Call-Center Management with a Human Touch

By Kevin Fogarty

As American corporations continue to move mundane IT functions offshore, they force IT managers to stretch their technology and management skills to keep those operations up to par.

Call-center operations make up only about 35 percent of the functions U.S. corporations outsource to foreign corporations, according to a January survey by tax and financial consulting firm BDO Seidman, LLP.

But call centers in general—and those in foreign countries or otherwise removed from the direct management of the companies they serve—are among the most challenging technical functions to manage and come with among the highest penalties for failure, both in direct revenue and in customer relationships, according to Donna Fluss, the founder and president of DMG Consulting LLC, customer-service consultancy in West Orange, N.J.

The hottest thing in customer service management right now, Fluss says, isn’t the call-routing, screen pops and other IT-based tools that make call-center operators more efficient—but that have become commonplace. Instead, it’s Call Center Performance Management (CCPM)—a sophisticated set of performance metrics that collects data on every aspect of every operator’s work and translates it into a balanced scorecard measuring the performance of operators, workgroups, entire call centers, shifts within the call centers or groups of call centers operated by an outsourcing partner.

“At this point, anyone who’s not using some form of CCPM is behind the curve. Most people think it’s just reporting, on steroids, but if that’s what you’re using it for, you’re wasting your money,” Fluss says. “It’s supposed to give you a dynamic picture of what’s going on—not a static picture like a report—so you can make sure the goals and performance of the call center are aligned with the company’s goals.”

But tracking the performance of operators shouldn’t include only what they do on the phone, according to Rex Dorricott, CEO of Exony, Ltd., a  CCPM developer based in London and Boston. An operator might be slow or unable to handle a particular call not because of a performance issue, but because training for a whole group of operators didn’t accomplish its goal or wasn’t completed on time, Dorricott says.

“Ten years ago if you were concerned with average handle time, it was in a small environment of agents,” Dorricott says. “Now you’re talking about facilities in different time zones around the world, looking at the training and the size of enterprise queues. You have to look at the background of the agent. You can’t depend on pure data; you have to run it through analytics based on business rules.”

Exony’s approach is to pull data out of human resources records, call center records, training databases and other places that show an employee’s performance and growth over time. It can then integrate that historical picture with live performance data and provide a range of tools to give managers at the enterprise, divisional and workgroup levels the ability to analyze the on-phone performance and off-phone preparation of their staffs. Exony refers to this approach—which treats multidivisional, often international, call center operations as a single organization—as virtual contact center management.

Exony’s Virtualized Interaction Manager is designed to provide real-time analytics and support for multinational, multi-time zone operations. Its biggest market is among contact center operations of 500 seats or more, and is provided as a hosted service, maintained by Exony for customers such as Microsoft, Prudential, Verizon and France Télécom.

The most difficult part of managing large contact center operations is an overall reliance on key performance indicators (KPI) that show so tiny a part of the performance picture that it’s hard to get a coherent idea of what’s going on, DMG’s Fluss says. Call-processing systems, interactive voice response, call-routing systems and each of the other automations in a call center track their own KPIs, identifying whether it takes a second or a nanosecond to analyze the source of a call and route it to the appropriate call center, for example.

DMG  polls call-center owners and managers on a range of topics and reports in detail on their operations and satisfaction levels with various systems. The 2008 survey shows that CCPM purchases increased 79 percent during 2007, and projects a further 50 percent increase during 2008.

CCPM systems round up all that data and present it—often in real time—to provide a complete, one-screen picture of how quickly calls are picked up, how quickly customer problems are solved, how often calls have to be elevated to supervisors or second-level specialists, and so on.

Call-Center Management with a Human Touch

By Kevin Fogarty

As American corporations continue to move mundane IT functions offshore, they force IT managers to stretch their technology and management skills to keep those operations up to par.

Call-center operations make up only about 35 percent of the functions U.S. corporations outsource to foreign corporations, according to a January survey by tax and financial consulting firm BDO Seidman, LLP.

But call centers in general—and those in foreign countries or otherwise removed from the direct management of the companies they serve—are among the most challenging technical functions to manage and come with among the highest penalties for failure, both in direct revenue and in customer relationships, according to Donna Fluss, the founder and president of DMG Consulting LLC, customer-service consultancy in West Orange, N.J.

The hottest thing in customer service management right now, Fluss says, isn’t the call-routing, screen pops and other IT-based tools that make call-center operators more efficient—but that have become commonplace. Instead, it’s Call Center Performance Management (CCPM)—a sophisticated set of performance metrics that collects data on every aspect of every operator’s work and translates it into a balanced scorecard measuring the performance of operators, workgroups, entire call centers, shifts within the call centers or groups of call centers operated by an outsourcing partner.

“At this point, anyone who’s not using some form of CCPM is behind the curve. Most people think it’s just reporting, on steroids, but if that’s what you’re using it for, you’re wasting your money,” Fluss says. “It’s supposed to give you a dynamic picture of what’s going on—not a static picture like a report—so you can make sure the goals and performance of the call center are aligned with the company’s goals.”

But tracking the performance of operators shouldn’t include only what they do on the phone, according to Rex Dorricott, CEO of Exony, Ltd., a  CCPM developer based in London and Boston. An operator might be slow or unable to handle a particular call not because of a performance issue, but because training for a whole group of operators didn’t accomplish its goal or wasn’t completed on time, Dorricott says.

“Ten years ago if you were concerned with average handle time, it was in a small environment of agents,” Dorricott says. “Now you’re talking about facilities in different time zones around the world, looking at the training and the size of enterprise queues. You have to look at the background of the agent. You can’t depend on pure data; you have to run it through analytics based on business rules.”

Exony’s approach is to pull data out of human resources records, call center records, training databases and other places that show an employee’s performance and growth over time. It can then integrate that historical picture with live performance data and provide a range of tools to give managers at the enterprise, divisional and workgroup levels the ability to analyze the on-phone performance and off-phone preparation of their staffs. Exony refers to this approach—which treats multidivisional, often international, call center operations as a single organization—as virtual contact center management.

Exony’s Virtualized Interaction Manager is designed to provide real-time analytics and support for multinational, multi-time zone operations. Its biggest market is among contact center operations of 500 seats or more, and is provided as a hosted service, maintained by Exony for customers such as Microsoft, Prudential, Verizon and France Télécom.

The most difficult part of managing large contact center operations is an overall reliance on key performance indicators (KPI) that show so tiny a part of the performance picture that it’s hard to get a coherent idea of what’s going on, DMG’s Fluss says. Call-processing systems, interactive voice response, call-routing systems and each of the other automations in a call center track their own KPIs, identifying whether it takes a second or a nanosecond to analyze the source of a call and route it to the appropriate call center, for example.

DMG  polls call-center owners and managers on a range of topics and reports in detail on their operations and satisfaction levels with various systems. The 2008 survey shows that CCPM purchases increased 79 percent during 2007, and projects a further 50 percent increase during 2008.

CCPM systems round up all that data and present it—often in real time—to provide a complete, one-screen picture of how quickly calls are picked up, how quickly customer problems are solved, how often calls have to be elevated to supervisors or second-level specialists, and so on.