The Potential of Performance Management

A Roundtable feature with VPI (Voice Print International), Exony, Enkata and IEX

BM asks a panel of experts for their opinions on the increasing emergence and growing potential of contact center performance management.

THE PANEL:
Patrick Botz, Global Director of Marketing, VPI (Voice Print International)
Rex Dorricott, CEO, Exony
Ron Hildebrandt, Co-Founder, Enkata
Debbie May, President, IEX

BM. Recent years have seen increased interest in using real time information to improve customer satisfaction, improve communication between departments and make the call center a more productive place. What challenges does this raise from a management perspective?
PB. Rapid consolidation of contact center operations involves the growing complexity of contact center technology and an increasingly dispersed workforce. This calls for a more integrated approach to managing workforce performance and technology. In response to external and internal pressures, organizations are continuously updating their operational and workflow processes. These dynamic environments require more sophisticated contact center performance management (CCPM) solutions that can easily adjust to new business processes and integrate to telephony, call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, eLearning and business systems with minimal IT involvement or professional services.

Also, since the purpose of real time information is to empower managers and agents to rapidly adjust performance, it is critical to properly plan which personnel has access to what extent of information and in what context to ensure a positive impact on performance. Measuring and tracking metrics that are not properly aligned with corporate objectives or overloading employees with information can have an adverse affect on performance.

RD. Real time performance optimization enables a contact center to tune its operation to accommodate the current demands placed on it. The objective is maximize the customer experience and value returned from the contact while keeping the delivery cost down. Tuning the current operation may involve changing strategies such as agent allocation between services, rate of overflow to outsourcers, overtime, reshaping the logical service path to further encourage self service options or enable a call-back strategy.

While all these strategies can be used to address a particular issue, they all have negative side effects elsewhere. The challenge for real time performance management is to provide decisions support to enable the best changes and strategies to be made. In reality, the issue is difficult to solve with real time reporting provided by the contact center platforms. Performance management must produce real time analytics with a broad business overlay, trending and predictions to provide effective decision support.

RH. Real time information, while holding promise to improve the customer experience, poses some basic challenges for managing agents. An agent’s access to real time recommendations, context related tips and experts, changes both the goals of a call and how an agent’s performance should be assessed. Standard measures such as average handle time become far less relevant to rate a call’s success where an agent was recommended to provide a personalized interaction and ask a few qualification questions, up sell a customer and instant message a colleague for help. New metrics, such as first call resolution, sales per hour and CSAT scores, which measure a call’s outcome, not speed, more accurately measure a call’s success. Management priorities and systems must be adjusted to ensure that agents are properly developed, rated and rewarded in this dynamic, customer centric context.

DM. Contact center managers need visibility into service level and team performance in order to identify and address issues to positively impact business performance in a timely manner. Understanding the critical metrics or KPIs and getting data aggregated, analyzed and presented in a meaningful way is a key challenge. This has historically been a time-consuming and cumbersome process. From a leadership perspective, when you look at implementing a solution that closely monitors and measures individual performance, it needs to be done in a manner that is interpreted to be positive from the agents’ perspective. The idea is not to convey a ‘big brother’ approach, but rather to empower employees to self-manage and improve their performance with a positive attitude. It’s a delicate balance.

BM. How can a CCPM solution help address some of these issues? What other business benefits does it offer?
RD. CCPM provides controlled access to the contact center that is appropriate to the individual users accountability and responsibility. This allows for safe access to the single view of the truth, encapsulating the business goals and objectives, but tailored to supporting the decision-making responsibility of the individual user. Additionally, a performance management solution keeps an audit trail of all changes and resultant outcomes, promoting the basis for effective score-carding and analysis.

Given the ability to not only quantify performance, but also empower the enterprise with the capability to effect change in performance, CCPM promotes both the notion of optimal use of resources and the culture of the enterprise to be more competitive.

RH. CCPM provides the mechanism to accurately measure an agent’s performance taking into account the dynamic context and goals of a real time adjusted call flow. For example, if an agent is recommended to ask probing questions and cross-sell a customer, a CCPM system would adjust the goals for that call by raising the handle time target, adding sales per call and tracking first contact resolution. In addition, the call reason is a critical factor in assessing handle time, CSAT, sales rate etc. CCPM systems must account for call reason to accurately assess an agent’s performance. The result is that each call, based on its individual context, will be assessed to ensure that agent goals, development plans and incentives are tightly aligned with real time directives. Without CCPM tracking an agent’s performance against a new set of dynamic goals, agent KPI performance would bear little relevance to their actual performance.

DM. A quality CCPM product provides visibility and reporting to the right people at the right time. Executives can see the entire operation for overall performance, but can drill down for specific analysis and trends to determine if a performance problem is system-wide, a manager problem or isolated to an individual agent issue. Managers can find and fix performance gaps on their team through dashboards and scorecards, and employees can manage their own performance through scorecards. From the agent perspective, this levels the playing field in the sense that a CCPM system brings fairness into the equation because everyone is held to the same standards. From a management point of view, a CCPM solution makes decision-making much easier, because they are reviewing fresh data from multiple areas in the center. Looking at this from a process perspective, automated reports and analysis provide an environment for consistent staff management processes; that is, managers can spend more time coaching instead of analyzing data. As a result, the frequency and regularity of coaching is improved. Ultimately, a quality solution will drive improved customer service and lower agent attrition. When you see real results like that, the ROI is incredible.

PB. Advanced CCPM solutions are helping organizations gain a competitive advantage in today’s demanding economy – many are realizing that the risk of change is being eclipsed by the risk of doing nothing.

An effective CCPM solution does more than provide management with consolidated reporting and a dashboard of metrics. CCPM solutions help align people, processes and technologies in contact centers in order to maximize performance results. When implemented properly with an integrated training strategy, it empower executives, managers and agents to proactively identify and eliminate performance gaps – improving customer experience, retention and profitability, while enabling organizations to achieve enterprise and departmental objectives.

Real time distribution of information can also be invaluable for multi-site, distributed organization that employs a combination of on-site and remote contact center employees, to assure consistent performance with respect to accuracy, compliance and customer experience. CCPM and integrated eLearning solutions also help dramatically boost remote employee morale and retention by creating a positive virtual team environment.

BM. Many IT implementations stall due to poor planning and a lack of understanding of the issues involved. Do you have a roadmap for successfully implementing a CCPM program? And can you recommend any best practices that will help companies get the maximum returns from their investment?
RH. Successful CCPM projects are challenging given three risk factors: data integration, goal alignment and process change. Enkata’s Rapid Deployment Methodology was developed to address these three risk factors and deliver repeatable customer success. For data integration, a critical aspect of Enkata’s success roadmap is that Enkata offers its software on demand. Therefore, we are able to provide our customers with lower cost and more predictable deployments. The other two risk factors, goal alignment and process change, highlight that CCPM is more than just an IT project, it is first and foremost a change in management process. As such, Enkata’s methodology assigns 30 percent of the project timeline to map contact center goals to agent goals under different contexts, to create automated call reasons, to map out new coaching goals and processes, and to ensure that incentives are clearly tied to new performance expectations. By treating CCPM projects as change management projects and not just IT projects, we have been able to get the right executive sponsorship and organizational commitment to long-term success.

DM. To maximize your ROI, make sure you are involving all the stakeholders by establishing a cross-departmental team that includes one or more people from each department impacted by the CCPM technology. This includes contact center management, analysts, forecasting and scheduling staff, IT, training, quality assurance, human resources and contact center agents. Once the team is in place, the group should clearly define what it expects to achieve by deploying a CCPM system.

Once expectations are set, examine current business processes to see if changes are required. Knowing what the center wants up front will help gain buy-in from internal stakeholders and define measurable goals. Since data is collected from multiple systems, the implementation process should clearly document what data will be collected from each system and how that data will be used to calculate objectives and KPIs on dashboards, scorecards and reports. This documentation is critical to ensure that the system is installed and configured correctly to meet your needs. Finally, make sure reasonable goals are set for the initial deployment and the users are comfortable with how they will be evaluated once the system is up and running.

PB. We recommend first defining specific short-term and long-term strategic and tactical objectives – the clearer the better. Next, focus initially on short-term objectives to create a baseline. For example, capitalize on the opportunity to contribute to campaign management with unprecedented relevance and speed. Then, prior to implementation, define and collect baseline levels of important real-time KPIs for each level of employee.

Shortly after implementation, compare your results to what you were getting before. Contrast will help you more easily communicate and sell the capabilities of your new application and the significance of the contact center as a major source of business and performance intelligence throughout the organization.

While rapid ROIs are typically recognized, embrace an ‘adapt and learn’ process mentality. Think of performance management as a journey in improving operational performance and building valuable intelligence, one that requires the continuous use of results to refine and improve real time reporting, analysis and training.

RD. Successful roll-out of CCPM has two key steps. The first step is to ensure a true return on the implementation is understood and the second step increases overall tool adoption.

With the first step, ensuring the implementation provides a successful return, it is important to consider all the costs and the best way to address them – and gain the end user ‘buy-in’. It is equally important to gather effective requirements and produce a deployment strategy that understands the business, how it works and the roles people play in making things happen

The second step can significantly improve adoption by first delivering a clean interface that presents relevant functionality in a highly useable manner then, secondly, deploying a system with integration points in to the other essential business tools, such as quality management or workforce management systems.

BM. How do you see this market developing over the next few years? What will be the key drivers, and are there any potential hurdles on the horizon?
DM. CCPM is definitely an emerging and growing market. In fact, it might surprise some people that the penetration of CCPM solutions in contact centers is still quite low, but as contact center leaders continue to understand the value and ROI of these products, adoption will continue to increase. For instance, to make the most of the people in a contact center, you have to have the tools to provide good overall performance results for each agent, supervisor, manager and analyst. Because of this, CCPM will change from a ‘nice-to-have’ application to a ‘must-have’ application in the contact center. The main hurdle for a vendor is the ability to build an effective business case and to communicate the benefits of a commercial software package over custom reports and scorecards developed in-house. If a vendor has a sound business case with a quality product to back it up, the decision to adopt a CCPM solution becomes a lot easier.

PB. We expect to see the growth in demand for CCPM software solutions in the coming years, for a variety of reasons.
Contact centers face a variety of challenges as they search for ways to lower their overhead while maintaining high quality standards. As agents disperse from the call center, organizations must find effective ways to manage remote workers or risk inconsistencies that can result in dissatisfied customers and possible attrition. Under these circumstances, contact center management becomes a rather challenging undertaking without timely, consolidated reporting and ability to effectively manage agent development, retention and everyday performance across all locations, while maintaining a coherent company image with respect to customer experience.

Also, today’s customers behave in ways that demand increased control of customer service – many of them are highly knowledgeable, more demanding and less loyal, ready to defect based on perceived value. Under today’s challenging economic circumstances, quick access to information on issues of customer-facing employee groups is critical.

RD. A number of factors will change over the next few years. Firstly, as the ‘millennials’ begin to have disposable income, the need to adopt media other than voice will increase significantly, bringing a different set of performance management issues.

Secondly, the enterprise goal of improving competitiveness will force the blurring of the boundary between the front and back office. Increasingly, customer interactions will be transferred to ‘occasional agents’ who are subject matter experts. This approach is becoming technically achievable for the first time as enterprises adopt a unified communications strategy. This will bring its own challenges of measuring and motivating the right behavior of these new agents together with the optimization of the strategies that deliver the calls to them.

RH. Companies are aggressively moving to get the most out of their customer contacts to optimize not only long-term loyalty, but short-term revenue. This new partnership between the contact center and marketing will bring a wave of investments to deliver targeted, personalized customer interactions. New ways to assess call context, such as automated call reasoning and new metrics, such as first call resolution will be required to successfully manage this transition. In addition, the new demands on agents to be both marketing and service agents will require corresponding changes and advancements in management tools, including CCPM, training and hiring practices to ensure that this vision becomes an operational reality.

Extra info...

Top 5
The top five advantages of performance management in the contact center are:

1. Simplified, streamlined reporting
2. Increased productivity
3. Reduced operating costs
4. Improved customer and employee experiences
5. Competitive differentiation through improved service levels