Contact Center Performance Management To Optimize Enterprise Profitability: The Steps For Success
A successful contact center is a combination of art and science. Providing world-class support to large numbers of customers requires a very sophisticated servicing environment and often involves millions of dollars in technology investments. This is the science aspect of managing a contact center. The art component is the softer side, the considerable management talent required to keep a contact center, including its personnel, on the right course.
Contact center managers are being pulled in too many directions. In the past, they dedicated more than 80% of their time to internal departmental issues, specifically ensuring productivity and quality. Now, as contact centers are being asked to share valuable customer information with sales, marketing, operations, product development and senior executives, managers need tools to automate many of their departmental responsibilities. They no longer have the luxury of spending hours consolidating and reviewing agent data derived from multiple systems, including the automatic call distributor (ACD), quality management (QM), sales and workforce management (WFM). However, neglecting these functions in order to dedicate their time to delivering information to external departments would diminish their center's service excellence.
Contact center performance management is a business strategy backed by practices, applications and tools that is designed to align contact center performance with corporate goals. At a tactical level, performance management captures, aggregates and analyzes contact center data to identify and mine customer insights and intents. It then creates a series of measures and benchmarks that are tracked and reported to ensure that the contact center meets its objectives, including delivering world-class customer service, increasing sales and improving customer loyalty while enhancing productivity. Contact center performance management translates departmental objectives into key performance indicators (KPIs) that correlate with and contribute to the company's bottom line.
This paper presents best practices for migrating from an internally focused contact center to one as committed to overall corporate goals as it is to departmental quality and productivity objectives.