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 25 years, she has helped end users build world-class differentiated contact centers.

Contact Center Analytics is Hot

Contact center analytics is a hot topic that is rightfully attracting the attention of contact center and senior managers. It fills a need for contact centers, which have many systems and even more reports, but little actionable intelligence to help them run their operations. Contact center managers need a method to gather the data contained in their dozens of reports, find the important anomalies and trends, make sense out of it all, and figure out how to fix the identified issues. Conceptually this is what performance management is intended to do. But because it can take a great deal of time, effort, and resources to implement a full performance management solution, the adoption rate has been slow.

What is Analytics?

Analytics is a way of “injecting dye” into a business process or system to identify what is broken or working sub-optimally. It is a means of gathering, assessing, conceptualizing and presenting data so that trends and issues are easily isolated and understood. Once these issues are properly identified, they can be addressed on a timely basis. It’s great to know when there is a sharp needle that could harm someone hidden in a large haystack. This is useful information, but not actionable. The question is how to find and remove the needle before it hurts someone. Analytics is the answer.

There are many opportunities to use analytics in contact centers. Technology vendors are meeting the challenge by delivering solutions that have great potential for making major contributions to improve the performance of the operating area. This translates to cost reductions, while also improving the customer experience and helping managers meet other contact center goals. Some of the solutions now finding their way into contact centers, such as predictive analytics and desktop analytics, are already well established in other operating areas like marketing or IT, albeit in different ways. Other applications, such as speech analytics and customer experience analytics, have found their initial commercial use in contact centers.

High-Level Functional Requirements for Analytical Applications

At a high-level, all contact center analytical applications should have the following capabilities:

1. Capture and analyze large volumes of detailed transactional data
2. Identify specific trends, opportunities and behaviors from the large volume of transactional data – isolate the issues
3. Graphically represent the findings in a manner that makes it easy for users to see and understand the underlying issues (including the ability to create multi-dimensional graphical cubes)
4. Present data via online dashboards that allow users to drill down to the underlying transactions and perform additional analysis
5. Make data actionable

Ideally, an analytical application should make the data available in real time; however, while some of the solutions meet this criterion, most are still working towards this objective.

Emerging Contact Center Analytical Solutions

Customer Experience Analytics (CEA), which is an externally-oriented application that assesses the customer experience during every touch point, and desktop analytics (DA), an internally-focused solution that critiques desktop servicing application performance and the related agent experience, are two of the newest entrants into the contact center analytics market. Both of these IT categories introduce functionality that does not currently exist in contact centers and is potentially highly valuable. CEA and DA are in their infancy but because they can improve the customer experience while reducing operating expenses, DMG believes that they will soon be incorporated into the world of contact center solutions.

Implications for Contact Center Managers

It’s not the time to throw out your system reports. But it is time to look around and find solutions that provide actionable tactical and strategic information that empowers you to improve the performance of your contact center on an ongoing basis. Prioritize your needs and invest in the analytical solution that will deliver the greatest quantifiable benefits for your center. Like it or not, delivering cost savings and productivity improvements is clearly the top priority in today’s economic climate. The great news is that there are analytical solutions that deliver on this promise while really improving the customer experience.

We invite you to learn about the two newest contact center analytics solutions, CEA and DA, in our new report on emerging contact center analytics. Request your copy of the report abstract.

Question:

What are the best practices for determining the optimal QA to agent ratio and how it this calculated?

Answer:

There are no industry guidelines for determining the QA evaluator to agent ratio or number of calls that should be monitored per contact center on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This number varies based on total number of agents, type of contact center (multi-channel or multi-skill) and transaction volume. One way contact centers address QA resource limitations is to split the number of agent evaluations that need to be completed among supervisors and quality reviewers. While it's important to have dedicated QA resources, it's also essential for line supervisors or managers to keep informed about their agents' performance. Evaluating agents is a great way to stay apprised of what’s happening with agents and the contact center.

The goal of a quality assurance program is to provide a statistically significant analysis of service delivery and the quality of customer interactions. To accurately measure service quality and establish credibility and reliability for the quality assurance process, randomly captured calls should be evaluated consistently for all agents, on a regular basis. Unfortunately, most contact centers do not have the resources to conduct QA on a statistically valid sample of transactions. Instead, management generally specifies a number of calls/emails/chat sessions to evaluate on a weekly and/or monthly basis. This number is based on the number of QA resources budgeted by the contact center. (To determine the number of QA sessions that can be performed in a day, calculate the amount of time it takes to do an evaluation and deliver a coaching session. Then divide this number by the working hours available per day, which is generally 6.5.)

Here is a strategy that some contact centers use to determine the number of evaluations to monitor per agent/month. Start by evaluating 10 calls per agent for a month to obtain a baseline figure. Each subsequent month, reduce the number of evaluations for each agent by 1 and compare the results/findings to the prior month. Continue this process until the variance between the results is significant. At that point, the number of calls evaluated is as low as it can go. (The most common number of calls evaluated for agents on a monthly basis is 3 to 5.)

Have a question for the DMG Experts? Click Here!

Contact Center Analytics: Emerging Customer Experience and Desktop Analytics Solutions

Desktop analytics provides transparency into how agents interact with their servicing applications, eliminating the last black hole in contact centers. CEA solutions measure the customer experience throughout the service lifecycle. These applications are delivering cost savings of 5% - 10% to organizations. When implemented properly, they help managers achieve their cost savings goals while improving the customer and agent experience. In short, they are a gift for our troubled times. Read More