Insight from Interactions

Do you remember your local grocery store—the one closest to home when you were a kid? The owner knew you and your family members by name. He knew what you bought and, if you hadn’t paid him a visit in a while, he would ask your mother if you were okay. He knew what you liked and, if he didn’t have what you wanted, he would order it especially for you. In short, you had a relationship. His prices may have been a fraction higher than the larger supermarket, but no one there knew you. You didn’t mind paying a little more for that personal connection.

The bottom-line value of this kind of connection has not gone unnoticed among larger grocery chains. Over the last few years, they have been investing big bucks in innovative technologies to help them get to know their customers as well, if not better, than their mom-and-pop rivals. They issue coupons for the products customers are most likely to buy, based on their previous purchases, invite them to promotional events and more. The supermarket is going head-to-head with the neighborhood grocery store in the battle for customer intimacy.

The battleground extends well beyond grocers. Small to mid-size businesses worldwide face the same challenge. The key asset that differentiated them from large competitors was knowledge of their customers, attained through their customer service operations. But that advantage—a hallmark of the small to medium contact centers that support local and regional businesses—is eroding.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the simple call recording that’s done in the small to medium contact center (SMCC) today is regarded as standard but increasingly insufficient for competitive purposes. With the risk of losing the battle for customer intimacy, more robust applications for SMCCs have become a must. According to the Datamonitor report, “Small and Suite: The Mid-Size Contact Center” (April 23, 2009), “Because large enterprises also seek ways to personalize customer self-service, customer intimacy is a battle that mid-size contact centers cannot afford to lose.”

It’s somewhat ironic that today SMCCs need to invest in business applications to protect the intimacy advantage that once came so naturally. But as IBM correctly states, “To survive, mid-size companies must be agile enough to respond to the pressures to compete on levels not required in the past.” This may mean that SMCCs must explore the kinds of technologies—and price points—once reserved for bigger players. It’s an opportunity for SMCCs and their call recording solution vendors to provide advanced customer service applications that best fit SMCC needs and budgets. It will be interesting to see how they rise to the challenge.

Lately I’ve been seeing a significant amount of coverage in the news about personal finance. Startlingly, it seems a large number of people have begun to manage their spending based on a decision-making process that I call the “ATM Approach.” If the withdrawal or purchase goes through, they spend. If not, they walk away. This easy approach to spending involves very little effort on the part of the consumer and always provides an immediate answer: yes or no, approved or declined, sufficient or insufficient. A few clicks on the screen provide the guidance for a day of financial indulgence—or abstinence—ahead.

In today’s contact centers, dashboards, overview reports and wall-boards serve a similar role, providing immediate data with which to manage the center. Roll-up values for sales, support tickets, service level, calls waiting and average speed of answer are valuable high-level metrics used in center operations. Yet, often these values are used without the detailed analysis behind the numbers. Just as opening your bank statement each month and analyzing your spending over time is important to a consumer, so is opening the detailed analysis behind the dashboard each month to uncover trends on service levels, abandonment, customer satisfaction, schedule adherence and much more.

Most workforce optimization applications provide both types of analysis—the high-level overview and granular detail, recognizing that different parts of organizations place unique and varying value on one or the other. Through advanced speech analytics, fine-grained information derived from customer interactions can provide the evidence to support sweeping changes in training, pricing or marketing campaigns. But without a high-level overview, there is no “big picture,” no strategy or focus. The overview summarizes results, while the detailed analysis is the change-agent (no pun intended) for pinpoint accuracy.

If your contact center is selling a product or service, the perfect place to start taking a more balanced approach is by inviting your marketing counterparts to the contact center for a presentation of the detail you could provide through powerful interaction analytics. And if you’re in marketing, share your broad-based customer loyalty and marketing research with the contact center so you can work together to drive more business.

Whether you’re managing your personal finances or a corporate contact center, you can’t always let the ATM Approach guide your decision-making. Too often, there’s too much at stake to risk that kind of uncertainty. Let this remind you that in life and at work, no matter how big or small a figure the “check your balance” function may reveal, the devil’s in the details.

Lately, there seems to be a lot of discussion about voice over IP (VoIP) call recording technologies. I have received many questions from customers, and participated in many conversations about the pros and cons of various VoIP call recording options and the advances in emerging technologies in this area. I’ll try to recap the main points here in the hopes of bringing in a wider audience perspective.

The first method utilized for VoIP call recording was passive sniffing of media packets directly from the network gateways. Passive sniffing requires that gateways be configured to copy all network traffic to the recording system. The drawbacks of this method are limited scalability, and increased administration and security risks.

Next, Active VoIP Recording was introduced. In this method, telephony or network components provide an interface that enables the initiation of the recording session. Active VoIP recording can be divided into three options (from the oldest to the newest):

• Conference-based VoIP recording is the least attractive, in my view. It utilizes valuable conference resources and requires a change in the real-time transport protocol (RTP) path, forcing every recorded call to go through the forking entity (media gateway).
• Forking by phone (or end points) seems to be a better option, but also has some disadvantages. It requires triple uplink bandwidth (between branches and the data center), as well as special, more expensive phones.
• The third option is most promising — VoIP call recording that forks by network components (router, session border controller [SBC] or gateway).  This method reuses components that are already in the call’s path and hence presents the most efficient and cost-effective option. I’m calling this option “Recording in the Network.”

 The main concept behind Recording in the Network (RiN) is to capture media directly from the network layer (gateways, switches, SBC, media servers), either in the enterprise or provider’s network, and correlate it with call information received from the enterprise application layers.

Conference and phone-based VoIP recording technologies rely on PBX vendors to provide VoIP signaling and media, however this is not always feasible or optimal. With Recording in the network this is done by integrating with the network infrastructure layer and therefore bypassing PBX interfaces, which also greatly reduces PBX licensing fees.

In addition, when recording of IVR interactions is required, the local PBX is not aware of such interactions. The only way to record them is to capture media from the SBC or gateway, and receive the CTI data directly from the IVR. In this type of integration interoperability is a critical requirement, both from customers and vendors.

NICE understands the importance of interoperability and believes that Recording in the Network is the optimal practice.  NICE actively participates in the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force, see my previous post – Session Recording Protocol), which sets standards for VoIP call recording and other common industry practices. We submit proposals for standards and best practices, seeking to guide the evolution of VoIP recording toward a practical method for all organizations that rely on stored VoIP calls for regulatory compliance, quality management or for other reasons.

Agent attrition is one of the biggest challenges call centers face today. The reasons are clear – in the current market conditions, when managers are required to cut staff while retaining high productivity and customer satisfaction levels, losing well-trained, skilled agents could have a serious impact on the contact center’s performance. In fact, the operational and financial implications of attrition could be dire, with labor costs accounting for as much as 80% of a typical call center operating budget, and recruiting and training new agents typically taking up to 6 months and costing as much as $10,000 or more per person.

However, despite the clear focus on attrition and efforts made to retain agents in call centers worldwide, many studies (such as the recent reports from UK Contact Babel and Dimension Data) show that agents are leaving centers in ever greater numbers. Common explanations for this trend include relatively low salaries, increasing levels of stress at work and limited opportunities for career progress. No doubt, all these factors have a major impact on agent satisfaction, however they cannot be easily changed.

So what can be done to retain agents? There is, in fact, another way to drive agent satisfaction and retention – through agent empowerment practices. Various studies, such as the one conducted by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), indicate that agent empowerment in areas such as training, quality management and coaching practices, can lead to increased agent satisfaction, engagement and eventually retention. The idea is to allow agents to have more responsibility, involve them in more processes and provide them with more knowledge and better tools.  Do that, and they’ll be happier, more productive and more engaged—for longer—in their work.

Workforce optimization solutions provide a ready-made platform for agent empowerment practices, while still keeping managers in control. Sounds promising, but does it work? According to some NICE customers, yes, absolutely. Here’s what they’re doing to empower their agents:

• A leading financial services organization involves agents in the quality management process. The call center provides agents with personal dashboard, enables agent playback and self-evaluation of calls, peer-evaluations by experienced agents, and allows agents to review customer surveys that pertain to their interactions.
• A large healthcare organization enhances the agents’ training and coaching practices through a bi-directional, on-line coaching process that provides them with the most relevant information tailored for their individual needs. The coaching uses rich content – real examples of calls, evaluations and quizzes, and allows agents to be part of the overall process, as they can send their ideas and insights back to their managers or the training team.
• Companies are also starting to look into the emerging and exciting capabilities offered by real-time guidance tools.  These tools provide agents with information based on the actual call flow and a simple, fast access to relevant data with which they can quickly resolve issues.

Following the adoption of these agent empowerment practices, each of the companies cited above made noticeable gains in agent satisfaction and retention.

Most people like to feel valued. And most workers prefer a career to a dead-end job. Empower your call center agents with knowledge and responsibility and they’ll likely stay with your center longer, and feel more invested in its results. Give it a try!