Customers know that their business is invaluable to companies and rightfully so, leading them to expect high quality service from these enterprises, an attitude that is not going to change as the economy pulls out of the downturn.

 

A study just conducted by Ventana Research for Voice Print International, or VPI, the 2009 Agent Performance Management benchmark research on contact centers, is the first quantitative investigation to assess the maturity and direction of the emerging discipline for managing contact center agents. Backed by extensive feedback from 365 contact centers, it offers significant insights into how companies are improving performance by focusing on their contact center agents, who largely shape the customer experience. The findings include analyses of processes deployed and technologies used to make the agent workforce more effective, as well as the information and metrics used to monitor and assess agent performance.

 

Key recommendations include:

 

*          Improve customer interaction-handling by thinking more strategically. Focus on automating the agent quality monitoring process, using analytics tools to improve the agent assessment process, and utilizing more outcome-focused key performance metrics

 

*          Make better use of available technology and applications. Follow the example of innovative companies and deploy unified communications, smarter call routing to best-skilled and highest-performing agents, call audio and desktop screen recording and analytics, agent coaching, and the latest contact center-specific performance management tools

 

*          Reassess key performance metrics. Explore supplementing basic measures such as number of calls handled, average length of calls and percent of calls placed on hold with more outcome- and business-related measures.

 

“Companies interact with customers many thousands of times a day, in many forms including a large number of calls to contact centers,” said Richard Snow, vice president and research director at Ventana Research who led the research and heads the company's Customer and Contact Center Performance Management research practice. “In today's economic environment it is important that agents handle each of these calls in a way that leaves the customer feeling he or she has had a good experience, as well as producing a beneficial business outcome. But this research shows that too many organizations are striving after cost efficiencies rather than ensuring agents deliver an effective experience that will enhance customer satisfaction.”

 

 “The results of this research demonstrate that, in order to survive the current economic downturn and prepare for the imminent upswing, today’s forward-thinking companies are positioning themselves for rapid improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency by planning investments in more intelligent, automated interaction recording and contact center workforce optimization software tools,” said Patrick Botz, corporate vice president of marketing at VPI, in a statement.

 

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