Analytics will empower agent improvement

The initial training sessions scheduled for all new customers typically dive into basic system navigation, system administration, supervisor usage and agent usage, reports, dashboards, etc.

Additional training opportunities allow for unthrottled, pinpoint insight into particular processes, questions, new enhancements, or simply fine tuning what your team learned originally, to do as my son's karate dojo claims, "to make their best even better".

Are you looking for that extra report or piece of analytic data which can help you drive your quality assurance and training cycle time down...

Continue reading:
Taking training to a whole new level of analytic discovery

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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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Top 10 Benefits of Real-Time Dashboard Analytics for Contact Centers

The Dashboard Analytics feature set available in Virtual Observer 4.0 has many benefits for today's busy contact center:

1. Gain real-time contact center performance snapshots and insight into emerging trends 
2. Keep all vital information on one screen rather than having to switch through multiple screens
3. Focus on high level results and drill down as needed through multiple levels
4. Detect patterns across multiple dashboard components
5. Find inefficiencies in agent skill sets and create targeted training programs to improve the overall performance
6. Generate trending reports to provide evaluation feedback by day, week, month, quarter, year, etc.
7. Identify actionable changes required in your scoring process
8. Measure your agents against standard scores with attainment reports
9. Focus in on specifc agents or questions to uncover agent weaknesses or discover your next superstars-in-training
10. Compare peers, groups or departments to see the collective gaps and performance gains

When asked by Customer Interaction Solutions about analytics, Coordinated Systems, Inc., was eager to speak to changes happening in the industry as well as some of the enhanced dashboard analytics released in their web-based Virtual Observer 4.0 call recording and quality monitoring solution.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

Customer Interaction Solutions: What business needs deliverable via contact centers are you seeing a growing demand for i.e. (a) knowledge management, (b) operational efficiencies, (c) multichannel management, (d) increasing self-service success rates, (e) customer retention and (f) sales/collections performance that you are seeing more of and why?

CSI: All of the above are important, but the one I've seen emerging as an in-demand request are for tools which focus on the customer experience (retention). It’s more and more vital to retain your current base versus spending tremendous monies chasing new business…there's an old adage there somewhere. Multichannel especially social media has gotten a lot of press these days. We haven’t really seen any requests for incorporating Twitter or Facebook (News - Alert) streams as scorable, recordable data points. On the other hand web chat has really seen an uptick. One of our customers, a large expo producer, has noticed a large percentage (20 percent) of customer traffic now flowing through that channel. I also surveyed our customers and a good number of them can see a point where web chats will exist alongside recorded calls, screens and e-mails.

Customer Interaction Solutions: Customer interaction channels: such as contact center live agents, self-service, social media and others such as retail have been housed in silos, making difficult to obtain 360-degree insights from via the information they collect on which to perform analytics. Are these channels beginning to break down or are they still locked in? Are firms getting it that they must rip apart these walls? What strategies do you recommend in response?

CSI: It's becoming more and more apparent that the applications we use today and in the future will be required to offer an API for easy access to data. Even beyond that, the app engineers will need to make it WYSIWYG so the data becomes accessible to any business analyst or application who needs it. With strict privacy controls in place, this should be fairly simple to pull off. It's kind of like when Facebook asks you to give permission to an app – you’re essentially a user who is allowing an app to have access to your data (and your friends’ data - yikes!). I can envision a social network of business applications...apps that are pre-authorized to access each other's data.

Customer Interaction Solutions: Firms appear to be more so in an "I-want-it-yesterday" mode when it comes to information, intelligence and insight. Are you seeing this and what are the drivers?

CSI: This is most definitely the case. We're now fashioning our performance reporting data as real-time, multi-level widgets which can be inserted into any users’ custom dashboard environment. The main drivers for this would be a need for speed in all areas of business analytics. The faster you get your data, the faster you can analyze it and make decisions based on it. We’ve equipped Virtual Observer version 4 to offer a wide range of dashboard analytics to meet this demand.

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10 Ways to Boost Customer Retention

Came across a great read from CallCentreHelper.com on tips for customer retention.

There are many forces at hand trying to weaken your customer retention rates:

- Increasing competition
- Economy
- Emerging technologies
- Changing customer expectations

I've taken the liberty of rewriting their list of tips and condensing the article down to some strong bullet points.

Adopt two or three of these ideas for a boost in customer retention:

- Prep the customer for what's coming next, prior to tranferring to another agent

- Add space in your CRM for interesting notes about the customer. Hobbies, Kids, Music, etc.

- Provide a comprehensive yet abbrieviated recap of what's been discussed.

- Compile an easy-access list of save opportunities for different categories of customers and calls.

- Use analytics at hand to anticipate customer behavior based on experience and trending.

- Music on hold keeps the customers tapping their feet as they await pick-up.

- Be consistent in all channels: phone, email, web chat, social, etc.

- Place a higher value on FCR (first call resolution) as opposed to AHT (average hold time).

- Share successfull calls/stories among agents

- Let the customers know how happy you are to have solved their issue or answered their questions.

You can read the entire article from CallCentreHelper.com in its' original form here:
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ten-tips-to-improve-customer-retention-16719.htm

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