Smart phones in the call center

Everywhere you look today you see smartphones. Call center managers, team leaders, agents, IT support, etc all have smart phones. Since so many people are using smart phones why not extend the use of the phone to the call center.

So what is a smart phone? If you have an IPhone or a Blackberry phone you have a smart phone. However, Wikipedia defines a smart phone as a phone with traditional phone features and advanced computing and connectivity.

Call centers leaders are now using their smart phones to stay in touch with the call center with web based reporting, scheduled reporting that provide current call center status and ad hoc alert message about metrics that are outside of the goals.

Managers are very mobile and the smart phone is an ideal tool to stay in touch with the call center in a very unobtrusive way.

Five Tips for Successful Real time reporting deployment

In addition to desire there are five tips that Spectrum recommends a company follow if they want a successful Unified Contact Center Reporting solution.  

1. Goals:  State your goals for the reporting solution and do it in writing.  Too often the goals change from one person to the next. This implies the goal is not really a goal more likely it is a plan of action.  This also implies there really is no goal, the goal is not written down for all involved to understand or the goal is really steps to create a better call center. The goal should be measurable and stated in clear concise terms that leave nothing to interpretation.

Some examples of goals for the call center:

1. Improve agent productivity
2. Increase revenue
3. Improve the customers experience with the call center
4. Reduce operating expenses
5. Reduce agent attrition

It does not matter if your goal is one of these top five or something completely different, it only matters that you have a goal(s).

2. Data: Call centers have a wealth of data hidden away in application databases. Capturing the data that exists in these applications provides the call center with information that can be used to improve the overall performance of the call center and agents.  What data does the call center have that if an effective report was build it would help achieve the goals?

Data can and should come from such sources as the multi-channel ACD, CRM, WFM, Help Desk software, CSat surveys, and in house data sources.  The reports can provide summary information with drill down to find the root cause of an issue.

Next decide which KPI’s within these data sources will be most helpful in obtaining your goals. For example, if one of your goals is to improve agent productivity the types of data that you should be capturing and reporting include:

• Agent Occupancy (How much time the agent spends actually working)
• Adherence
• Agent Idle time

3. Audience:  Each level within the call center and business needs to see specific types of information either real time or integrated (Historical and Real time).  Each level of the organization also needs to certain kinds of data. Kinds of data include agent statistics, multi channel ACD stats, WFM, CRM stats, FCR, CSat, and in house data.

Reporting is not just for one level of the call center. Everyone in the call center must have access to real time information.  Agents who most directly affect the goals should see their real time status, team leaders that manage groups of agents should see the real time and historical status, and managers should see the overall scope of the call center with drill down capabilities.

4. Reports: Think about the goals for the call center and determine which stakeholders within the call center will benefit most from real time reports.  The stakeholders are: Agents, Team Leaders (supervisors), Call Center Managers and Senior Management.

With the audience defined the process of determining the types of reports becomes much easier.  Reports can be Web based reports, reports that are displayed on LCD screens, text based information shown on wallboards, desktop displays, and daily threshold or schedule based email reports.

Reports can real time and they can be historical. A real time report allows for immediate corrective action and results.  A historical report provides a view into the past and possible reasons for the results the call center is experiencing.  Most CC managers view both types of reports to determine the root cause of the problem.

5. Results:  Prior to putting a Unified Contact Center Reporting solution in place measure and record the KPI statistics: Baseline.  Next determine where the call center should be within 6 months after the reporting solution is in place.  After 6 months review your results and make changes accordingly.  The goals of the real time reporting solution is to measure track and adjust.

Share the results with the call center not only the negative but also the positive results. There are some CC Managers that believe in only showing the negative stats to the agents because they believe this will motivate the agent.   This is short term and irresponsible.

Thinking and acting on these five tips for deploying a Unified Contact Center Reporting solution will result in a successful installation that improves the overall call center.

Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to learn more about Contact Center Activity Monitoring and Unified Reporting.

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Dan Boehm
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Spectrum
dan@specorp.com
713 986 8839

Call Center Metrics Changing Agent Behavior

The statistics and metrics you provide (display) to your call center and agents should be changing their performance.  If you are not seeing a change in performance this could mean:

1. You are not reporting the proper metrics;
2. Your goals are not set properly;
3. You are not showing (displaying) the correct metrics and statistics;
4. You do not show the appropriate amount of concern to your agents.

Performance change typically means the agents and team leaders regularly meet and exceed the stated goals for the call center.  First call resolution ratings are up customer satisfaction is improving and other metrics and statistics are improving when the performance in the call center is changing for the positive. The performance improvement could also mean that agents are communicating more often and call center morale is improving.  These changes can be hard to measure and track but should not be forgotten.

Proper Metrics

Each industry has a given set of metrics that are most appropriate for their industry, business and skill sets.  This means a financial call center will report on a different set of metrics than a call center in the utilities sector.  Within the business groups will look at a different set of metrics. Finally agents with different skills should see different metrics. If the metrics the agents are looking at are not relevant to them they will not improve the overall performance of the call center or their own performance.

The goals that are set will trigger threshold alerts and messages to the agents. If the goals are set too high or low it will trigger an alert message to the agent too often.  (How often do you pay attention to a car alarm going off?) Set the goals properly for the metric based on the industry standards, your staffing levels, time and day of the week and your agent's skill sets. Each group should have its own level of thresholds not one level. For example, in the insurance industry a new policy group would want to keep a very low abandon rate while the cancellations group may have a higher abandon rate.

 

Show the correct metrics and statistics

The metrics and statistics that are reported and displayed to the call center will change depending on how the agents receive this information.  Metrics and stats can be displayed on an LCD screen, wallboard, desktop, IP Phone, email, web report, printed report or on a smartphone.  The type of metrics and stats the agents read will change based on how the information is viewed.  Group level metrics and stats belong on a LCD screen, wallboard and first level of a web based report.  Agent metrics and stats belong on the desktop, IP Phone, email, smartphone and second and third level web reports.

 

Be concerned about the metrics and statistics

If you do not care if a metric or statistic threshold has been exceeded should your agents care?  Your management style is entirely your choice, however, it is very easy threshold alerts to change agent behavior.  Also recording how often a threshold violation has occurred will also be useful during reviews with the agents and team leaders.

The proper use and reporting of metrics and statistics in your call center will improve the overall performance in your call center. If you are not seeing an improvement in performance it could be one of four reasons for this lack of performance change.  As a manager you should also review your goals at least annually to ensure on-going performance improvements.

Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to learn more about Contact Center Activity Monitoring and Unified Reporting.

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Call Center Digital Signage Content

I have been helping customers this week layout their Call Center Digital Signage Content. This is the content that will be displayed on their LCD screens in the call center. The content is real time information from multiple sources such as the ACD, CRM and WFM. However, one consistent challenge that I have run up against is the amount of content the customer wants to display on a single screen.

In each case that I worked the customer wanted two - three times the amount of content that is recommended for a LCD screen. Content over run occurs becuase the manager has so much they want the agents to be aware of at any given point in time. So how does a manager cut down the content or decide what content goes to the second and third page on the screen?
1. Know your audience;
2. Understand what the goals are for the audience;
3. What type of impact does the content need to have on the audience;
4. How far is the average person from the screen?

Know your audience: If the digital signage is for the agents and team leaders then the content should be directed to them. Displaying historical data from the IVR may be interesting but it does not help the agents achieve their goals.

Understand the goals for the audience: If the goal for the audience is to improve Average Handle Time then display the metrics that affect the average handle time including AHT.

What type of impact does the content need to have on the audience: Be sure the content is prominently displayed and is the first to be read/seen by the audience. Make the important content stand out with larger fonts and use color thresholds to gain attention.

How far is the average person from the screen? On average a 1 inch tall character on an LCD screen can be read from 16 ft away. If your agents are 50 ft from the screen a 3 inch tall font is required.

Since this is a blog I did not want to go into much more detail. Contact Spectrum for more details on this topic of Call Center Digital Signage content.

Smartphones and Unified Contact Center Reporting

A smartphone is a mobile phone that combines the traditional phones features and advanced computing and connectivity capabilities according to Wikipedia.  The advanced features include email, text messaging, browsing, interactive maps and calendar functions to name just a few business applications.  For the call center manager the smartphone provides constant contact with the call center reporting tools from Spectrum. 

A reporting solution must provide reports, alerts and allow for proactive response from the manager to be an effective and efficient reporting solution.  Smartphones have the features that offer this type of functionality and Spectrum takes full advantage of those features.

Reports and Alerts

An alert can take many forms above are just two ways that a manager can be alerted to the current status of the call center.  Graphics give a tremendous overview of the call center which is easy understand and react to.  A spreadsheet report could be run as a web page with drill down if the manager wanted to go to the next step.  Or a simple email notification that presents the status of the call center may be more appropriate for the manager.

Proactive Response:

 Productive and efficient managers use their smartphones to proactively respond to a change in status in the call center.  Using remote log in a manager is quickly able to send a message to the group, team leader or even to an agent and provide immediate direction and support.

The benefits of utilizing a smartphone in the call center are:

1. Call center manager productivity is enhanced with scheduled and ad hoc reports;
2. The manager and senior executives can remain mobile and receive alerts when thresholds and variances have exceeded the goals;
3. Agents and team leader benefit from positive reinforcement messages from the manager.

Call center managers are very mobile and need the ability know what is going on in the call center but to also reply and respond to changes in the status of the call center.  Using a smartphone as part of Unified Call Center Reporting managers receive on going updates from the call center, are alerted when a threshold or a variance has occurred and are able to reply and respond quickly and effectively.

Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to learn more about Contact Center Activity Monitoring and Unified Reporting.

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Dan Boehm
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Spectrum
dan@specorp.com
713 986 8839

Contact Center Activity Monitoring

In 2002 Gartner Group coined the phrase Business Activity Monitoring or BAM. This phrase refers to the aggregation of real time acitivities inside the organization. To narrow the focus of BAM within the call center another phrase is used - Contact Center Activity Monitoring or CCAM.

Contact Center Activity Monitoring is a process of capturing real time and historical data from various call center applications. Call center applications store the data in different manners so the application used to retrieve that data must be flexible and powerful enough to get the data. An effective CCAM software application must have mulitple methods of being able to connect and capture the data.

The image above shows six common methods of retrieving data from call center applications.

After the data is captured unified reports are built and published to the agents, team leaders and managers to use and gain the benefits of the information.

Key benefits of CCAM:

1. The call center manager is able to make immediate and informed decisions;
2. The call center is able to react quickly to changing status in the call center;
3. Managers can make changes to the agents and team leaders to take advantage of the status change within the contact center.
4. Agents, team leaders and managers are more effective and efficient with real time information.

Unified Reporting

Unified Reporting is a term that is used often in the call center industry. Unified Reporting unifies data into single reports. By taking data from multiple sources and creating a single report out of that data is a unified report.

Unified Reporting (UR) provides a snap shot view of the most important KPI's from various data sources.

1. Snap Shot View: This is a report that is updated continuously so the information is real time and accurate. You do not want to make a decision based on old information.


2. Most important KPI's: These will vary by company and industry. The KPI's should include metric information more than statistics. Metric information shows how well someone or some group is performing. Statistics just show what has been done. For example, average handle time is a statistic while CSat is a metric.


3. Data Sources: These are different software applications that are also in operation in the call center. In the call center industry these sources could be any of the following: ACD, WFM, CRM, Ticketing Systems, Customer Satisfaction surveys, or other in house data source. There are many different applications in the call center and this is just a short list.

Unified Reports can take different shapes and sizes depending on how the report is going to be used. Reports can be displayed on LCD screens, LED wallboards, Agent and Team leader desktops, web based reports, configured as email messages or as short flash reports through an SMS message.

Furthermore the unified reporting would change based on the person viewing the report. Agents will see real time information about their performance, team leaders will see reports for the groups they manage and managers will see reports that are more historical than real time and will be for the entire call center.

Unified Reporting is an ideal way of bringing together critical data from the many call center applications. Saving time, being more efficient and reducing the many headaches that come with trying to find critical data are the benefits of unified reporting.

At-home agents

My nephew just started working out of his home rather than at the office. He asked me about some things that he should be doing to make certain his sales do not drop off. I was thinking about this and realized how similar his situation is to a work at home agent. So I created a list of things that a work at home agent should have to be able to be effective. This list is not in any priority.

1. The right tools: This is a basic assumption that can be overlooked. Phone, computer, high speed access to the internet and company network, headset, desk and comfortable chair.
2. Work Space: A dedicated place to answer the phone and work. This needs to be comfortable too.
3. A quiet environment: There is little worse than talking to an agent and hearing the dog barking or dishes clanging in the background.
4. The proper attitude: Not everyone can work from home. Some agents need social interaction. Years ago I had a work from home sales rep quit because he could not "hang out at the water cooler" and get caught up on gossip. During the interview process be sure to determine if they have the proper attitude.
5. Dedication: It is easy to log on and then place yourself into some type of non working status. Agents that work from home need a schedule and they need to be dedicated and stick to the schedule.
6. Feel like part of the team: Include all agents in contests, share information, send messages and make them feel like part of the team.
7. Back up plan: The agent should have a notebook and pencil ready for when (not if) the internet connection or network access is lost of denied.
8. On-going training plans: All agents need on-going traning. Agents that work from home may miss out on the team leader or manager immediate support therefore training is important to keep at-home agents up-to-date.
9. Access to real time statistics at their desktops: Real time information will let the agent know their status and that of the call center and can be prepared for heavier call volume. The ability to change the statistics and metrics they see would be helpful.
10. Priority access to team leaders or managers: Working from home does not mean at-home agents do not have trouble at times. Because they are at home and do not take as much team leader or manager time they should have priority access when needed.

Spectrum can provide the Real Time desk top statistics and metrics. Contact Us for more information.

Statistics and Metrics for Call Center Agents

While we already know there is a difference between call center statistics and metrics (see my blog dated June 2, 2010) what many call center managers are unaware of is what metrics and statistics they should be providing to the agents.

Each level of the call center (agents, team leaders, managers and senior management) need to see not only different statistics and metrics they also need to see a different timeline for the information. Agents need to see real time information about how they are performing. Furthermore, the statistics and metrics can and should change based on the call center industry.





The statistics and metrics the agent views on their desktop should be real time and about themselves. Occasional group information and current status for the day are also relevant and useful but nothing further out than that. To improve efficiencies and become more effective an agent needs to see how they are performing right now so they are able to change their behavior.

Here are some of the top Metrics and Statistics agents should be viewing on their desktop:
FCR - if available
Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSat) - if available
Abandon Rate
AHT
ASA
Adherence
Service Level

Some industries and agent skill level will need to look at different metrics and statistics. At Spectrum we always recommend these metrics and explain why they are important to the agent.

Contact Center Activity Monitoring

The Spectrum June newsletter discussed Unified Contact Center Reporting (UCCR) and the benefits of this type of reporting.  Spectrum Unified Contact Center Reporting is a complete solution for capturing real time and historical data from contact center applications and building real time reports with proactive alerting for monitoring the contact center business processes.  This month the Spectrum newsletter will discuss one aspect of UCCR: Contact Center Activity Monitoring. 

In 2002 Gartner Group coined the phrase Business Activity Monitoring which means the aggregation of real time activities inside the organization.  Spectrum’s CCAM refers to the aggregation of real time and historical information inside the call center. 

Contact Center Activity Monitoring (CCAM) is the process within UCCR that captures the real time and historical data from various call center applications. Call center applications store and provide access to their data in different manners.  It is for this reason that an effective reporting tool must have multiple methods of being able to connect and capture that data.  Spectrum’s neXorce software has six methods of capturing real time and historical data.

Key Benefits of CCAM:

• The Call Center is able to make immediate informed decisions;
• The Call Center is able to react quickly to the changing status in the call center;
• Managers can make changes to the agents and team leaders to take advantage of the status change within the call center.

Example:
Through an alert notification at her desk top a call center manager is made aware that the Csat rating for the day is dropping, abandonment rate is going up yet the number of calls taken for the day is normal.  By drilling down on the web based report the manager is able to see that the AHT has gone up on two new groups (Split skills).  The manager knows these two groups were specifically created to handle calls relating to changes in customers policies.  The call volume was not expected to be this high. The manager look at other group call volume, messages two team leaders to log agents out of the slow groups and log them into the busier groups. This transaction takes less than 5 minutes.  Now the manager is able to review the two new groups and work on anticipated call volume for the future.

Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to learn more about Contact Center Activity Monitoring and Unified Reporting.

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Dan Boehm
VP Sales and Marketing
Spectrum
dan@specorp.com
+1713 986 8839