Donna Fluss is the founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global 2000 and emerging companies. Ms. Fluss is a recognized thought leader and innovator in CRM, contact center and real-time analytics. For over 23 years, she has helped end users build world-class differentiated contact centers.

CCPM Shows Great Potential

Contact center performance management (CCPM) is the most misunderstood application in the contact center market. When used properly, it is a highly valuable tool that assists contact center managers in achieving strategic and tactical goals. As contact centers take on more responsibility and migrate from reactive cost centers to revenue-generating profit centers, the role of CCPM will increase in importance. CCPM is much more than “reporting on steroids,” although any good performance management solution delivers sophisticated reports that can be easily “sliced and diced” to allow multi-dimensional analysis.

CCPM Defined

DMG Consulting defines contact center performance management in the following way:

• At a strategic level, contact center performance management provides a framework for aligning the goals of the contact center with those of the corporation.
• At a tactical level, the performance management process uses goals, KPIs, metrics, data sources and balanced scorecards to capture and report on how well the contact center delivers to its objectives; it also helps identify the actions necessary to address areas of performance weakness or strength.
• At a practical level, performance management streamlines and simplifies contact center reporting, enabling managers to use a carefully selected set of KPIs, metrics and reports to manage their operation, instead of the numerous reports and hundreds of measures previously required.

During the last 12 to 18 months, the market has started to adopt a more standard definition of CCPM. Most of the CCPM vendors are now concentrating on delivering solutions that improve the performance, effectiveness and productivity of contact center agents. As a result, we’ve seen delivery of modules to address agent coaching, rewards and recognition, and performance appraisal.

CCPM Should be Actionable

The CCPM market, while still in its early stages of development, has demonstrated great promise for helping managers improve contact center operations. CCPM is intended to be “actionable,” enabling enterprises to improve the customer experience, increase sales, improve productivity, reduce costs, curb agent attrition, and enhance the perception of the contact center within the enterprise. Ultimately, the evolving and expanding contributions of the contact center to the greater enterprise will help to improve the working relationship between contact center managers and their peers in other departments. CCPM enables contact centers to work synergistically with their peer organizations to increase revenue and improve the company’s bottom line.

Increasing Market Adoption

Adoption of CCPM has not yet lived up to its potential, but the rate picked up in 2007. CCPM vendors are a practical group, and are working to increase adoption by delivering “quick start” programs for users. To circumvent prospects’ concerns about the cost and time of implementations, which can take 6 to 9 months for a full CCPM program with many integrations, they have started to deliver smaller modules that allow users to get started in one to two weeks. Their hope is that once a user organization succeeds with a small implementation, they will be willing to invest in a more complete offering. As this is a new strategy, it remains to be seen if it will be successful. However, many of these new streamlined modules have been rapidly implemented and are highly valuable. So, even if companies do not adopt full CCPM solutions, they can realize significant, quantifiable benefits from some of the smaller modules.

Bottom Line

Regards,

Donna Fluss
President, DMG Consulting LLC

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Question:

How can we motivate our technical call center agents to up-sell products when they were originally recruited for a technical support position?

As call centers continue to evolve from cost centers to revenue generating profit centers, call center agents will increasingly have some form of sales responsibilities – up-selling/cross-selling, customer retention, lead generation, etc. – added to their role. Call center agents, particularly those who were not originally hired for the sales function or who don't already possess this skill set, may feel apprehensive or uncomfortable about selling.
Call center agents are more likely to be motivated to up-sell when they are well informed about the products, so training is a critical part of the acclimation process. A sales training course should address the ability to recognize a sales opportunity and how to segue from handling a service issue into a sales interaction. The training should also include thorough instruction in product features, customer benefits, sales techniques, communication skills and how to overcome customer objections. Ideally, the course should utilize extensive role-playing to help alleviate the initial awkwardness inherent in practicing a new skill. As agents often learn best from their peers, it is helpful to share best practice examples of real sales calls from highly effective call center agents. If at all possible, give your staff an opportunity to get hands-on experience by allowing them to use the product or service that they are selling. Call center agents with first-hand knowledge are better able to articulate product or service features and benefits and can communicate the information with confidence.

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