills for both new hires and seasoned agents. This leads to efficiency improvements, enhanced customer satisfaction and cost decreases.

When business processes fail downstream from the contact center such as the unfulfilled order, this can lead to an unnecessary call back from the customer which doubles the customer service cost for the request. This example is not uncommon. Fulfillment problems are endemic in many organizations, and with the trend to continue to outsource more of these functions, the ability for organizations to quickly identify these gaps will become an even greater challenge – with the contact center, not the outsourcer, taking on the cost burden of call backs and the "hit" to their customer satisfaction scores.

CEM can help identify failures in fulfillment and other downstream processes by allowing quality-monitoring analysts to identify them quickly through evaluating customer call backs. These call backs can also be linked back to the recording of the original inquiry to determine what was promised by the agent and verify that the order entry was accurately entered.

Customer Example

Intertwine, a telecom outsourcer, realized that first contact resolution was a key strategy to reducing unnecessary callbacks to reduce cost and improve customer satisfaction. They needed a technology that would help to address this problem and chose CEM solutions to: 1) identify agents with inadequate first contact resolution skills to guide coaching and training to address these gaps, and 2) capture both voice and screen transactions to identify and address downstream process breakdowns that were leading to unnecessary call backs. The result: agents significantly improved their first contact resolution skills, and the fulfillment process breakdowns that created unnecessary customer callbacks were identified and significantly reduced. Intertwine saw a first contact resolution increase from 73% to 90%.

While Interwine was able to achieve over a 17% improvement in first contact resolution, let's take a conservative assumption of a 1% improvement. Let us also conservatively assume that a lack of first contact resolution results in only one additional call . we know that a 1% improvement in first contact resolution will result in a 1% reduction in call volume due to the elimination of the call back. Below is a savings summary for our 150 agent contact center based on a 1% increase in first contact resolution leading to the elimination of 26,625 call backs with an average cost per call of $6.03 (industry average).

INCREASING MANAGEMENT PRODUCTIVITY

Companies are recognizing that they would prefer to have their supervisors and quality monitoring analysts spend less time monitoring and more time providing coaching and feedback. Manual methods for performing quality assurance can be tedious and time consuming. Taping at an agent's desk, performing real time monitoring, and completing and scoring paper evaluations takes time and prevents managers from more important tasks such as performing side-by-side coaching or handling escalated calls. Call recording provides the means to significantly reduce monitoring time without decreasing evaluation output.

Customer Example

Compaq computer wanted their supervisors to spend more time providing coaching and feedback and less time monitoring. According to Compaq computer, its CEM system increased supervisors' productivity by 30%.

TIME SAVING BENEFITS

Call recording and quality monitoring provides significant times saving improvements through its automated call logging and user-friendly call retrieval system. These benefits include:

• Supervisors do not need to find analog tapes, dial into a switch or sit by an agent's side to find a call to evaluate. Complete calls are immediately available for evaluation at the reviewer's desktop.
• Statistical analysis of agent performance is achieved instantly without having to manually crunch numbers.
• Supervisors have a complete picture of contact center quality from overall, group, and individual performance across multiple platforms (i.e. phone, e-mail, web chat). Instant comparative analysis provides management with better information to make the best use of coaching time.

INCREASED AGENT EFFICIENCY

Today, many contact centers measure performance such as the average length of time on a call. This type of measurement may indicate that the best agent spends 1.4 minutes on a phone or e-mail transaction, for example, while a lesser skilled agent spends 3.2 minutes. However, these statistics don't tell companies why one agent spends more or less time handling the customer contact. The manager must be able to see and/or hear the specific transactions handled by each agent to correctly ascertain the problem areas.

With voice and screen capture, available in many of today's leading CEM solutions, contact center managers can identify the agent's ability to effectively navigate from one screen to the next when accessing particular information. Without the ability to record the agent's screen activity, you lose 50% of the agent's activity. It is not enough just to evaluate what an agent says to a customer, we need to know if the agent is using the on-line reference tools, entering correct information and navigating efficiently. All these factor into evaluating the effectiveness of the agent.

Customer Examples

Mitsubishi Inc. reported that its CEM system saves agents time and uncertainty and enables their call centers to handle 38% more call volume.

A major parcel delivery company identified navigational bottlenecks in several of their call center applications utilizing screen capture technology. Modest application modifications decreased call-handling time by 33 hours a day with savings estimated at $146,000 per year.

As most contact centers are aware, even a few seconds shaved off of agent handling time can bring substantial savings. For the average 150-agent call center, with an average call length of 5 minutes, reducing the amount of handling time by only 2% (6 seconds) per transaction can result in savings of over $68,000 per year.

MORE TARGETED TRAINING

Training programs that are developed for agents without the benefit of first reviewing actual agent/customer interactions to identify problem areas can miss the mark completely and waste resources.

Historically, agent training utilized the "shotgun" approach. All agents were sent to classroom training even though some agents already had the requisite skills that the training was targeting. However, due to the lack of precision evaluation, there was no easy way to differentiate between those who needed the training from those who did not.

CEM enables supervisors to pinpoint the problem(s) that the agent is having, whether it is limited to product knowledge, for example, or difficulty closing the sale. Based upon a detailed agent profile, the potential cause of a limited skill-set can be identified. A customized training program can then be designed to help develop the required skills. As a result, only those agents that need training will receive it, reducing costly "misguided" training.

Customer Example

A major US telecom service provider achieved an 11% decrease in off-line training time as agents learned by example through call recordings.

Ben Inc., a wireless provider, decreased training costs with an estimated savings of $200,000 per year.

INCREASED AGENT RETENTION

Providing an incentive program is the best way to keep call center agents motivated and operating at a high performance level. CEM provides the required information – gleaned from customer interactions - that can be used to track and reward top performers.

When agents have more job satisfaction, they are less likely to leave their job and more likely to provide better customer service. Keeping star performers on staff longer provides more consistency of service and keeps valuable resources in-house.

Customer Example

With reduced agent turnover, the need to bring on new agents to replace those who leave is reduced. The average cost of training each new agent is $6,572 according to the Gartner Group (1998). In a 150-agent contact center, for example, the reduction in new hire training costs resulting from a 2% improvement in agent retention is $19,716. Beyond the savings achieved through the reduction of new hire training, more experienced agents on the floor mean higher customer satisfaction levels and service levels.

Chase Mellon Bank reduced agent turnover from 30% to 2% leveraging their CEM system while Ben Inc. – a mobile communications provider, was able to achieve an agent retention rate nearly double the industry average.

CEM Solutions with E-Learning Integration

One of the most important trends in call center technology is the integration of Quality Monitoring technology with e-learning applications. It is now possible to launch training directly from the on-line evaluation form to immediately address identified knowledge and skill gaps.

Timely, targeted agent training is more critical than ever in today's contact centers. Agents' jobs are becoming more complex as customers expect higher levels of service. But in the fast-paced contact center environment, it is increasingly difficult to find time to take busy agents away from their stations for training. Leading CEM e-learning tools today can deliver multimedia e-Training directly to the agent's desktop. Targeted training modules can be triggered based on Quality Monitoring scores to deliver the specific training agents need, when they need it Desktop delivery of concise, complete training modules enables contact centers to make the most effective use of agents' time by allowing them to train at their desk during low call volume periods or during scheduled training breaks. Built-in assessments allow testing of agent understanding after the training session. This flexibility significantly reduces time spent in the classroom - and the demands on trainer resources.

These tools reduce the need for costly classroom training, and by integrating with the call center's automatic call distributor (ACD) and workforce management software, the system can send training to the agents during their idle time, minimizing the impacts on staffing.

Most contact centers recognize that much of the cost of training does not lie with the instructor and classroom costs. Most cost is incurred by taking the agents off the phone for the training; thereby requiring the contact center to "backfill" other agents to handle the call volume. If contact centers are able to send training to agents during idle time, there is no need to "backfill".

Based on conservative estimates, by implementing an e-learning solution, a 150 agent contact center can save over $118,000 per year based on modest improvements in "back-fill" costs, new hire training and increased agent retention. In addition, with the integration of quality monitoring, e-learning and workforce management can ensure the right agents receive the right training at the right time.

As with any return on investment story, companies can achieve outstanding results if they take the time to carefully implement and leverage their technology investments. I knowof no technology that you just "plug in" and the dollars come rolling in. However, those who implement quality recording solutions will see these solutions typically paying for themselves within just 9 months by increasing management effectiveness, improving agent efficiency, providing more focused agent training, reducing agent turnover and more. Based on modest assumptions and actual business testimonials, the average 150 agent contact center can expect savings totalling more than$380,000 per year with an integrated quality evaluation and e-learning platform – numbers even the most demanding CFO will appreciate.