December 2000

BY JACKIE WIEDNER

Contact centers are under relentless pressure to improve productivity and make significant contributions to the enterprise's bottom line. As contact centers are placed front and center in the battle for customer loyalty, hardware and software investments multiply in the hope of providing that much-needed competitive edge. The result is contact centers awash in reports and data, but no closer to the clear, succinct answers managers need to improve performance, achieve business goals, and deliver superior customer service. How can we truly manage the complete customer experience if we can't get a handle on our customer data?

Advancements in technology play an integral role in the fast-emerging business strategy known as customer experience management (CEM). CEM provides solutions by which organizations can capture, evaluate, analyze, and improve their customer's experiences with a company. A call recording element captures all the calls to the center. Advanced query functions allow users to evaluate and analyze exactly what is wrong, why it happened, and how to fix it. CEM gives managers the business intelligence and capabilities to truly improve the way they do business and ultimately the customer experience. An essential element to a CEM solution is "follow the call" capability that allows tracking of the customer through the entire call, from the time spent in queue to being placed on hold or transferred. With this capability, agents can "see" what has happened to a customer from the time they enter your contact center to the time they hang up.

Data Becomes Knowledge
New data mining and data analysis applications are enabling contact centers to transform their wealth of customer interaction data into powerful, actionable knowledge. Web-based access to this data offers another advantage, as it provides the most efficient means to make this information available throughout the enterprise and from any location.

While crunching and querying data provides insight, getting to why certain activity takes place in the contact center can still be a challenge. Once the data is analyzed and specific call segments are identified, there is tremendous benefit in providing links to actual call recordings of the customer interaction associated with contact center data.

Until recently, call recording and data mining functions were completely separate. With newer solutions, the data mining application can be fully integrated with call monitoring and recording to provide contact centers with a comprehensive analytical tool that goes far beyond  standard reporting. These tools enable contact center managers and supervisors, as well as senior executives, to cut through all the data clutter so they can hear and truly understand why certain activity in the contact center occurs.

What Do You Need To Know Today?
By taking call data from an automatic call distributor (ACD) and combining it with recordings of those interactions, managers can truly understand what drives their call statistics. And, most importantly, they can obtain a cradle-to-grave view of the customer's call. In practical contact center terms, managers will be able to listen to calls to understand exactly what is behind the data. For example:

• Why are customers placed on hold?
• How many callers abandoned after holding for more than 2 minutes?
• Why were customers transferred more than once, and where were they transferred?
• Why did call volume double between 1 and 2 PM? What were these calls about?
• What are the causes of excessively long calls? What were these calls about?
• Who called from cellular phones? Prisons? Hotels? What are these calls about?
• Are my best customers getting the very best service?

How It Works
Advanced data mining and analysis tools can tap detailed information about your customer interactions from call management systems such as an ACD. In the near future, these tools will also allow users to easily share data across other external data sources. For instance, users with basic PC knowledge can export the desired data elements to other applications such as spreadsheets, databases, and word processors. For more advanced levels, developers can set up an XML data feed or link via ODBC.

Users can analyze data at the call level or a segment level, providing all information associated with a single call, regardless of the number of segments comprising that call. This enables a beginning-to-end assessment of the customer experience. Users can define favorite queries that are always there each time they log on. Managers can also define a standard set of queries available to all users.

Integrated data mining and analysis solutions can support a wide range of recording environments, including random recording, total recording, or selective recording solutions. Or, they can work in stand-alone mode, independent of recordings for detailed data analysis.

The robust combination of an analytical tool and a recording solution allows users to easily drill down to root-cause data, and then listen to all recordings that meet the profile queried. This unique blend of functionality gives managers all the information they need in order to know exactly what is happening in their contact center today, and every day.

Intelligence Benefits Business At Every Level
Advanced data mining and analysis, coupled with the actual recordings provides insights that benefit every level of the organization. You can:

• Increase customer loyalty by hearing the call from the customer's perspective as they are transferred, placed on hold, or as they abandon from hold, facilitating the identification of opportunities to improve processes affecting customer satisfaction.
• Improve agent performance by examining call data and recordings to identify coaching needs. For example, why does Susan transfer 10 percent of her calls to another department when the average is typically less than one percent?
• Identify root causes of excessive call duration, transfers, or hold times that impact productivity and the quality of the customer experience; listen to all calls of excessive length; and identify ways to increase your efficiencies.
• Improve decision-making with access to essential customer interaction data anywhere, anytime through a Web-based application.
• Easily resolve any potential claims or disputes by maintaining an exact record of all calls.
• Validate business policies and procedures by tracing the route of a call to examine whether the expected course of events matched the actual call path.

With a user-friendly browser interface, executives can view reports of a single customer's experience from start to finish, to understand what customers are calling about, and how they are handled. By clicking on sample recordings, executives can listen to what customers are saying about their products and services, hear the next new customer idea, or a request for products or services that aren't being offered.

Contact center managers can now clearly and comprehensively understand exactly what happens to the caller from the beginning to the end of the call, and determine reasons for call fluctuations or anomalies in their contact center statistics.

Supervisors can use the tool to coach agents in consistent call handling practices. They can easily see who needs training, gauge the effectiveness of the training, and determine who the most efficient agents are, and why.

Switch programmers will be able to utilize these tools to validate that business rules and processes are working as designed, analyze the value of call routing schemes, and determine if callers are being handled in an effective and productive manner.

Workforce management systems can use these expanded capabilities to help set schedules. By looking at both the talk time and the after call work time, schedulers can understand the total work required for a particular task and fine-tune their workforce schedules based on the detailed information yielded from advanced data mining and analysis.

Improving The Customer Experience
The advanced capabilities of these analytical tools, combined with interaction recording, represent a quantum leap from the old world when call statistics told just part of the complex customer experience story. We have evolved from a world in which a supervisor was restricted to a narrow view of agent performance, to a wider, unlimited universe that enables the intelligent review of business processes and the impact these processes have on the customers' experience.

Jackie Wiedner is director, Global Product Marketing, CEM Division of NICE Systems. NICE's Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions enable customer interaction centers to capture, evaluate, analyze and improve the customer experience in a wide range of communications including voice, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), e-mail, and Web interactions. The company develops and delivers solutions that enable the enterprise to build lasting customer loyalty and brand recognition by providing tools to listen and respond to customer needs. NICE CEM solutions bring the true decision-makers of an organization closer to customers and empower agents to become key assets in the business value chain.