Ineffective Call Centers Need Performance Management

From: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2005/oct/1198672.htm

Advances in technology, tools and an understanding of business processes all lead to a simple statement: You can make your contact center more effective and a more valuable contributor to the top and bottom line.

Ventana Research believes organizations can improve the operational performance of their contact centers by aligning the agents, the processes and systems being used to a common set of business-driven goals. To achieve this, organizations should follow a three-step process we call Understand, Optimize and Align.


To Understand, business managers acquire baseline information that can be used to measure their processes both currently and historically. To Optimize, they employ models and algorithms to create forecasts and plans that can change the way they view the contact center. To Align, they establish procedures for setting goals, scoring, notifying and automating the performance management process.

Managing operational performance in a contact center begins with determining what to measure, how to extract the data from which to derive the measures and how to apply the measures to improve performance.

What to Measure
As regards what to measure and how to find data, most contact centers are managed tactically, focusing on transactional throughput. This approach is typified by the wallboards that display supposed key performance indicators, such as number of calls in each queue, number of calls processed today and average length of call. However, these numbers, taken directly from the telephone switching equipment, really indicate only the efficiency of the center, not its effectiveness in resolving the customers’ issues....click for more

Ineffective Call Centers Need Performance Management
By RICHARD SNOW
VP & Research Director at Ventana Research