Use more part-time agents. I find it surprising that, according to a survey of contact center managers conducted by the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP), nearly half (45%) of contact centers use few or no part-time agents. Specifically, their survey results show that 17% of respondents do not use part-time agents at all and 28% employ only 1 to 10% of their staff on a part-time basis.  Staffing contact centers with up to 25% part-time agents can deliver schedule flexibility and staffing cost savings over using full-time agents alone. By creating flexible schedules for part-time agents you can eliminate most overstaffing and, in many cases, improve customer service during peak intervals as well.

Offer voluntary time off (VTO). Enabling part- and full-time agents to volunteer for time off without pay is a great way to provide the best service at the lowest cost.  Because it is voluntary, the agents that sign up for it actually want the time off instead of the pay, so it can help improve employee satisfaction for a portion of your contact center staff. Plus, it can shave costs off the bottom line. SWPP 2007 Workforce Management Professional of the Year Kim Newkirk (Henderson) of Bluegreen Corporation launched a VTO program for her business, cutting $215,265 in payroll costs and eliminating 17,360 hours during off-peak periods.    

Of course, there are some prerequisites to making VTO work.  You need to have intraday managers who have the time and workforce management tools to determine overstaffing conditions.  You also need change management capabilities, including the means to communicate the program effectively to supervisors and agents. And once the program is in place, it requires ongoing communication regarding time-off slots available, time-off granted, schedule changes and more. There are a lot of moving parts. The good news is that leading workforce management systems can help you automate some or all of this communication between the workforce management team and the agents and their supervisors. 

While employing more part-time agents and VTO initiatives will take some time and effort, the rewards can be great.  If you are faced with layoffs, these programs can help retain a larger workforce because many agents would be willing to work fewer hours if it meant that they could keep their jobs.  These programs also can save the investments you have already made in those individuals.  Then, when the economy turns around, you can easily increase hours without incurring significant hiring and training costs.  In the meantime, you will save your company money while improving customer satisfaction:  a win-win-win, and a way to break away from the cutback mentality.

Companies interact with their customers across an expanding and increasingly complicated landscape. It can be chaotic, to be sure—but there’s an upside. More interactions and more channels across which these interactions can unfold more opportunities to forge strong customer bonds, maximize profits and create lasting competitive differentiation. The key is understanding and optimizing the dynamics—the Customer Dynamics—they represent.

Customer Dynamics  is an exciting concept that describes the ongoing, complex interchange between businesses and customers occurring across all customer touchpoints (phone, chat, email, etc.). By optimizing Customer Dynamics, organizations can have both happy and loyal customers and be highly efficient and profitable.

Today NICE announced  a new methodology and tools with which companies can generate tangible business value through Customer Dynamics optimization. This systematic methodology works in conjunction with our NICE SmartCenter suite. We’ll get into the details in upcoming posts. But the basic idea is straightforward.

We help you take charge of the complex interactions you have with your customers by capturing intent (with our multi-channel interaction recording platform), analyzing intent to rapidly reveal meaningful insights (with cross-channel interaction analytics), and then taking decisive actions to impact your business performance (with our new Real-Time Guidance offering and additional solutions). From intent to insight to impact, NICE offers companies a way to understand exactly what’s going on in all those interactions, to see patterns in the chaos, to glean insights and, finally, to act and make a difference for your business.

Which customers call your contact center most frequently and why? How do customers who use self-service channels differ from those who call you? What are customers saying about your competitors? How are customers reacting to your latest marketing campaign? What revenue opportunities are you missing? What is driving customer dissatisfaction? Who are your best-performing agents? How can you promote best practices and enforce procedures across your workforce? Where are your opportunities to reduce handle time? What if you had the answers to all these questions and more?

Customer Dynamics optimization is a new and exciting concept we look forward to discussing with you in the coming weeks and beyond. In the meantime, we want to hear what you have to say. Post a comment. Let us know: How would you have handled a customer situation differently had you understood the true intent of the customer? What insights have you always wished you could extract from customer interactions? What impact do you think Customer Dynamics optimization can have on your company?

Hear the voice of the customer. The best way to know a call is a repeat call is to listen to what customers tell you. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that, when a customer says “I called yesterday,” or “this is the second time I’m calling,” you have a repeat call. All it takes is good speech analytics  software. This is the best way to avoid false negatives, and identify repeat calls regardless of the caller ID used in each case.  

Identify the customer, not the phone number.  What about repeat calls in which customers do not mention they already called? To cover these, rather than using caller ID, look for customer ID or, even better, problem or ticket ID. The best way to identify these is to peek at the agent desktop. Agents typically use a CRM application that shows the customer ID, account number or ticket number. This data may be “scraped” from the agent screen and associated with the archived customer call such that it can subsequently be used to identify repeat calls.

Measure first contact resolution, not first call resolution. Do you allow your customers to contact you via email? How about online chat? If you do any of those, you must measure first contact resolution across the different channels. A customer might send an email to address an issue, and follow up with a phone call if the issue is not resolved. Make sure you get a holistic view of the customer experience across all touch points, and that your agents truly do resolve customer issues the first time, every time.

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.

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.

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!

The ability to virtualize hardware and applications isn’t all that new—in fact, it’s been around since the late 1960s. But it seems that an increasing number of organizations are moving their infrastructure onto virtualized platforms. VMware’s Vsphere 4 is a good example. It was released about a year ago, but at first customers chose to keep it in their labs while still running their legacy production environments. However, in the last few months, we see more organizations moving their production environments to virtualized platforms, primarily due to significant performance benefits.

Virtualization presents a new opportunity for vendors to offer considerable cost savings and much greater system availability to customers. At NICE, we are working hand-in-hand with virtualization vendors such as Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware to test our specific components, and draft resource requirements and detailed deployments guidelines for virtual machines. Customers greet these developments with much enthusiasm. I believe we are just at the beginning of the virtualization age, which will spread much deeper into the call center and trading floor market, and will eventually transform the way datacenters are deployed and managed. It will be quite a sight to behold.

Happy with my final selection, I went to purchase the TV, only to find a bunch of other costs completely neglected during the selection process. Basic service, subscription to my cable provider’s HD service, upgrade to my audio system.… My budget was quickly surpassed. And that was a simple commodity purchase. When it comes to companies purchasing an enterprise-grade call recording system, it’s no surprise to find 100+ page RFPs, covering the bits and bytes of every technical and functional component. Yet I ask, have you considered the entire big picture? Or was the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) cliché brushed aside in favor of getting the best price today?

When it comes to call recording systems, there are many soft or hidden ownership costs that, if neglected, will lead to greater IT costs or unmet business requirements down the road. These can include server-related costs such as maintenance, power, cooling and floor space; the IT personnel needed to manage your call recording system; future needs for higher-capacity recording or changing telephony technology and architecture design, to name a few.

Industry best practices suggest that there are five key initiatives that can lower the TCO of IT systems:

• Standardization – imposing a standard, consistent operating environment and procedures for infrastructure resources
• Centralization – concentrating servers, data, applications and other infrastructure resources within a single location or a single point of access
• Consolidation – merging multiple infrastructure resources such as servers, storage, applications and databases into fewer systems
• Virtualization – running multiple physical resources such as servers or storage devices on a single, physical resource as virtual services
• Downtime Minimization – reducing costs associated with restoring IT services after failure, lost revenue and lost employee productivity due to outages

If a call recording system you’re considering can enable even one of these capabilities—for example, if it enables you to record calls across branch locations from one central server—the big-picture cost over the life of that system may be substantially lower than the price tag might suggest.

In the recently published paper “Reducing TCO of Call Recording Systems”, we elaborate on applying these five concepts. The conclusion? When comparing two systems, don’t settle for the easy-to-measure metrics that apply only to your recording environment as it is today. Try as much as possible to explore the less tangible cost factors and how the capabilities of the system you purchase impact your IT ecosystem over time. Whether it’s a TV or a call recording system, the results might surprise you.

• Credit and debit card fraud reached $7.82 billion worldwide in 2006 and is expected to climb to $15.3 billion by the end of 2009. (Frost & Sullivan)
• Loss or theft of personal and financial information is the number-one concern among consumers worldwide (64%), surpassing terrorism, job loss, disease epidemics and natural disasters. (Visa survey)

PCI DSS and call centers to the rescue

Knowing this, banks have taken action. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB each began programs to protect card security, sowing the seeds of what would become the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Each company’s intentions were similar: to create an additional level of protection for card issuers by ensuring that merchants meet minimum levels of security when they store, process and transmit cardholder data. In September 2006, the PCI Security Standards Council was formed as an open global forum for the ongoing development, enhancement, storage, dissemination and implementation of security standards for account data protection. As of September 2009, more than 600 organizations participate worldwide. 

At its core, PCI DSS is comprised of the “Digital Dozen,” six goals and twelve requirements that revolve around maintaining a secure environment for cardholder data, restricting access to data stored there and ongoing monitoring to ensure this environment has not been breached. If you examine the Digital Dozen, you can see the important role that call centers play in PCI DSS. From protecting cardholder data, to restricting access and constantly monitoring who is accessing it, the contact center can be considered one of the main gatekeepers for credit card security.

Having been the victim of credit card fraud, I take some comfort in the idea that companies—particularly their call centers—are working to protect me. And personally, I’d be more inclined to do business with a company that is taking PCI DSS seriously, as part of its responsibility, not only to credit issuers but to customers.

What measures is your call center taking to comply with PCI DSS?