The Real-Time Contact Center Newsletter

November 2004

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Real-Time Contact Center Newsletter. In this and future bi-monthly editions, DMG Consulting LLC will share the current trends, developments and technologies in the world of real-time contact centers and real-time analytics. We'll fill you in about the latest thinking in the market and the benefits and impact on your company. It's really all about best practices and how to make them work for your operating environment.

The Real-Time Contact Center Newsletter will address strategic issues and day-to-day tactical challenges. In coming editions, we'll cover hot topics that impact real-time service, such as offshore outsourcing, performance management, quality management/liability recording, speech analytics, speech recognition, real-time analytics, IP contact centers, migrating contact centers to profit centers, agent training, relationships between marketing and service and many more. We'll examine benefits, challenges, ROI and strategies.

The Next Five Years

The world of contact centers is in transition. It's taken us 30-plus years to get to where contact centers are now - technically sophisticated, cost-oriented, reactive service and sales organizations. But the next five years are going to be the most exciting in the history of this market. Contact centers are going to open up and proactively engage customers in real-time, improving the customer experience and providing timely access to customer insights. Contact centers are going to make an increasingly significant contribution to corporate revenue goals. Contact center managers will finally achieve parity with their colleagues in sales and marketing, as their input will be viewed as critical to achieving corporate objectives.

Sure, this may sound unrealistic, but market necessity is driving innovation that will empower contact centers and make them an even more valuable corporate asset. Contact centers are the heart of the enterprise. They know more about customer wants and needs than any other part of the company. Today, most of this information is wasted because many contact centers do not have tools or best practices for structuring customer communications, calls, emails and web interactions. But this IS changing!

It's time for enterprises to take advantage of the real-time element of most contact center interactions. It's one thing to take customer information and analyze it after the fact, something that is rarely done anyway; it is far more beneficial to leverage these interactions while the customer is on the line. Enterprises that build real-time contact centers will have a strategic advantage over their competitors.

Regards,

Donna Fluss

Principal, DMG Consulting LLC

11/08/2004	Customer Experience Management Turns Contact Center Managers Into Corporate Leaders (GreaterChinaCRM)
11/01/2004	The Lost Art of Saying I'm Sorry (CallCenter Magazine)
10/15/2004	Less for Success (CIO Magazine)
10/12/2004	Spending up, but what will contact centers buy? (SearchCRM.com)
09/02/2004	Customers Shouldn't Have To Think About Speech Recognition (CRMGuru)
08/05/2004	For the Customer's Sake, Don't Let Marketing Own the Contact Center (Callcenter Magazine)

What criteria should we use to determine if our call center is successful? Please provide specific quantitative and qualitative measures for evaluating success.

- Telecom Company

There has been a great deal of innovation in this area in the past two years. The leading contact centers use both quantitative and qualitative key performance indicators (KPIs) on an ongoing basis to measure their performance. Contact centers have also started to use scorecards and performance management. Scorecards are often a component of a performance management application (and/or program). Scorecards are used to measure performance at all levels: Agent, team/group, contact center site and entire contact center organization. They are also used to measure how well a contact center delivers on specific goals. So, you may have different scorecards to measure the number of new sales closed, revenue or number of accounts saved, for example.