Know Your Customers ... And Your Agents

Formerly seen as a profit drain, call centers are starting to get the respect they deserve. In recent years companies have realized the connection between their call centers and the customer experience. As a result, executives are taking steps to ensure their call centers are properly equipped to satisfy customers. Some of the technologies helping to meet these requirements are quality monitoring and e-learning tools. These tools enable call center managers to capture customer data, identify things such as product flaws and competitors' products, and assess the overall customer experience with the company. Additionally, this data can be used to teach call center agents how to properly interact with customers.

What's Driving Call Center Technology?
Over the past five years, there has been an evolution of call center technology from random sampling of calls to total call monitoring. Lou Boudreau, CTO of call center software vendor Verint Systems Inc. (Woodbury, NY), describes the events leading up to the present: "Initially, companies became interested in measuring agent performance, then they became interested in customers' interactions with the company, and today the emphasis is on the overall customer experience."

Two factors drive this. First, it is much cheaper to keep the customers you have versus trying to find new customers. So, rather than waiting until customers have left to make amends, businesses are being proactive. The second factor is the high turnover many call centers face - averaging 30% to 40%. Additionally, many call center agents work part-time, which makes off-shift scheduling difficult.

From Random Sampling To Total Call Monitoring
Just three to five years ago the trend in call centers was to randomly capture about 2% of the calls that came into the call center and dedicate a person to listening to the samplings to try to spot weaknesses in agent performance. "The trend is to record all calls and put data in a data warehouse," says Roger Woolley, VP of marketing for e-Talk Corp. (Irving, TX), a contact center solution provider. "And, instead of having someone listen to entire tapes of conversations, word spotting tools are used to search through the data and detect key words and phrases." For instance, a call center may choose to search its database for all calls that include words such as "unhappy" or "disappointed," and they can retrieve those conversations to hear the context in which the words were used. In some instances, this technology can be used to monitor calls and take action while the call is in progress. If, for example, a customer's tone becomes agitated and angry or if curse words are used, an alert may be sent to a call center manager to listen to the call and coach the agent with screen prompts or have the agent transfer the call.

Quality Monitoring, E-Learning Go Hand In Hand
Besides using quality monitoring tools to train call center agents and to intervene in heated calls before the customer slams down the phone, these tools are being used to help business executives. For example, all calls that mention a competitor's name can be forwarded to specific executives who can learn about their competitors. For call center agents, however, the process is a bit more complex. That is where e-learning tools come into play. "E-Learning tools can be integrated with ACD [automatic call distribution] switches to automatically coordinate the best timing for agent training," says Jackie Wiedner, director of product marketing for NICE Systems (Rutherford, NJ), a vendor specializing in multimedia digital recording solutions. "If an agent is strong in product knowledge but has difficulty diffusing angry customers, he may get interactive training sent directly to his desktop. The training would include an actual recorded example of how another agent was able to successfully calm an angry customer." Not only are e-learning tools able to provide a high level of individualized training for call center agents, they also can be used to find out whether training has yielded quality improvements. For instance, following an audio clip of another agent interacting with an angry customer, the agent may be asked to take a quiz and identify key points that made the other agent's conversation effective. By comparing quality rating reports among agents before and after training, benchmarks can be established to determine whether a further training session is needed.

The Next Step In Call Center Evolution: VoIP
One of the drawbacks with adding technology to the call center is that companies need IT administrators who support data as well as voice technology. VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) technology is starting to change that by enabling companies to use dedicated data lines (e.g. T1 connections) for incoming and outbound calls. Because this technology uses Internet protocol, it is more easily integrated with enterprise applications such as CRM (customer relationship management), which helps enterprises have a more complete view of their customers. The other benefit VoIP offers is significantly reduced telecommunications costs. It also presents other opportunities. "Companies are no longer restricted to staffing their call centers with local agents," says Woolley. "They may opt to use a call center in India as an overflow center by transferring calls over the IP network." This technology is still in its infancy, however, and is just recently starting to climb the adoption curve. Problems such as one-way delays and data loss for VoIP traffic have been problems for some businesses. Hardware fixes such as QoS (quality of service) boxes, which are able to prioritize data across a network (and to give voice data top priority), are helping alleviate some of these problems. According to Woolley, we will see more companies adopt VoIP within the next 24 months as the technology evolves.

Being able to capture all calls coming into the call center and apply quality monitoring and e-learning tools to capture and share that information with top executives, salespeople, and call center agents is proving invaluable. Whether you're trying to retain existing customers or acquire new customers, quality monitoring and e-learning tools have to be at the forefront of your business plan.