WORKFLEX SOLUTIONS WHITEPAPER
TRANSFORMING CALL CENTER
ADMINISTRATION THOUGH PROACTIVE
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
LEVERAGE THE POWER OF AUTOMATED
DECISIONING AND COMMUNICATIONS TO DRIVE
SUPE-RIOR PERFORMANCE
In today’s call center environment a tremendous amount of agent and system perfor-mance information is being continually captured. Call center administrators depend on this information to identify and address performance issues. Most large scale call center operators track a multitude of Key Performance Metrics (KPM’s) including Aver-age Handle Time (AHT), After Call Work (ACW) Cost per Contact (CPC), Customer Satisfac-tion (CSAT), Forecast Accuracy (FCST), Occupancy (OCC) and Schedule Adherence (SAD). Call Center Administrators establish target performance ranges for KPM’s and analyze actu-als versus targets to determine if corrective actions need to be taken. Analyzing all of this information is complex and time consuming, making it a constant challenge to determine and communicate what corrective actions need to be taken in a timely manner.
This white paper explores how automation of intraday data analysis, decisioning and communications can fundamentally shift the performance management paradigm in the call center from reactive to proactive, significantly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of agent and system performance.
The Call Center Performance
Management Challenge
Call Center Administrators face a number of performance management challenges in a call center environment
1. KPM Complexity
There are a multitude of call center KPM’s that are typi-cally captured by workforce administration systems rang-ing from Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems to Workforce Management (WFM) systems. These KPM’s are not always captured at the same frequency or main-tained in the same databases, making it difficult for ad-ministrators to capture a single consistent view of their operations. Additionally many of these KPI’s tend to work against each other. Placing an emphasis on one KPI may negatively impact another. For example, driving high oc-cupancy (OCC) is good from a cost perspective, because it indicates that agents are very busy handling calls; how-ever high OCC can burn out agents, negatively impact-ing other key metrics like schedule adherence (by drivimpact-ing higher absenteeism) and lowering CSAT. These KPM cross-impacts make analysis and decisioning complex and time consuming for workforce administrators.
2. Timely Communication
A second challenge for call center administrators is in communicating the right information to the right people at the right time. It would be far more advantageous for example, to notify an agent at 11:55am that their lunch break is coming up in 5 minutes and not to take another call as opposed to telling an agent at 12:35pm that he/ she needed to have started their lunch break at noon. Ad-ditionally, the impact of coaching from a team leader for an agent struggling with AHT for certain call types is far more impactful if the discussion happens within minutes of the call conclusion as opposed to days later.
3. Prioritizing Actions
A third challenge for workforce administrators is decid-ing which issues should be acted upon first. It is very difficult for a workforce administrator who is taking ac-tion to resolve one issue to simultaneously take acac-tions on other issues that may be happening concurrently. As a result, there may be delays in identifying and address-ing some issues and other issues may not be addressed at all.
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The Solution – Automation of Decisioning
and Communication
When you analyze the work of intraday workforce admin-istrators, the majority of their time is typically consumed with three key activities
- Monitoring of KPI’s and identifying issues - Determination of recommended actions to take - Effectively communicating recommended actions
to the right people in a timely fashion
Because administrators are generally looking at KPM’s in a consistent way and often have a predefined response based on past experience, it is possible to automate the monitoring and real-time analysis of these KPI’s and de-velop a set of recommendations based on a set of policies or “business rules” that the administrator can define in ad-vance.
For example if the KPM for a certain agents After Call Work (ACW) should be 90 seconds or less, and the sys-tem detects two or more times in a shift where ACW for an agent is 5 minutes or more, this may be an indication that the agent is using ACW to avoid taking the next call, especially if OCC is high for the day. An automated system could be configured to notify the agent that they have exceeded the standard ACW KPM two times today. Another automated action could be to notify the agent’s supervisor of the ACW adherence issue so that they can talk to the agent.
By implementing a flexible communication mechanism, agents, supervisors and administrators can be contacted using the most effective communication channels. If an agent is working in the call center with no access to email or a cell phone, a screen pop is the most effective commu-nication mechanism. For a team leader walking the floor a SMS message might make the most sense. A workforce administrator may wish to be notified via e-mail. A key to ensuring that the right people get the right message at the right time is to take their contact needs/preferences into consideration.
Dynamic Shifting of Call Volumes
It is very typical for Service Providers to manage the direc-tion of call volume among internal and vendor centers. A standard practice has been to provide a certain amount of predetermined volume across internal centers and then to direct variable traffic to suppliers based on forecasts that they have been internally developed and reflected in con-tacts.
As the burden for forecast accuracy has shifted from Ser-vice Provider to Vendor however, SerSer-vice Providers have an incentive to direct their variable traffic to their best performing vendors. If the best performing vendors can handle more volume they will get more volume, while poorer performing vendors stand to get less volume until they improve their service levels.
Proactive Performance Management
Examples
The following are three examples of how Automated De-cisioning and Communication can be used to drive supe-rior performance and agent satisfaction in the call center.
PPM Example 1 – Correlating KPM’s with Productiv-ity Tool Utilization to Improve Performance
Some call center operators are introducing speech-to-text (STT) technology in the call center which can reduce AHT and ACW by enabling agents to talk instead of type. Productivity improvements realized through STT technology can be 10% or more. However since STT is not required to actually handle a call (an agent can still type), it is may be a challenge to ensure that agents are tak-ing advantage of the capabilities of STT technology. By automatically correlating agents with High AHT/ACW and low utilization of STT, messages can be automatically generated to team leads, identifying “high ROI” coaching opportunities.
PPM Example 2 – Improving On-Line Training Effectiveness
By leveraging desktop training technologies, call center operators can take advantage of low occupancy times to push training to agents, converting non-productive idle time into productive idle time and reducing shrinkage due to classroom training. The effectiveness of online training can be improved by automatically monitoring key KPM’s and automatically selecting the online training modules for agents that will best address their specific needs. Af-ter an agent has taken AHT training, they could receive screen pop messages thanking them for completing the training and congratulating them on achieving a post-training improvement in their AHT of X%.
PPM Example 3 – Implementing an Agent-Empow-ered Agent Bonus Program
Many companies offer bonuses to agents that achieve superior performance based on their KPM’s. However agents sometime do not have the visibility to know which of their metrics need improvement in order for them to earn a bonus.. An automated decisioning and communica-tion system could be used to provide agents with current information so that they know exactly where they need to improve. This same information could be sent to supervi-sors to enable them to provide focused coaching with the objective of helping their agents achieve bonus.
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Summary
Performance Management in Call Centers can be a chal-lenge for Workforce Administrators from a complexity, communication timeliness, and real-time prioritization perspective. Automation of performance management monitoring, decisioning and communications can help address these issues and drive improved intraday perfor-mance at a lower cost.
The base ingredients to achieving dynamic scheduling flexibility include:
• Capturing information related to agent availabil-ity and means of being reached
• Providing wage premiums for “on-call agents” • Automation of the business processes to identify,
and reach the optimal set of “on-call” agents An optional consideration would be to consider equip-ping agents with work-at-home capability which can in-crease the acceptance rate for agents being called, and re-duce delays in getting on-call agents logged in.
About WorkFlex™
WorkFlex is a venture-backed, Cincinnati-based software company focused on workforce optimization solutions. Founded in 2009, WorkFlex products are de-ployed to major service providers and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) within Canada and the United States.
About the Author
Larry Schwartz is Chairman and CEO of WorkFlex Solutions. Mr. Schwartz has 25 Years of Executive Management Experience in Large-Scale Operational Streamlining, Enterprise-Grade Software Development, Strategic Planning, Business Transformation, and Outsourced Services including Contact Centers.
