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A recent Gartner survey of more than 1,500 businesses revealed that although still important, customer service is receiving less emphasis than cost cutting. When the contact center is the main channel to the customer, knowing how to cut costs without damaging the customer experience is critical... Knoa's solutions improve the way your agents use your servicing, sales, CRM, and FS&D applications. And, they have been proven to strip 15 to 40 seconds of time from every call, resulting in significant improvements in agent productivity, call center operations, and customer experience.
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The Complexity Conundrum
During a single customer interaction, an agent may have to access multiple software applications – a CRM application, a “soft phone”, accounts receivable, order management, knowledge base, etc. Effective use of these myriad applications has a direct impact on the agent’s productivity, the cost of the transaction and the customer experience. This complex set of technologies enables the sophisticated interactions that take place in today’s contact center. But, sophistication comes with a cost.
Each agent uses the technology differently – sometimes well, sometimes clumsily and sometimes not at all. The technology itself often presents barriers to agent performance – which is usually transparently shared with the customer when the agent apologizes, "Sorry, my system is slow today”, or vents frustration, "Why isn’t it letting me do this today – it let me yesterday”.
Thousands of customer interactions across hundreds of agents every day. Each instance is a data point in your composite customer satisfaction index. Each is a factor in your AHT. Each impacts your contact center costs – when inefficiencies ratchet up contact center costs, with higher repeat calls, unnecessary escalations and increased traffic. Despite a seeming glut of metrics, most contact center managers do not have comprehensive visibility into agent performance during each and every customer interaction. The agent/customer interaction is the last remaining ‘blind spot’ in contact center performance management.
The Solution to the Puzzle
Continuous monitoring of the entire agent population, across all customer interactions, is the foundation of a comprehensive contact center performance management strategy. Call recording/quality monitoring solutions provide a deep qualitative analysis of agent behavior and customer experience. However, while these technologies provide invaluable information, they are inherently a sampling technique; so many problems that impact call center performance remain undetected. It’s difficult to implement holistic performance management with insight on ‘some’ of the things that have happened to ‘some’ of the agents during ‘some’ of the customer interactions.
A new source of metrics is emerging as a rich source of insight to enrich a call center performance management strategy. End-User Experience Monitoring generates metrics that measure the experience the Contact Center applications are presenting to the agent. Are the applications slow? Is the agent being confounded with system errors? Is the user-interface cumbersome? A second set of metrics measure effective usage of the applications. Are agents using the correct transactions for the process? Are they using them effectively or making errors?
See the Forest and the Trees
To illustrate the potential impact of end-user monitoring, consider these actual situations.
- A consumer travel services company implemented end-user monitoring and was able to strip 15 seconds from a 360 second call flow – simply by identifying (and subsequently eliminating) non-actionable warning messages that the CRM system was presenting to the agents.
- A consumer energy company identified a particular ‘user error’ that 90% of the agents were making in a fundamental customer validation process. On average, it took the agents 9 seconds to recover from this error. With visibility to the problem, the company was able to re-engineer the user interface and eliminate the issue, knocking 9 seconds off the ATT.
- A telecommunications company identified a workflow change that improved productivity by 25%. This translated to a staffing reduction of 75 full-time-equivalents that was realized, through attrition, over the course of several months.
- A consumer entertainment company found that agents were not using the knowledge management system they had implemented at a cost of multiple millions. The company implemented a re-launch and re-training initiative which drove utilization to nearly 100%.
Actionable metrics to improve agent performance distinguish those firms that achieve their contact center goals from those that struggle. End-user experience and performance metrics effectively illuminate the last remaining ‘blind spot’ in the contact center, identifying system issues and pinpointing opportunities to improve the performance of servicing agents on an ongoing basis.
