Say it’s decided that customer satisfaction is the key focus. While every facet of the company will play an important role in the end customer’s satisfaction, each function or employee will have different responsibilities. Let’s break this down even further – specifically to the agents within the call center. How are you going to make sure they perform effectively?

Automated performance management solutions can draw on data from different sources across the contact center to provide a unified view of performance, while aligning the results with goals and other targeted business outcomes. These tools allow executives to set the strategic agenda using key performance indicators (KPIs), which they can align with the business strategy.  For example, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction, it might be advisable to have front line agents focus on customer empathy scores, following the script, and customer survey scores.  If agents meet these operational goals, the organization will accomplish its customer satisfaction objectives. Agents can also view personalized feedback that helps them track performance, and when needed, participate in automatically triggered coaching. The contact center is able to evaluate and improve individual agent performance, while guiding employees to work together to achieve broader objectives.

Here are some best practices for managing and maximizing your agents’ performance:

• Ensure that agents fully understand goals prior to the performance period. This ensures they focus on these metrics and are more likely to accomplish them.

• When choosing KPIs, make sure the KPIs drive the behavior you want to see. Choose KPIs that front-line agents and supervisors will understand and that are in support of your strategy.

• Set up your performance management system to automatically alert you when agent performance falls below target, which frees supervisors from having to sift through reports.

• When conducting performance reviews and coaching sessions, be sure the sessions are fully documented, so staff can go back and see the problem and plan for the resolution.

While many organizations realize the importance of optimizing performance of their contact center agents to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and manage the extended workforce, fewer organizations employ performance management to align resources to strategy and improve the effectiveness of agent performance. In fact, a 2009 report from Ventana Research indicates that agent performance management is still an untapped strategic tool in many companies.

Performance management tools ensure that everyone is working towards the same strategic goals. A comprehensive application provides complete visibility and accountability at every level of the organization, while diagnosing and correcting problem areas. Businesses that embrace performance management as both a process and tool are more likely to consistently achieve their strategic goals.

What is your organization doing to assess and improve agent performance? What best practices have you implemented?

Corporate IT leaders and others responsible for new technology investments have had many reasons to put new infrastructure expenditures on hold. Budget dollars have simply been too scarce in the lean economy of the past two years to overlook interoperability concerns. But just as companies’ interest in unified communications’ potential to improve productivity and efficiencies has grown, so has their restlessness for access to the business value of the technology’s capabilities.

The UCIF promises to help the industry break free of lingering restraints. The alliance is pursuing an agenda that will benefit both customers and vendors. By identifying common customer scenarios and leveraging existing industry standards, they’ll be able to resolve interoperability issues that have slowed the momentum of adoption and deployment of unified communications. UCIF members will also benefit from simpler, more cost-effective multi-lateral testing capabilities that replace ad hoc interoperability testing.

As a company that holds a long-standing position that strongly favors developing solutions using standards-based technology, Aspect welcomed the opportunity to join UCIF. Actively working with other like-minded members, we expect to play a continuing role in helping customers fully leverage unified communications through application integration. Our ultimate goal is to help focus our customers’ efforts on deploying new technology that will deliver the greatest benefits, without investing valuable budget and resources in making technology interoperate. With the collective efforts of UCIF members, the market will benefit from faster availability of interoperable UC solutions.

How can your organization benefit from UCIF efforts?

Since Avaya/Nortel announced their product roadmap, it has given both key stakeholders and the market the opportunity to step back and examine what this means for their businesses. While there are myriad technological implications now and in the future, following is the Aspect perspective on a few of the issues that seem of greatest interest based on market feedback.

SIP – Businesses have long known the importance of session initiation protocol (SIP), which Avaya now is embracing, too. SIP brings dynamic capabilities that Aspect has long recognized as essential to elevating the customer experience.  SIP reduces complexities across your contact center by delivering a common protocol that connects all the people, processes, systems, and applications that support the communications infrastructure.  In doing so, it increases flexibility, interoperability, and scalability, and opens the gate to a whole host of new applications that can help to enhance agent productivity and improve customer service, while at the same time allowing retention of existing infrastructure investments.

The issue, however, is that focusing on SIP is relatively new to the Avaya roadmap. Customers and prospects should look for a SIP interoperability policy from Avaya in order to fully understand the implications of leveraging proprietary SIP applications. Contact centers should carefully vet the levels of additional charges could be required to SIP-enable existing switches to work directly with the Aura environment. The alternative is that they will continue with their TSAPI computer telephony integration (CTI) solution – which should be displaced by IP-based integration – without fully leveraging a SIP backbone. Thus, Avaya-Nortel customers may not be able to standardize their contact center applications on a multi-vendor hardware infrastructure. Aspect has long recognized the importance of standards-based solutions in that they do not lock organizations in to proprietary applications or hardware as they look to enhance and upgrade as needed to address business objectives.  

Unified Communications and Collaboration – Avaya has not yet outlined a specific strategy related to bringing unified communications and collaboration capabilities to their Aura platform. This has implications for Nortel customers who’ve developed strategies around Microsoft technology, and should raise some questions from those who are still forming their unified communications plans. Customers who’ve planned around Microsoft technologies should ask whether the Aura communications backbone will enable them to leverage Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a unified communications infrastructure – or will they have to start over with a new unified communications platform?  In addition, companies should compare the number of components and communications infrastructure complexities of an Aura and if it will provide the key unified communications functionality and office integration that Microsoft OCS provides.  They need to examine if it will be a redundant component complicating management and if it will increase the cost compared to a rich OCS deployment.

What are your thoughts about the future of the Avaya roadmap?  Are there other important technology considerations?

Mike Ely is the director of system architecture at Aspect. Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center.  For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC. 

Other opinions on the Avaya/Nortel roadmap can be found:

• Phone Plus – http://www.phoneplusmag.com/hotnews/avaya-nortel-integration-reaction-mixed.html
• DestinationCRM – http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240016122/Avaya-Nortel-roadmap-shows-no-clear-path-to-UC-in-the-contact-center

UC Strategies – http://www.ucstrategies.com/in-the-spotlight/our-views-on-the-avaya-nortel-roadmap.aspx

There is no doubt that “collaboration” is a hot topic of late. And, while there are varying ideas of what collaboration entails and what it really has to do with unified communications (UC), we are confident in the benefits that collaboration can provide to organizations. 

As Andy Bezaitis wrote in his last blog , collaboration capabilities provide significant opportunities to improve workflows and increase first call resolution in the contact center.  Collaboration will also play a big role in improving processes across the enterprise as well, which translates into greater productivity, reduced costs and improved results within the enterprise and between the enterprise and its customers.

Collaboration tools, like Microsoft SharePoint, are playing an increasingly larger role in communications-enabling of business processes (CEBP) for the enterprise as part of a larger UC deployment. The important thing with both UC and collaboration is that by surrounding software applications and platforms with systems integration (SI) capabilities, organizations will be able to achieve specific goals and objectives better than they could if they were just using services or applications alone.

As unified communications and collaboration capabilities converge, there are a number of ways that companies can apply these new technologies to enhance business processes across key functional areas, including:

• - Customer Interaction
• - Customer Collaboration
• - Customer Acquisition
• - Field Service Management
• - Payment Processing
• - Web presence
• - Data Management, Analytics & Reporting
• - Data Integration

Some examples of how collaboration tools, coupled with UC, can positively impact areas of the business include:

• - Leveraging video and web conferencing tools to create virtual meetings to create, update, or review content in real time. 
• - Utilizing IM, presence and screen sharing capabilities to quickly resolve issues across multiple locations or even across departments. 
• - Creating a central content repository for employees – as well as potentially partners and customers – enabling easy access to information and providing the presence on the expert associated with that information and the ability to seamlessly communicate with the person through UC tools if more data is required.

The interesting thing about collaboration is no matter where it’s being applied, it can have immediate results.  It can be applied to individual productivity, workgroup productivity, and communications-enabled business processes and will yield benefits in each area.

Has your company begun leveraging collaboration tools? What are some of your initial results so far?

Author: Andy Bezaitis, Senior Vice President of Product Management

We’re starting to see that companies looking at unified communications (UC) deployments have also been evaluating the benefits of collaboration technologies.

Since Aspect just announced the acquisition of Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI) Quilogy , I thought I would discuss the specific opportunities collaboration brings to contact centers, provide an overview of what collaboration is, and explain how it can deliver benefits by providing concrete examples of its application. 
I think it’s important to first define collaboration.  Like UC, it is being defined in a number of different ways.  Gartner has segmented collaboration into four different elements:

1. Communication
2. Coordination
3. Communities
4. Social Interaction facilitation

And, the tools that support these elements can be divided into two categories (which do have some overlap):

- Non-real time tools shared document repositories like SharePoint, wikis, enterprise search, blogs (like Contact Center: Unplugged), and of course e-mail.
- Real-time tools for conferencing like Live Meeting, IM and social messaging text messaging or micro-blogging tools like Twitter

Aspect has already demonstrated the value of desktop sharing and leveraging enterprise knowledge workers in the contact center  through the use of real-time UC capabilities, so let’s look at additional benefits and implications of using collaboration tools in the call center.

By integrating collaboration capabilities within UC applications in the contact center, companies will be able to take advantage of the groundswell of social media   to fundamentally change workflows and business processes.  They will be able to take raw content– structured and unstructured data – and turn it into information that drives action.  This means a wealth of opportunities to improve productivity and communications (and ultimately the overall customer experience).  Let me give you a few examples of the benefits that collaboration tools can bring to the call center. 

- Use data from customer and partner communities, social media and websites
- Tie results from post-call surveys or responses to emails and notifications to individual customer records
- Leverage portals and enterprise search to bring additional enterprise content and analytics into the contact center
- Make structured and unstructured contact center  content (including call recordings) consumable and actionable by other departments
- Use search capabilities to monitor customer conversations around key topics (such as (“closing account”) by linking SharePoint into customer facing emails, instant messages(IMs), simple message syndications (SMSs), web conversations, and social networks

Next, we’ll be looking at the significant benefits that collaboration technologies can bring to the enterprise, so be sure to check that out next week.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear about ways in which you are thinking about using social technologies and other collaboration technologies in your call center.

Working within an organization that has experienced a number of noteworthy mergers and acquisitions over the years, I am well aware of the challenges that are faced internally with bringing two companies together in a seamless fashion (or at least seamless to the customer). Having done this many times in the past, we understand how challenging it is to bring together two different companies products and this one will be particularly difficult knowing the breadth of the offerings and size of the companies.

The Avaya and Nortel merger has certainly given many in the business pause . The merger brings the company a larger customer pool, but the customer does not necessarily stand to gain much in the way of new capabilities.  In fact, they may have to deal with a number of challenges and pain points.  The two companies have spent many years executing on very distinct strategies and developing solutions that are not compatible.  And when they were separate entities that was a logical approach.  This new entity has a monumental task in front of them in trying to integrate platforms and people, and still keep their existing customers satisfied.

I’m sure most customers of either Nortel or Avaya, are trying to get a handle on what exactly this means to them and their business.  Having had to address these same questions and concerns from our own customers over the years, I thought I would take this opportunity to help identify some of the things that you may want to look out for in the next 6, 12 or 18 months.

• • UC Future Strategy/The Microsoft Relationship – Nortel had a relationship with Microsoft to deliver unified communications (UC) to the contact center and the enterprise that didn’t progress too far and has come to an end.  And, Avaya has been developing its own stand-alone UC strategy with proprietary solutions.  This will potentially require one customer or the other to abandon its UC strategy in mid-stream.  Most analysts have stated that no single vendor can provide everything that an organization will require for a complete UC strategy, so this will compel customers to develop an understanding of how this will impact a future UC direction and who will provide the full capabilities needed to execute on that strategy.
  • Product Compatibility – Avaya has announced that it will select  the best of breed solutions to provide the greatest value to its customers.  But where does this leave the customer who has already invested significantly in the platform that’s not going to be supported in the long-term? Customers will need to determine if there is a clear migration path for future investments or if this is going to require a forklift implementation.  And most importantly will the new solution actually yield the capabilities and results they’re looking to achieve?  The company has a history of stopping and starting the development of unified solutions, and from the roadmap discussion it looked as if that wouldn’t be available for several more years, so it could get worse before it gets better by having to integrate multiple points across numerous applications.
  • Customer-Facing Contacts – Whether you work with Avaya through a partner or directly with the company, there is bound to be duplications with your customer-facing contacts, which will inevitably resulting in staffing adjustments. Whether these changes happen all at once or gradually over time, you should plan to weather some changes that may not all be to the good. Customers may have to deal with people that don’t know their business and don’t understand the solution and the problem is compounded with a channel strategy where all partners are not necessarily on board with the go forward plan.  And, when customers contact the support group, they may be routed differently than they were in the past and they may not be treated the same way.  Asking how all of these changes will impact a customer’s day-to-day operations is key.

The road ahead for Avaya and Nortel customers will be a challenging one. For those involved, it is important to go into this with eyes wide open. Current customers need to know what to be on the lookout for and to ask the right questions.

What are some of the other challenges that you think are important to consider when your vendor mergers with another company?

Collections agencies have been around since the 1920’s, usually bringing in debt that credit issuers were not able to collect for various reasons. The environment then was much different than it is now, however. Most of these agencies had few clients, few employees, and everything was manual. Collectors used index cards to write notes on, and when mail and phone didn’t work, these collectors would become “door knockers”, actually walking to the debtors’ homes to collect on debts.

It wasn’t really until 1977, when the United States Congress cited “abundant evidence of the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices by many debt collectors”, that regulations were established around debt collections. That’s when the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) set guidelines on how, when, and where a consumer could be contacted, began to require collectors to identify themselves and the company they worked for, and limited the information that could be given to a person that was not the debtor.

Due to these new rules of collections, businesses had to change the way they viewed their collectors.  They needed to refine business processes, including introducing new technology to optimize the use of their collections agents as well as ensure they comply with the FDCPA because failure to meet regulation requirements could result in big fines. In fact, they still can – the largest fine to date is $2.25 million.

The good news is that today’s technology is better than ever, which means that compliance can be virtually automatic. A variety of capabilities like quality monitoring, list management, and performance management tools, are configured to help organizations meet FDCPA requirements. In particular, some areas that require particular focus include:

• Dialing and tracking based on your customers’ time zones. Your system must be able to differentiate time zones, and base calling on those time zones, in order to both meet FDCPA and individual state requirements.
• Scheduling callbacks to avoid harassing your debtors.
• Reducing work phone calling at the account level or through exclusion process to ensure prohibited numbers are not called.
• Monitoring and tracking to ensure collectors are not using abusive or profane language, revealing specifics of the debt to any third parties, or using language that could be considered threatening.

The goal of technology used in collections call centers is to help mitigate risk and improve collections as much as possible. How else can companies like Aspect help? We’d love to hear your suggestions.

We’ve been talking with customers about unified communications (UC) for quite some time. We’re finding that many people understand how deploying UC across the enterprise can increase employee collaboration and productivity, and significantly lower costs, such as those associated with conferencing and telephone usage. We’re also finding, however, that a lot of people are still unclear about where the contact center fits in. So, I thought I’d take some time to share with you a real-world example of how Aspect has implemented UC across our own global contact center environment with multiple locations and languages.

You may already know that earlier this year, Aspect completed a company-wide deployment of Microsoft’s UC solution, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2. We immediately began to see the benefits from this new technology. But, being in the contact center business, we really felt like we needed to take the capabilities one step further and use it to radically improve the service we were providing to our customers.  So, we implemented Seamless Customer Service, a unified communications application for the contact center, and transform the way our Aspect® Technical Services team was communicating with our customers.

Now, thanks to Seamless Customer Service and its Ask an Expert feature, our support personnel has access to UC capabilities such as presence detection, instant messaging (IM) and conference calling, which gives them instant visibility to worldwide contact center resources and those in the enterprise who are available to assist with customer inquiries. Ask the Expert enables the support engineer to quickly and easily use presence identification and skill criteria to find an available expert and rapidly address customer questions that may not be available in the knowledge base. They can call anyone in the enterprise by pointing and clicking (no need to use valuable seconds looking up phone numbers and dialing the phone), and even route a customer interaction directly to that expert if necessary. This eliminates the wait time to request assistance and effectively expands the pool of available resources for the Aspect support center.

We immediately began seeing measurable improvements in key customer experience metrics after implementing Seamless Customer Service and OCS in our contact centers. In the last year, call hold times have been reduced by 76 percent from an average of 2.5 minutes per call to just 44 seconds per call. Our overall first day resolution rate has increased by seven percent and the time to reach a support technician with the correct skill set has improved by eight percent.

Thanks to Seamless Customer Service, we’ve improved our call routing through our worldwide resource pool to the most appropriate available resource based on factors such as product, language, region and issue severity. Clearly, the right UC capabilities can mean measurable improvements in customer satisfaction for any global contact center environment.

Are you ready to fit your contact center into your UC strategy?

Since I’ve moved into my new role as head of product management at Aspect, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with several companies from around the globe and gain more insight into what they’re planning for 2010 and beyond for their contact centers. One common trend that I’ve noticed is that more organizations are looking at the bridge between the enterprise and the contact center— through unified communications.

The companies that I’ve spoken with are not alone in these plans. In a recent survey of more than 1,300 participants, Nemertes Research found that more than 52 percent of organizations will be bringing unified communications into the contact center in the near future. I found this stat to be very telling on the direction of the contact center industry. Clearly, companies are moving to architectures that support unified communications strategies, and are looking at technologies such as IP infrastructures, presence engines, instant messaging tools and other applications that can help manage virtual contact centers or remote agent workforces.

The report also surveyed the participants for feedback on contact center vendors. They gave the highest marks to those vendors that offer professional services and systems integration offerings to support UC deployments across the enterprise and the contact center. This is seen as a clear differentiator in this market – a vendor that understands the broad need of the enterprise and the contact center.

The voices of hundreds of companies were heard loud and clear: organizations have been integrating (or will soon deploy) UC technologies into their contact centers, and the right software and services are key to their vendor selection. They want platforms that standardize their investments across the Enterprise and allow for software integration to their many systems. Services experience deploying mission critical voice will be table stakes as these customers select their suppliers.

Where is your organization in terms of bringing in unified communications into your contact center operations? What are the key services and capabilities that will be key to your rollout strategy? How does software figure into your long-term strategic thinking?

Not too long ago, a Top 5 bank decided it wanted to focus more on maximizing “share of wallet.” In order to do that, the bank needed to align its voice portal with its overall bank strategy, a process that required getting rid of multiple, inflexible legacy dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) systems. The bank ended up replacing these systems with a tightly integrated on-demand inbound self-service solution that included a financial services voice portal. The pay off was huge. The bank’s customers noticed the change immediately as they began to experience a single phone call view of their entire bank relationship, rather than just bits and pieces of disparate information. As customer satisfaction increased, the bank saw impressive results. It experienced a 10 percent increase in its voice portal containment rate, and a dramatic decrease in the average time customers were spending in the voice portal, driving $25 million in cost savings per year. The bank also was able to reduce callbacks by 25 percent, and increase the cross-sell response rate by 7.5 percent, driving $56 million in new bank revenue during the first year after implementation.

Another example is an online global travel company that saw a big business impact when it began using an on-demand voice portal for customer care. When the company entered the market in 2001, it immediately recognized that outstanding customer experiences could help set it apart from its competition. The company’s differentiating strategy was to deliver timely information to its customers within seconds of a change. In order to achieve this goal, the company began using data from its customers’ travel itineraries to provide the most relevant information, and then utilized an on-demand proactive customer care solution to communicate that information to customers via high quality recorded messages. Since the company has implemented the on-demand solution, its sales have doubled per year, while inbound call volume has remained approximately the same. What’s more, 80 percent of the company’s customers have indicated that they would refer a friend and 25 percent said they would use the company to book another trip within 12 months.

We’ve seen several of our customers use on-demand solutions for collections. It’s widely known there is significant value in proactively contacting delinquent customers within the first 15 days of their delinquencies. Some companies are using on-demand voice portal solutions in early stage collections to deliver reminder messages about outstanding bills and provide customers with the option to pay by phone or make arrangements to pay. These types of automated interactions sometimes result in more in-depth discussions with agents. However, managing initial contact on demand with automated messages or self service reduces the burden on agents and enables them to focus on the mid- and late-stage delinquencies, which are often more complex to solve.

How do you feel about using on-demand solutions?