Call Centre Performance Management

EXILANT helped a Fortune-50 consumer electronics company enhance their customer service through better performance of the Call Centre. Enabled by our BI solution, the client management team can now spot trends and take better control of factors influencing call center efficiency. Here is what they had to say

" Call Centre reporting has been great for helping us identify poor agent behavior and opportunities for improvement with new agents. We couldn’t have made smart decision without the reporting "

About the client

The client is a hi-tech manufacturing company based in the United States and operating in several countries around the world. It is one of the world leaders in designing, manufacturing and marketing computers & related software, services, peripherals and networking solutions. It is spearheading a digital revolution in music with its highly acclaimed product suite.

The company is committed to bring out the best to consumers through innovative products, services and internet offerings. In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, call centre can become an important source of competitive advantage. Companies with top-performing contact centers typically have more satisfied customers. This specific initiative aims to provide the business groups such as telesales, order management with effective business intelligence data on call center processing.

Challenges & trends in the industry

All enterprises want to end customer frustration, improve contact center efficiency, and develop innovative practices. The key business challenges in the industry are:

• Customer experience: Customer satisfaction is a trusted indicator of how well enterprises deliver customer service. Making customer’s every contact with the company an enjoyable and rewarding experience is a challenge. Companies with actionable data about customer behavior have a clear understanding of how - and where - to make the improvements that impact customer satisfaction the most.
• Call centre productivity and satisfaction: The key challenge to deal with is to ensure that the call centre is being leveraged to maximize its return. Companies need to focus on maximizing productivity through innovative ways such as virtualization, multi-channeling, usage of right tools etc. and at the same time should give equal importance to keeping up the agent morale.
• Information access and visibility: As the contact centers can generate huge volumes of customer interaction data, transforming the details into nuggets of insight has been an ongoing challenge, often involving an army of analysts collecting data from disparate systems, manipulating, transferring and reporting the data. The decision-makers exhaust their attention trying to gather, coordinate and rationalize the data they use to make decisions.
• Cross-sell & up-sell: Cross-selling and up-selling have been major sales strategies and the traditional way to reach customers with such offers has been outbound calling campaigns. Today, customer outreach has shifted to 'inbound marketing,' and this shift puts the contact center at the heart of cross- and up-sell campaigns.

Recent trend in the industry

Most companies today have a significant investment in business intelligence to measure business performance. Business Intelligence solves the data integration and access problems that corporations face in the fast-paced, global marketplace. It shortens the decision-making cycle by eliminating the time it takes to assemble disparate data for review.

To implement operational performance management, companies are looking forward to integrate business intelligence with operational business processes. These components can be used to automatically guide people and optimize operations.

Business drivers for the initiative

The key driver for the initiative is absence of visibility to organized call center data and the lack of a solution that could provide slice and dice analysis facility to analyze call center efficiency and improve customer experience.

The client had an urging need to track and analyze the key metrics that can help the management spot trends and identify issues and take better control of factors that impact call center efficiency, success and ultimately the customer service.

Solution

Scope of the engagement

The EXILANT team was engaged to perform build Vs buy analysis for ETL component of the proposed Business Intelligence (BI) system and then develop, test, implement and support the recommended solution.

Solution approach

The Infomart package provided off- the shelf through IVR technology had limitations in terms of being able to slice and dice information across call center resource types. It was also not possible to add custom dimensions to the analytics. To overcome the set of problems in being able to use the ready-made Informart for analytics, EXILANT’s solution used the following approach:

Solution overview

The current solution has the following features:

• Integrated with Call concentrator and telephony system through out of box Infomart package
• Custom integration with the work force management package
• Custom integration with client internal systems like reference warehouses
• The solution also utilizes custom build java framework ETL engine for ETL processing
• Oracle 10g databases are used for data mart and meta data management
• Business objects XI s used for analytics reports
• Flexibility to create metrics as per user need

Analytics reporting framework

Business Objects is used for providing canned and custom reports. The framework provides canned and Ad-hoc reports. Following are some of the features:

Business benefits

The solution enabled the client to track and analyze key metrics that impact the service and cost of the call center management such as ACHT (Average Call Handling Time), Speed of Response, Ring No Answer, time spent on other activities, call abandon rates, hold times and after call work etc. In nut and shell, the following are the key business benefits from the initiative:

• Business decisions driven out of reports: Many business decisions have made based on the visibility provided by the reports. For ex: In the past, senior management always thought "the lower the ACHT (Average Call Handling Time), the better". However, with transfer call reporting, management looked at some of the AHT agents and found their AHT was low because of a high volume of inappropriate transfers

• Increased customer satisfaction and retention: Easy to spot potential issues, dig out root cause of the problem and take better control of factors that affect customer satisfaction
• Improved first contact resolution - By using customer profile and information gathered in the self-service application, a better match between customers and agents can be achieved.
• Identify areas to improve customer experience
• Identifying opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell
  
• Decision  for appropriate migration by monitoring the channel usage: Integrated view across all channels such as IVR, email, web etc. will help to decide on appropriate migration if required