Insight from Interactions

There are days when you’re truly amazed by stories in the media. For me, October 16 was one of those days. That’s when I heard about a government agency, Medicare Australia, requiring its call center reps to limit each toilet break to three minutes and to record the length of time spent in the bathroom. Apparently (according to the report), some managers even followed staff into the restroom to “hurry them along,” seeking to enforce schedule compliance rules requiring CSRs to spend at least 92 percent of their time on the phone.

After a newspaper investigation started, Medicare Australia prudently abandoned the policy. Certainly, its 92 percent schedule adherence goal was reasonable, allowing a full-time worker to be out of adherence 3 hours and 12 minutes per week. But requiring workers to log reports of their, ahem, private time and chasing them out of restrooms is going too far. Call center managers shouldn’t care how reps spend their non-compliance time as long as they meet their goals.

At issue has always been the non-inbound-call work that has been difficult to track with traditional schedule adherence reporting and real-time schedule adherence software. Things like paperwork, meetings and, yes, bathroom breaks—anything an automatic call dialer (ACD) can’t account for—can present a challenge to schedule compliance efforts. Add to that the fact that call centers are now managing more than just inbound calls. Some reps now handle outbound calls, emails, faxes and postal mail. Many more also handle instant messaging and text messaging, and a just-published NICE contact center benchmark report forecasts that these channels will grow more than 100 percent in 2010.

Not surprisingly, workforce management (WFM) vendors are supporting multi-channel schedule adherence to be able to track more than just adherence to ACD states.  You can now track schedule adherence for agents handling outbound calls, emails, instant and text messages, and using desktop applications.  These advances in schedule adherence can yield greater visibility to how CSRs are using their time…without invading their bathroom privacy.

Let me know what you think about these trends and if your contact center is measuring schedule adherence across multiple channels today.

The “digital age”… It sounds so advanced, even though for the most part customer service organizations entered it years ago when we started taking emails from customers. The interesting thing to me is how it’s stagnated since then. Sure, we’ve played around with chat a bit, but is that really a value-add? Not for me.

The point is, people differ in how they want to communicate with businesses. Some prefer phone, while others favor email (like myself). As today’s younger generation matures into mainstream consumers in the “digital age,” what type of communication preferences will they have? Based on what I see, texting is a definite possibility.

According to NICE’s contact center benchmark report, many call center managers agree with that. When asked about which new contact channels they plan to support by 2011, instant- and text-messaging were clearly top priorities.

Being an email-first kind of guy, I remember how frustrating it was when that channel was first opening up. Lack of response, hard to find addresses, no receipt confirmation. Let’s not make those same mistakes when the new wave of digital contact channels rolls out.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on communicating with customers over digital channels. What are your company’s plans for supporting IP- and Web-based contact channels (other than phone and email)? Do you really see value in offering them? What pitfalls do you expect to occur?

Ask three different call center veterans what QM stands for, and you’re likely to get three different answers. Over the years I have heard several definitions of QM. Here are a few: Quality Monitoring, Quality Measuring and Quality Management. Which is it?

To me, it can be all three, depending on call center goals and maturity. Here’s what I mean:

Quality Monitoring refers to the playback and evaluation of call center interactions for the purpose of agent improvement and business process verification. The question is, what do we do after we evaluate? I often see call centers evaluating interactions with no follow through to gain insights on these evaluations.

Quality Measurement takes monitoring to the next level. This flavor of QM adds to quality monitoring the tools for measuring quality trends and assessing quality improvement over time via reports.

Quality Management: Here, we have the complete process of managing quality in call centers. This QM expands on quality measurement by introducing capabilities for setting targets (how many and which calls to evaluate), providing tools and methodologies for taking actions based on measurement outcomes (coaching, e-learning) and incorporating supervision tools to help ensure that the QM process is running smoothly and in a consistent manner (Web portal, Calibrations).

But wait—QM is being extended once again! I recently visited a call center where QM has a little longer title: Quality Management by Objective or QMBO. Using speech analytics and performance management technology, evaluators automatically focus on the interactions that affect the company’s key business objectives (e.g. first call resolution, customer satisfaction), and utilizing a KPI dashboard, are always made aware of the impact that their quality program has on their company’s objective. I’m not sure if there’s an M-word that can sum all that up but it’s clear that the future of QM is here.

As long as you are closing the loop in your QM process, it doesn’t matter how you call it!

Do you have a different definition for QM? Share your thoughts.

I’ll start with one of mine: QM = Quality Micromanagement…

One of the most exciting projects that I am working on right now is the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) draft for the standardization of session recording interfaces. The main idea behind this work is to take the opportunity – while almost all major telephony vendors are working on session initiation protocol (SIP)-based recording interfaces for their new SIP-based voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony systems – to create an interoperable standard for call recording.

Currently, the lack of standard call recording protocol limits the adoption of IP telephony in enterprises. There are many existing proprietary, non-interoperable protocols; migrating them to an interoperable standard will serve the interests of vendors and customers alike. Not surprisingly, then, the authors of this standardization draft are leading architects from all major telephony vendors, including Acme Packets, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, IPC, Siemens, and of course NICE.

In one or two years from now, most requests for proposals (RFPs) will include demands from clients to comply with the Session Recording Protocol standard. Is there a down side?

Let me know what’s your view on this.