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EPM and the Contact Center
Contact center performance management aligns the tactical and strategic goals of the contact center with corporate objectives. Performance management is intended to broaden the focus of the contact center from strictly departmental goals to an enterprise-oriented set of objectives that includes sales, marketing the executive suite. It provides tools, processes and a means for sharing reactive and time-sensitive, essential customer information with the rest of the company. It also provides automated data collection and reporting technology and processes that free up contact center managers to work toward achieving corporate goals.
Contact Center Performance Management Functional Components
Contact center performance management has five major functional components. The components are:
- Scorecards: Reports that focus on measuring adherence to a given set of goals or key performance indicators (KPIs). Contact centers typically produce scorecards to measure agent, departmental, site and contact center performance. Scorecards are intended to include a comprehensive set of KPIs that reflect individual and departmental performance. The data reflected in scorecards is collected from many systems, including the contact center (ACD), quality management, customer surveys and sales. This allows the contact center to address its own productivity and quality needs and to assess how well it's delivering toward corporate sales goals.
- Dashboards: Measures of individual, group or departmental performance, customized to each user's needs. The data reflected in dashboards is increasingly real-time, allowing organizations to identify issues quickly and take action immediately.
- Analytics: A tool that creates a three-dimensional view of the data to be used in identifying customer trends and patterns.
- Reporting: Standard and ad hoc reporting capabilities.
- Action Engine: A system to automatically identify and take action to optimize an opportunity or remedy a problem.
Reports are becoming standardized and scorecards are increasingly common. Dashboards are now offered by many types of vendors, but the effective ones allow contact center managers to identify and address problems and opportunities in real or near-real time. Companies that want to differentiate themselves are going beyond these basics. They are using analytics in cooperation with marketing and investing in real-time products that allow their agents to take action in real time or near-real time.
Benefits of Performance Management
Performance management provides tools and processes for gathering, analyzing and presenting customer data to decision makers who are positioned to take appropriate action. When used properly, the performance management application gathers data from the contact center, sales, marketing, credit, operations and other departments that impact customers. It then analyzes the data and allows decision makers in the contact center and through out the corporation to take steps that will benefit customers. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Contact Center Performance Management Benefits
Building a Successful Program
To succeed, contact centers must address tactical and strategic issues. From a tactical perspective, contact center managers must identify appropriate KPIs or metrics for all of the departments that they impact. These include sales, marketing, operations and finance, in addition to the contact center itself. It's important to ask for the participation of all enterprise constituents during the definitional stage. While it will slow down this early phase of the project, it will increase the program's chances of success in the long-term, as department managers throughout the company will have a voice in the process. Once the KPIs are identified, the next phase involves identifying all appropriate feeder systems and integrating them into the performance management application.
Senior decision makers also need to be brought on board with these efforts. Contact center managers need to reach out to peers and executives in other operating areas to ask for their support with this initiative.
Performance Management Readiness Checklist
Performance management will make valuable contributions to your corporation, but success requires a great deal of change within your contact center as well as the cooperation of external departments. The checklist below will help you see how beneficial performance management can be for your company.
Performance management is essential for all contact centers - service, sales, inside sales, collections, fraud, help desk, human resources, consumer affairs, etc. It automates tasks that are currently manual in many organizations and establishes a formal framework for sharing customer information with constituents throughout the company. Contact centers need performance management in order to become essential contributors to corporate productivity and revenue goals.
Donna Fluss, principal of DMG Consulting LLC, is the author of The Real-Time Contact Center, published in August 2005. Contact Ms. Fluss at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com.
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