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.
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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.
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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.
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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.





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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



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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.

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.


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Friday, June 07, 2013

Call monitoring and workforce management processes improved through automation

Having just gone to the annual Northeast Contact Center Forum, which is a great conference jam-packed with valuable contact center-focused content for its' audience.

I did get a chance to talk to a percentage of attendees, and I observed one trend which I found eye-opening:

A handful of contact centers today are still running their key call monitoring and workforce management processes with Microsoft Excel! 

Organizations like the NECCF exist to help contact center professionals learn what is available to help them in their day-to-day contact center lives, and the industry consultants and analysts will likely be less surprised than I was about the amount of companies still using Excel.

In fact, using Excel must be better than using nothing. I am sure many managers have done many amazing things with Excel macros and pivot tables.

Still, the ROI and benefits of automating those processes seem extremely compelling:

- Time Savings: Not only will supervisors be freed up to do additioal tasks, they can also evaluate more recorded interactions, including screen recordings, web chats, email support and more. They will also be able to evaluate the most important interactions based on the data analytics streaming through their dashboards.

- Cost Savings: Under and Over staffing is a challenge which can be solved quickly with the right workforce management solution.

- Efficiency gains: Average Handle Time and First Call Resolution are two key metrics which can be improved with the help of a call monitoring system.

- Customer Service Improvement: Using an advanced call monitoring solution will allow your staff to ensure training focuses on the key needs for improvement.

- Improve Scheduling: With the help of an automated workforce management solution, schedulers can create forecasts & schedules based on multi-skilled agents with the click of a button. Another click will yield what-if scenarios.

- and the list goes on and on...

I suppose there still are reasons (cost may be one, but even the cost of a robust, scalable enterprise workforce optimization solution has been made more affordable in recent years) companies resist bringing in a modern, automated workforce optimization solution. I just can't think of any.
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Friday, May 10, 2013

WFM integrations done right: Avaya


Virtual Observer Community workforce management system offers a native and smarter integration at a lower cost than legacy workforce management suites, providing Avaya customers with distinct advantages in a highly competitive marketplace. 


Virtual Observer (VO) Community workforce management integration is native to the Avaya platform, whereas, legacy solutions traditionally require the end users to acquire two distinct reports, one for transactional data and one for agent state data that is used for adherence reporting purposes. VO Community workforce management directly queries the database eliminating this expense and third party cost entirely for the end users.

Because of the way VO Community workforce management directly queries the database, once installed, the resident Avaya transactional data may be moved directly into the VO Community  database and immediately used for forecasting purposes. VO Community customers do not have to wait for transactional data to accrue to generate forecast of customer demand.

In addition to its ability to quickly move transactional data into our MS SQL database, VO Community also enables the migration of both agent and queue data right into the application, streamlining the entire the setup and deployment cycle and providing a deeper integration than legacy systems.

VO Community workforce management also has a built-in intelligent recovery mechanism. Should VO Community ever lose visibility into CMS or AACC, for any reason, once visibility is restored VO Community will automatically populate the missed interval data into our database with no end user involvement.

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Monday, April 15, 2013

Experience, Synergy and Integration Provides Virtual Observer Community WFM with an Advantage

Workforce Management Software Group (WFMSG), fresh off exhibiting at the Software for Planning Professionals (SWPP) annual conference last week, and Cooordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI) are two call center technology firms who both have accomplished much in their respective spaces, now working together to deliver an incredibly mature workforce management solution, Virtual Observer Community WFM.

Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI), a veteran-owned technology company, was started in 1972 and continues to thrive, innovate and disrupt the contact center space with their bundled, scalable workforce optimization solution, Virtual Observer (VO).

Back In 1995, WFMSG launched their first consultancy, which was dedicated exclusively to WFM systems and practices. They offered a wide range of services, including acquisition support, deployment, and optimization services across all product lines. WFMSG was a recognized “Best Practices” leader and they were also regarded as highly reputable industry speakers.

The result of their strategic partnership, Virtual Observer Community WFM boasts a very easy-to-use and sophisticated user interface and is deeply integrated within the Virtual Observer (VO) workforce optimization. “We’re bringing an array of integrated features which differentiate us from less mature workforce management (wfm) applications in the marketplace. From right in the main VO interface, a supervisor can glance at agent adherence levels, make scheduling inquiries, view forecasts and more. From within our Agent Portal, agents can view their schedules, request shift swaps and more. The VO Community WFM solution offers the most robust set of wfm features on the market – and they’re all bundled together in the core workforce management package,” added Marcia. “The strength and maturity of the integrated VO Community WFM solution is a direct result of the combined histories and hard work of both CSI and WFMSG.”





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Friday, February 22, 2013

Workforce Management IT Checklist

Of course we're excited about all of the features and capabilities available within the all-in-one bundled feature set, and we're extremely motivated to show off all of the snazzy new intelligent integrations with Virtual Observer.


First off, let's get started by stating that we are very excited about Virtual Observer Community WFM.

Today, however, we're focused on how Community makes life easy for the IT teams who may be evaluating workforce management solutions.

Thus, we've created a WFM checklist which collects all of the advantages our WFM solution provides and how it also creates the least amount of headaches from a technology perspective.

- Architecture/Platform: Familiar Microsoft Architecture (Windows Server 2008/2012, MS SQL DB Server 2008/2012, .NET, IIS) is easily supported.

- Rollout: Web-based user interface. The implementation should require zero fat-client installs. There are no flash or java requirements.

- Implementation: Remotely installs in less than one day.

- Integration: Tighter, failsafe, recoverable native data Integration: no third party middleware or extra charges. Supports over 20 phone platforms, including Avaya, Cisco, ShoreTel, SIP and many others.

- Virtualization: Supports a variety of fully virtual deployments and fits readily into existing SQL deployments.

- Redundancy: High-availability configurations are available.

- Authentication: Active Directory as well as at the application level.


- Upgrades: Turnkey upgrades included under standard maintenance.




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Thursday, February 07, 2013

Driving Collections Compliance with Call Insight Speech Analytics


Automated Collection Services, Inc. desired a comprehensive call recording solution which would reduce training cycle times and provide analytics to drive faster and better business decisions.

Virtual Observer Call Insight's phonetic speech engine will be a tool used to facilitate rapid detection of trends in the contact center, helping to ensure customer objectives are met. Call Insight also will help meet compliance standards by drawing attention to potential high‐risk calls. “VO is a game changer for us, really bringing our compliance efforts to an industry‐best level, as well as enabling us to further differentiate ourselves from the competition in terms of observing an enterprise‐wide quality model,” added Don Taylor, the President of ACSI.

Call Insight offers dynamic dashboard reporting, which can present critical metrics in a variety of ways, including graphical, word cloud, or more traditional bar and line charts. Each user can personalize their dashboard view to their specific needs, and drill down to actually play calls back and launch an evaluation for the event.

Virtual Observer (VO) is a robust workforce optimization solution which connects to ACSI’s ShoreTel phone system, allowing ACSI to leverage call recording for their compliance and quality processes. Beyond simple call recording, the solution enables ACSI to record screen activity, evaluate the entire interaction, run performance and trending reports in a dashboard environment, encrypt calls to protect sensitive data, and also run speech analytics on every call recorded.

Read more of ACSI's press release here

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