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2005 The Year of the Agent By the Editors
This is certainly an exciting time for all of us at Call Center Magazine. Call centers, and the managers and agents who staff them, are finally beginning to receive the increased attention and, most importantly, the recognition that they deserve. This recognition is welcoming news as it means more resources and more freedom to invest in technologies and implement strategies aimed at improving the overall operating efficiencies of the call center. One of the areas where this attention is having the most impact is an area that we identify as Agent Development. Earlier this year, we told you how agent development is the ultimate frontier in call center management: the art and science of tuning agent performance over the span of a career, using today's most advanced technologies. These tools include everything from pre-hire assessment and call monitoring software to workforce and performance management systems. Our 2005 Product of Year winners confirm this trend. Three of the honorees are in the assessment and selection space, including Banks & Dean, Employment Technologies and Qwiz. Call center employees are unique individuals and these assessment tools are designed to help you pinpoint candidates who have the skills, abilities and characteristics to become successful in their jobs. Performance management also came out a big winner as call centers are increasingly looking for ways to get a handle on all the disparate information coming from different systems and software. What makes this year's winners stand out, however, is not only the ability to gather this information but also the ability to analyze information about customer interactions and processes to spot trends and identify areas of improvement. But managers, agents and coaches can only do so much, which is why some of our Product of the Year winners fall into several other categories. For example, Empirix, which is dedicated to making sure that your automated systems, such as call routing and IVR, are working to peak performance. Kanisa introduced a clever tool for automating resolutions to common customer inquires and Jacada focuses on cleaning up and managing data and systems through the desktop. As we get closer to 2006, we look forward to further recognition of the immense value call centers lend to their organizations but for now, we congratulate our 2005 Product of the Year winners. Banks & Dean Helps Small Centers Hire the Best 2005 is poised to be a big year in the world of recruitment and pre-hire assessments. However, for small call centers that don't hire hundreds of agents per year, recruitment and assessment packages are often out of reach. Not anymore. Banks & Dean (Milwaukee, WI, and Toronto, ON, Canada), a professional services and consulting firm, fulfills the recruitment and assessment needs of small and mid-size centers with its Integrated Recruiting and Selection System. The company's Web-based software, which they first announced in May at our annual Call Center Demo and Conference in Orlando, makes it easy for you to filter applicants automatically without taking up a lot of your human resources department's time. The software enables you to focus on the best candidates with the highest potential to succeed so that only the most qualified agents end up in training. You customize the software to take on the look and feel of your company's Web site to attract potential candidates. When candidates decide to apply for positions, they take an on-line psychometric test, which includes multiple-choice questions to evaluate their experience, background and skills. Once candidates pass this initial screening, the software provides them with a more comprehensive test that determines the type of positions candidates are best suited to, such as inbound customer service, inbound upselling and cross-selling, outbound sales or customer support. Recruiters view candidates' information and results in real time. You can even schedule automated phone calls with candidates to assess their verbal skills. You can enable candidates to respond to additional inquiries through your IVR system or you can capture candidates' answers to open-ended questions, by asking, for example, about their best customer service experiences. Geared to companies that typically hire between 30 and 150 agents per year, The Integrated Recruiting and Selection System takes advantage of Banks & Dean's extensive experience with assessments to provide you with guidelines and best practices for conducting face-to-face interviews. By capturing agents' entire histories from their scores on initial assessments to their performance in training, this tool shows you how to identify traits and skills that are common to the most successful agents — and that is something every call center can use no matter what size they are. OneSight For Oversight Automation doesn't mean you can stand aside and ignore how your systems work. You still have to tweak, maintain, analyze and optimize things like your call routing and your IVR. There are two aspects to technology management: ensuring that it works, and that it works well. Empirix's (Bedford, MA) OneSight for Contact Centers is a tool for getting a handle on the how well your voice systems are working. It combines application and system performance data (the "quality of experience" stuff) with infrastructure-level performance data (e.g., T1 spans, IVR ports and servers, CTI servers, databases) so you know when your systems are working well from the customer point of view. When your company deliberately opts to take a server or IVR system off-line, you shouldn't have to receive reminders that these systems aren't running. That's too much data and not enough information. But when you receive alerts from OneSight, you discover issues you need to be aware of, rather than figuring out which alerts to ignore. At the same time, you'd rather not find out from customers that they're unable to complete automated transactions by phone or on-line; you'd rather know about, or prevent, these problems in advance. OneSight allows you to specify if you receive an alert concerning a particular piece of data, even if the system associated with that data isn't running. OneSight also lets you designate a failover data source so that you can continue to report on certain types of transactions despite problems you may encounter with the systems that process these transactions. Empirix lets you establish thresholds for metrics, including availability, mean time between failures and mean time between repairs. These reports allow you to track metrics for individual systems or for groups of systems. If you prefer to receive alerts based not on individual metrics, but instead on specific combinations of metrics for certain systems, Empirix offers its optional Service Level Management (SLM) module. The SLM module is valuable, for example, when you want to confirm that when customers complete automated purchases, their account information is accurate within both your IVR and on-line transactional systems. The latest version of OneSight expands the roster of systems you can observe, such as Cisco's ICM CallRouter, Genesys' T-Server middleware and Intervoice's IVR system. By the time you read this, OneSight will let you track the status of more systems, like Avaya's G3 phone switch, Genesys' IVR system, Nortel's phone switches (including Symposium) and Nuance's speech recognition software. Developing Tomorrow's Leaders Call centers are recognizing the importance of assessing, training, evaluating and establishing career paths for agents. But managers, too, need help building their careers. And the first step is determining whether they have the skills and the desire to supervise others. Employment Technologies' (ETC; Winter Park, FL) Team Leader Readiness Simulation (TLRS) is the best tool we've come across for assessing which individuals within your center are ready to supervise others. ETC, which offers software and services to help call centers assess and develop agents for careers in call centers, introduced the simulation last spring at Call Center Demo and Conference in Orlando, where it was among the winners of a best-of-show award. The simulated scenarios, which ETC presents to would-be team leaders to gauge their probability of success as supervisors, are components of a much broader assessment. In addition to a computer simulation, TLRS comprises a face-to-face simulation, which plays out similar scenarios to those from the computer simulation, as well as career development plans and interview questions for prospective supervisors. As we noted in our test drive in our January 2005 issue, TLRS's assessment is valuable not only for potential team leaders, but also for those who are currently supervisors. TLRS earns a Product of the Year award because it does far more than indicating whether someone qualifies to be a supervisor; it outlines valuable suggestions for how team leaders in call centers can grow in their careers. Connected Is Cool: Envision's Performance Suite Envision (Seattle, WA) showed us an impressive set of business applications that link the call center and the enterprise. Software applications need to be integrated to work well in the call center environment — that's becoming an accepted fact of call center life. The Envision Performance Suite takes the relevant information from disparate sources and transforms it into actionable business intelligence that others in the enterprise can use. The new apps focus on four main areas for improving business: contact center performance, transaction management, customer experience management and enterprise quality. "Despite better coaching and the valuable tools provided to agents, most contact centers still face the same challenges as twenty years ago when it comes to improving the customer experience," said Ted Lubowsky, vice president of sales and marketing at Envision. "Putting the improvement burden on agents, supervisors, trainers and coaches alone solves only half the problem. We believe contact centers can't get to where they need to be — the superior customer experience — without the enterprise getting involved." One of the most important aspects of what we call "agent development" is that when you use certain tools in tandem, you see operational improvements greater than when you consider the tools separately. Envision's approach, which goes beyond the agent to the customer-side of the interaction, lets a business consider the content of customer interactions and its effect on the enterprise in real-time. As a result, companies will be able to spot trends, improve efficiencies, reduce errors, lower costs and improve the bottom line. Envision's sophisticated content analysis and indexing software lets users receive direct customer feedback. This critical information, previously unavailable without listening to each call, provides unique and vital information regarding customer transactions, customer preferences, enterprise process weaknesses and areas for improvement, as well as key direct feedback on the customer's own perception of doing business with the enterprise and the overall customer experience. The new applications will also let enterprises compare customer intelligence with their actual spending trends, to link the contact center and agents to the front and back office support through business intelligence, to bring operations, IT, finance, manufacturing and support into the enterprise quality initiative. Jacada's Fusion: Productivity at the Agent Desktop The agent desktop is like the weather — lots of people complain about it, but nobody does anything to fix it. Except this year we saw a dramatic example of a new approach to organizing the applications that sit on this valuable desktop real estate in a way that makes agents more productive. Two-thirds of call center agents use three or more applications. More than a quarter use five or more. But those applications are not necessarily linked. Jacada (Atlanta, GA) crafted an interface, called Fusion, that simplifies what the agent sees. It combines all types of applications — no matter if they are Windows, Web or host-based — and centralizes them. Underlying Fusion is a development layer called WinFuse, which lets Jacada connect its interface to any Windows client/server application. But it doesn't need access to the underlying source code. You might have a shipment tracking application in one place, an order-processing app somewhere else, perhaps even a green-screen custom tool for managing customer data. Jacada's role is to come in and blend all the applications into one front-end that's easy for your agents to work with. The interface doesn't replace the underlying systems you use, it merely replaces the interfaces those systems present to the agent. The Jacada solution is that it cuts right through to the interface layer, and that makes the cost and deployment time of the solution much more palatable. It protects both your investment in your existing systems, and your ability to switch systems later on. It would be surprising if the switch from cluttered multi-screen desktops to a streamlined interface didn't result in better call times and other improved in-center statistics. What we liked so much about this simple solution was that it's non-invasive. All applications, regardless of platform, can be "fused" into a more usable format. It doesn't care if you're combining homegrown hosted software with ERP, CRM, supply chain or even HR software — the WinFuse component can meld them all together. And when you decide it's time to switch apps in one of those categories, you're not stuck because of an expensive, lengthy integration done the traditional way. This kind of interface-bundling could be done at the vast majority of call centers. Only a very few are operating today at peak efficiency. These days, most are looking for ways to make the most of their very precious IT and labor resources. This is one very promising development. Help for Customers Who Help Each Other When Kanisa6 from Kanisa (Cupertino, CA) came out last year, we were impressed that the software lets support centers set up processes for automating the resolution of the most common inquiries they encounter. But it's the software's additional ability to incorporate information culled from customers' on-line discussion forums that led us to choose Kanisa6 among our picks for Product of the Year. Kanisa6 enables you to present a series of on-line questions to customers who request help with specific products. With these questions, you encourage customers to provide more details to narrow down possible solutions, and Kanisa6 indicates what stages will come next in the resolution process. Besides allowing customers to backtrack among previous stages of the process, Kanisa6 makes it easy for customers to fill in any information that they may have missed. Kanisa6 prompts customers to rate how helpful the solution is, whether the solution results from a download or resides in a document from your knowledge base. If customers still consider their requests to be unresolved, Kanisa6 lets customers convey their requests, plus their past efforts to locate answers in your knowledge base, to support reps. Besides enabling customers to consult information from your knowledge base, Kanisa6 lets you set up threaded discussion groups, in which customers pose questions and provide each other with answers. Because the software lets you moderate these groups, you can ensure that the information customers share with each other is accurate. And because customers rate responses to their threads, they ensure the information is useful. Kanisa6 also allows your support team, as well as your customers, to rate the expertise and helpfulness of each customer who posts information to a discussion. The ratings are analogous to peer reviews from on-line marketplaces like eBay (which, by the way, is one of Kanisa's clients). In this manner, Kanisa6 helps you foster community among your customers while allowing customers to contribute to your knowledge base. That, in our view, is the way support should be. Kanisa6 earns a Product of the Year award for enabling this vision of support to become a reality. "Suite" Blend of Technology and Services Call centers are increasingly turning to performance management software to help them get a handle on all the disparate systems and data that reside throughout their businesses. But gathering data is only part of the solution — if you don't know what you're looking for, too much information can quickly become overwhelming. To get value out of performance management software, you need to figure out what information is most valuable and understand how it affects your business. Opus Group (Chicago, IL) addresses this issue by offering a unique blend of services and technology with (Chicago, IL) its Opus Suite. The company, which began in 2000 as a consulting firm, begins by observing and conducting a thorough analysis of your call center's current business processes to help customize a performance management strategy that will work best for your company. In addition to integrating data from different databases and systems across your enterprise to provide dashboards of information to agents, supervisors and executives, Opus Suite enables you to measure individual performance against goals and provides an empirical basis for agent coaching and feedback. To manage your workforce more effectively, Opus Suite offers real-time visibility to service levels and performance across the enterprise in addition to agents' schedule adherence stats. The software also lets you balance agents' workloads based on skills and provides intra-day views of workforce productivity. And if you don't already have workforce management software in your call center, Opus Suite can manage agents' schedules and create "what if" scenarios. Qwiz Reveals More Pre-hire assessment tools help you determine who your most successful agents are before they ever step foot in the door. And by doing most of the work for you, these tools reduce the amount of time that you and your human resources staff have to devote to screening and interviewing candidates who would not be successful within your company. One of the most interesting assessment tools to debut this year is Qwiz's (Roswell, GA) Qwiz Reveal. The software uses biodata, which is a methodology that assumes the way an individual has responded to a particular situation in the past is an accurate predictor of how he or she will respond to a similar situation in the future. Qwiz Reveal seeks to learn as much about a candidate as possible by asking candidates questions that cover a multitude of scales that measure both positive and negative aspects about the applicant. For example, four of the scales measured by Qwiz look at what the company calls "citizenship behaviors," including commitment and loyalty, helpfulness, achievement and dependability, and emotional maturity. The other four scales analyze "counter-productive behaviors" that include theft and dishonesty, impulsiveness, hostility, and vengefulness. We especially like that fact that Qwiz Reveal analyzes candidates' responses to these counter-productive and citizenship behaviors, enabling you to form a well-rounded assessment that that gives you more insight about the entire person. The software also provides reports that include information on specific actions you should follow-up on if you bring the candidate in for a face-to-face interview. |