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Making better informed decisions to improve the effectiveness of the contact centre

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4^th November 2009

Making better informed decisions to improve the effectiveness of the contact centre

By Jason Sparks, Commercial Director, ProtoCall One

Since the dawn of the call centre in 1956 in the US, they have been playing a larger part in our lives and have become gradually and inextricably linked to the success of many businesses. By 1972, 40 per cent of UK households had a phone and this doubled to 80 per cent by 1984. By this date virtually all businesses had a telephone and call volumes rose rapidly. Many of these call centres, initially inside insurance and banking businesses, needed to direct calls effectively around their organisations to ensure that customers were answered promptly by someone with the right level of skills and knowledge to help.

The Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) was born. Over time, ACDs were overlaid with skills-based routing solutions and evolved into the sophisticated switches which they are today, providing masses of data about agent activity such as how many calls each agent has handled per hour, 'average handling times' and percentages of 'abandoned' outbound calls. These productivity measures can be viewed in real-time or reviewed over a period of time by call centre operations teams to spot trends which might help them organise their agents better.

This switch data is often overlaid with Workforce Management (WFM) systems which provide a suite of tools for manager, supervisor and agent-level shift scheduling and workload forecasting as well as self-service tools to help agents manage their own shift and holiday requirements. WFM systems understandably provide lots of data for analysis by operations teams.

But what are call centres for but to help improve the service that customers are getting with a view to them buying more from them and staying loyal? To this end, call centres were enthusiastic early adopters of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. CRM systems brought together customer data which was largely held in separate divisional database 'silos' by product line purchased (e.g. in the case of a general insurer - pet insurance, household, motor, travel etc). Suddenly with CRM systems it became possible to gather a 'single view' of the customer based on all the history that a customer had with that company. Managers could see which customers were most valuable and should be offered special treatment and which were ripe for cross or up selling.

CRM systems today help deliver the single 'unified desktop' view of the customer to agents so they can act on this information. But CRM systems also generate masses of data which can be used to plan, implement and evaluate marketing campaigns, prioritise sales leads and manage customer contacts better, if this data can be unlocked and presented in the right way to the right managers .

Call centres have, in the last 10 years, also been evolving into multi-channel contact centres. Although we are still in the early adoption stage of multi-channel communications it is clear that contact centre agents must re-organise themselves to respond efficiently to customers, regardless of whether they choose to reach them by text, email, letter, phone or engage in a web chat for a more technical enquiry. That unified desktop just got a whole lot more complicated!

Then there are the proliferation of departments within an organisation that are taking a keener interest in what goes on inside the contact centre as they seek to monitor and deliver their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to keep driving the business forward. Some of the more obvious ones are marketing and sales management. But what about insurance claims departments or, in the case of regulated industries such as financial services, compliance departments? Increasingly industry regulation demands call recording solutions. As greater scrutiny and efficiency is demanded of businesses more and more systems are being put in to provide that scrutiny and monitor productivity. New systems mean new data feeds to cross tabulate and analyse.

As more is demanded of the contact centre by more managers across the business, Management Information (MI) departments have sprung up to find and present all this data that these managers need. MI analysts today are often supported by complex Business Intelligence (BI) solutions which help extract relevant data from multiple databases and present it in spreadsheets. But the Extract, Transfer and Load (ETL) processes that traditional BI systems carry out provide one time, static, snapshot views and can take weeks to produce. Requests to delve deeper or feed in another set of figures often mean that the analyst must manually rewrite a report or construct a new BI query.

Are you struggling to get to the data that they need to understand how your contact centre is really performing? Are you tired of having to work with expensive MI consultants (or in-house teams making large, per query, inter-departmental charges) to define new parameters of analysis in order to get a different view into the contact centre's performance?

Managers increasingly are looking for much more dynamic, real-time views into the contact centre and they want to monitor agents' progress against their specific KPIs and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on an ongoing basis. To this end a new breed of Decision Management solutions are now emerging, led by ProtoCall One's 'OneView'. This offers all managers across the business the ability to gain access to multiple data feeds quickly and present these in personalised, dashboard-style views on their desktops.

So if the finance director wants to look at the gross profit margin per agent for that day, week, month or year this becomes possible within minutes rather than days. If the motor insurance product line manager wants to check the value of motor insurance sales generated by the contact centre this month, this can be delivered in minutes once the data feeds are in place. If the marketing manager wants to check whether the latest campaign has led to an uptick of inbound sales enquiries or an increase in cross selling conversions to sale, then this too is possible.

ProtoCall One is already working with several large enterprises to help them organise their databases in a way in which it is possible to deliver this OneView power to multiple department heads. Part of our engagement is to help firms tease out what they are trying to achieve from getting a better grip on their data. Different departments want different things but there are also core requirements like improving the customer experience, increasing sales, reducing customer churn and creating brand loyalty, that tend to be common to many parts of the business from the CEO downwards.

The benefit of delivering this level of transparency across the business is that the value which contact centre agents are delivering to meet specific and collective goals is clearer to all. It can also provide more reliable and timely intelligence which ensures that operational changes being made by contact centre operations teams are good ones which genuinely improve agent effectiveness and take the business forward at the same time.


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