For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Improving Contact Center Performance

Workforce Optimization Suites Reduce Operational Complexity

by Elizabeth Herrell, November 16, 2007

Contact center managers are dealing with more challenges today than ever before — managing a multichannel contact center, coordinating a distributed workforce across several sites, supporting at-home workers, and anticipating the needs of customers with . . .

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

NICE Acquires IEX And Performix

Significantly Expands Contact Center Solution Suite

by Elizabeth Herrell, May 3, 2006

NICE Systems, a market leader in quality-monitoring solutions for contact centers, announced its acquisition of IEX, a leader in workforce management software, and Performix Technologies, a major software vendor for contact center performance management. . . .

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Quality Monitoring Provides Companies With Valuable Business Intelligence

by Elizabeth Herrell, February 3, 2006

Companies need more customer insight to make timely business decisions. Although contact centers are a major hub for customer interactions, companies do not analyze customer phone conversations, emails, and chats for the customer's experience or attitude. . . .

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Extending Quality Initiatives Beyond The Contact Center

by John Ragsdale, March 30, 2004

Customer service managers have long been frustrated when held responsible for meeting service levels for customer requests handled by other departments, usually back-office staff. Witness Systems' recent launch of eQuality Office extended its data capture, . . .

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

How Do Call Centers Measure Customer Experience?

by Bob Chatham, Bruce D. Temkin, Nicole Belanger, December 8, 2003

This is the fourth brief in the "State Of Customer Experience" series. Call centers emphasize agent monitoring and overall performance benchmarking. IVR quality monitoring disappoints.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Quality Monitoring: Beyond Business Recording, Now Strategic Business Tool

by Elizabeth Herrell, John Ragsdale, September 10, 2003

High Tech Companies Outsourcing Support Must Continue to Monitor Service Quality

by John Ragsdale, August 21, 2003

Companies that have outsourced technical support should continue to gather customer feedback on support, independent of any quality scores provided by the outsourcer. If feedback indicates a slip in service level, immediately contact the outsourcer.

Getting What You Paid for: Monitoring Service Level Received From Desktop Vendors

by John Ragsdale, August 21, 2003

If the service level received from one of your vendors slips, don't wait for the contract to come up for renewal to complain. Document the problem with times, incident numbers, product serial numbers, etc., and contact the account manager to discuss.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Identifying Customer Trends With Quality Monitoring Software Requires Tight External Integration

by John Ragsdale, August 12, 2003

Companies that build tight links between the QM software and external sources of customer data will be able to leverage new tools from their QM vendor to quickly identify new trends or anomalies in customer attitudes, priorities and buying habits.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Involve Customers at Each Step of a Quality Monitoring Program, Including Defining Agent Performance Goals

by John Ragsdale, August 11, 2003

Surveying customers before defining metrics is critical, asking what metrics are important to them and identifying expectations for metrics such as hold time and talk time, response time for e-mails, etc.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Using Quality Monitoring Software for Effective Hiring, Training and Coaching of Contact Center Agents

by John Ragsdale, August 11, 2003

Quality monitoring vendors have been expanding product suites over the last few years through development, strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Schedule a meeting with your current vendor to understand what other modules it may have.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Old Metrics and New Technology May Spell Trouble for Contact Centers

February 17, 2003

Many organizations strive to lower costs by measuring how efficiently an agent performs a task - and neglect to monitor for quality. This often leads to abrupt calls, poorly written e-mails, inadequate Web support and customer dissatisfaction.

Exposing Customer Experience Flaws

by Bob Chatham, Bruce D. Temkin, Moira Dorsey, December 11, 2002

The problem: Customers bounce between the Web and the phone, but companies can't track the quality of these cross-channel experiences. The solution: a scenario-based Customer Experience Evaluation (CXE).

Measure Contact Centers With BenchmarkPortal

by Bob Chatham, Laurie M. Orlov, December 4, 2002

Call center benchmarking provides key insight into tradeoffs between cost and customer service. As CRM efforts mature, firms must compare their centers against a suite of measures to assess the quality and efficiency of cross-channel customer experiences.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Ensuring the Quality of Agent Chat Conversations

by David Alger, John Ragsdale, September 9, 2002

Monitoring agent chat conversations is as important as monitoring phone calls and outbound e-mail to ensure every customer interaction, regardless of communication channel, meets quality expectations of both the customer and the support organization.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Options for Capturing Chat Conversations in Customer History

by John Ragsdale, September 9, 2002

Basic chat functionality is mostly a commodity and chat software may already be sitting somewhere within the company — it is usually bundled in with commerce servers. However, not all chat tools are created equal.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

How to Ensure Quality and Accuracy of Customer Service E-Mail Responses

by David Alger, John Ragsdale, July 24, 2002

Monitoring agent interactions with customers to ensure quality is a multi-channel problem, and service operations must have clearly defined quality guidelines in place for e-mails, as well as an ongoing process to check for the accuracy and quality.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

E-Mail Response Quality: How Are Leading E-Commerce Vendors Doing?

by David Alger, July 24, 2002

Fast but inaccurate replies do nothing to resolve customer problems or irritations. Firms must focus on the quality of the answer provided and then standardize as much of the response as possible.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Quality Management Teams Add New Dimension for Contact Center Performance

by Elizabeth Herrell, May 31, 2002

Quality assurance teams look beyond fundamental CSR skills and add an extra dimension to CSR performance evaluations. Working in partnership with supervisors, these teams look at the cause of problem performance.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Evaluation Criteria for CRM Logging Applications

by Elizabeth Herrell, March 28, 2002

Logging tools capture every event then archive the events in relational databases such as Oracle and DB2. This allows users flexibility in accessing events in a number of ways for monitoring and reporting purposes.

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Browser-Based Quality Monitoring Applications Support Distributed Contact Centers

by Elizabeth Herrell, February 22, 2002

As contact centers grow more complex, quality monitoring must deliver increased functionality to meet the changing complexity of customer interaction management. Cross-channel monitoring is essential in evaluating a company's response to its customers.

Business Intelligence Is Strategic in the Eyes of IT

by Keith Gile, January 28, 2002

BI is clearly becoming a mainstream technology and as such, successful BI initiatives are those with a high level of IT involvement (staffing and purchasing) and governance (project definition, management and success tracking).

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Strategic Steps to Reduce Costs and Improve Revenues for Contact Centers

by Elizabeth Herrell, May 24, 2001

Companies transform contact centers into opportunity centers by taking a proactive approach in managing customer relations and implementing new procedures and processes based on customer requirements.