Contact Center Observer: 2013

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Workforce optimization features and training can dramatically optimize and improve everyday business processes

Many customers end up incorporating process changes once they experience Virtual Observer's flexibility and full capabilities through our onsite training.

One recent example is the ability to send evaluations, calls, or recorded chats back to the agent via our Agent Portal and E-Learning feature set.

When customers learn this kind of automated coaching is available, they often incorporate it into their actual everyday processes, reducing a training cycle time from what used to be 3 days on average, to mere hours.

Another interesting process changes had a client utilizing the system's Agent Types and Agent IDs fields for KPI reporting.

They were able to create these Types and IDs to match their financial cost centers and then they ran performance reports by Agent Type in order to view KPIs into their reports by cost center.

This scenario shows the depth of our reporting as well as the ability to slice and dice the data in many different ways and also shows how users can customize the use of the Agent descriptive fields for many possible applications.

Of course, every user can customize their Virtual Observer dashboard layouts (see a sample screenshot above) in order to bring their important metrics to life.

Friday, November 01, 2013

Are your customer initiatives also boosted by the "Voice of the Agent"?

You've invested in a sweet new technology platform which records all of your calls.

Great start. Now what are you doing with them?

Many contact centers have deployed quality monitoring tools for evaluating and scoring calls. Sometimes this leads to live coaching of the agents and other times it leads to scheduled training based on topics where the agents did not fare too well.

Other contact centers have invested in full workforce optimization suites (typically consisting of the aforementioned call recording and quality monitoring, plus workforce management, speech analytics and surveying). These are great and extremely effective, except they lack the "Voice of the Agent".

Empowering your agents with the ability to use a workforce optimization system will do wonders for their self-improvement and personal development. There are several key areas where they can contribute to the quality monitoring process and calibrate with your "Voice of the Customer" (VoC) intiatives:

* Allow your agents to play back their own calls and view their recorded screens"
* Share evaluations with them and let them respond, dispute or accept their scores
* Provide them with targeted e-learning material based on where their scores show they need improvement
* Allow them to collaborate with approved peers, supervisors, groups, etc.
* Enable shift trading, bidding, etc. with integrated Workforce Management technology

Agents should buy into the whole quality-monitoring process and by giving them access to a WFO toolset, they are less likely to take on a "Big Brother" view of your technology investments and more apt to take ownership of their own developments.

Other WFO features such as CSI's "VO Live" exist to provide management with the ability to zero in on agent behaviors which might be inefficient, counter-productive or where supervisors can intercede in real time to help an agent solve a customer issue. Agents who are introduced into the WFO process in an enthusiastic manner will also buy into the concept of pushing themselves even harder to be the best they can possibly be.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Increase Contact Center Security and Performance with added Webcam Monitoring

CSI releases a new call monitoring feature which can utilize agent webcam feeds as an added security and performance measure, continuing a proud string of groundbreaking innovation with the release of the Virtual Observer (VO) VO Live webcam feature, a feature which takes agent call monitoring to an entirely new level of agent assistance.

The Virtual Observer (VO) Live Webcam is a feature that was developed from listening to our customers who wish to learn more about smart phone abuse and other distractions that lead to agent performance issues (#’s of calls per hour, out of adherence trends, fraud prevention, safety and security (reviewing what actually occurred during unplanned emergency events)).

CSI is the first workforce optimization vendor to integrate web cam control with live screen monitoring. Supervisors can now use VO Live to monitor agent motion and activity, facial expressions, body language, behavior patterns, employee code of conduct and ethics.

This new feature is a logical extension of the original call monitoring goal: to make your agents the best they can possibly be. The feature, intended to be another performance tool in your contact center’s utility belt, can be enabled or disabled for environments who wish to not have web cam capabilities.

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

How can I find recorded calls which are similar?

An enhancement was recently added to the Virtual Observer call recording and workforce optimization which allows users to quickly group calls based on similar characteristics.

If you have an event highlighted in the event log (pictured) and click "call linking", you can bring up all the other events that match that event within a time window for any field in our database, such as:

- ID
- Ext
- CTI-CALL-NUM
- Supervisor
- Agent Type

This kind of tracking, "Call Linking", can be used for:

- identifying all the calls in a cradle to grave flow
- show me all calls from this customer today
- show me all calls handled by a particular agent
- show me all calls for this department in the last hour
- etc.

In other words, users are able to tell VO to “Show me the Similarities”!

Monday, August 26, 2013

Do you measure how many calls are "avoided" in your contact center?

We've created a new "Call Avoidance" (CA) metric querying capability which gathers data relative to agents avoiding calls.

Unlike more typical call center statistics such as "AHT" (Average Handle Time), determining your center's CA stats may be different depending on your particular interpretation of how to measure such avoidance.

You may want to brainstorm and think of all the different ways calls could be avoided by agents in your center.

Once that question is answered, we can begin to be able to build business rules definitions in order to help you capture that data.

For example, Company A might say a call is being avoided if the agent hung-up first (before the customer) AND the call contains 70% or more of hold time, while Company B might say a call is avoided if its an incoming call greater than 10 seconds with more than 30 seconds of hold.

Based on the established business rules, the # of calls being avoided can be tracked and then analyzed by specific agent.

This kind of report should be extremely useful in helping to identify opportunities for agent improvement.

Call Avoidance, First Call Resolution, AHT and other data is available in Virtual Observer Version 4.

FCR and AHT are also available as widgets in Version 4 of Virtual Observer Dashboard Analytics.

Thursday, August 08, 2013

Reinventing our DMCC pricing model

News rang out over the wires yesterday about our breakthrough DMCC Discounting Program for Avaya Customers and VARs.

This Avaya-specific pricing adjustment which will present Avaya customers with the ability to purchase DMCC call recording licenses at a tremendous discount to further assist with the costs associated with Avaya DMCC and TSAPI licensing requirements.

The pricing adjustment, branded the "DMCC Discount", is designed to help maintain our position as market leader in providing high quality workforce optimization solutions (WFO) within an overall lowest cost of ownership philosophy.

The purchase price not only includes the DMCC call recording licenses, but also includes a bevy of call monitoring features, including scoring and evaluation, performance and trending dashboard analytics, Agent Portal and E-learning, PCI or HIPAA compliance, “VO Live” screen monitoring for agent assistance, and more. Other features available include workforce management, speech analytics, desktop analytics and more.

Avaya customers looking to transition from a legacy recording architecture to a more virtualized, software-only hub and spoke-style platform can do so by considering a DMCC recording method. DMCC recording solutions can be purchased through CSI or any of our Avaya business partners.

Read the complete news piece about our DMCC discounting program.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Scaling to record over 200,000 BPO Calls Per Day

The Results Companies, a business process outsourcer (BPO) and Teleservices firm, was recently awarded the “Fastest Growing BPO Company of the Year” in the Philippines by ICT.

Since 1990, The Results Companies has experienced phenomenal success, adding clients and implementing award-winning customer management solutions for Fortune 500 and Boutique Partners.

By offering tangible evidence of value and a successful company culture, growth has been fueled organically and inorganically. Growth has been significant and continuous for the now mid-size player. One of the challenges with rapid growth, of course, is making sure your technology infrastructure can keep up, especially when that technology encompasses your quality assurance initiatives.

After a thorough search, the Results Companies deployed CSI’s Virtual Observer for workforce optimization across their Avaya landscape. The biggest challenge the ResultsCompanies needed to overcome through the years is keeping the entire Virtual Observer environment growing along with their own growing business needs.

To this day, even during peak business times, they rarely have to wait more than a few minutes for a call recording to be processed and available for playback, even as their 200,000 calls per day flows through the process. Virtual Observer had proven scalability to meet the challenge.

Read more about how the Results Companies achieves Global Enterprise Call Recording with Virtual Observer and Avaya

Friday, June 28, 2013

Keeping an eye on first call resolution

In both workforce optimization (WFO) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), "First Call Resolution" (FCR) is defined as meeting the customer's need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call.

Average Talk Time (ATT) is another common call center statistic which is used to measure the average time an agent spends on each call.

Typically, Call Center Managers look for lower ATTs, but if lower ATTs are combined with poor first call resolution trends, it's a danger sign indicating that customers may be receiving unsatisfactory answers when they call.

It's important for Call center managers to monitor the FCR rates as well as ATT as one way to gauge performance.

Follow-up calls will create an increase in call volume and require more agents on the floor (hello, workforce management!).

In the call monitoring and workforce optimization world, we know FCR to be a focal point for contact center managers, so we've added a new component to our dashboard analytics features which offer a dynamic glimpse into this metric, as well as ATT and "Calls Answered".

FCR may be viewed differently from company to company, based on preferred interpretations of a basic "Repeat Call for the Same Issue" measurement.

In order to deliver FCR for Virtual Observer customers we needed to build business rule(s) which considers how each company defines a repeat call.

For instance, one company might consider a call to be a "repeat call" if the same ANI has called within the last 30 days.

Another company might say a call is a repeat if the Account Number has called within the last 10 days.

In summary, FCR is an important metric which is available in Virtual Observer for customers seeking to improve performance.