Call Centers - from the "mouth" of the Customer

Whilst not all of these may be applicable to your customers feelings towards your Contact Center, I doubt there isn't one or two that makes you smile. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone. And if you want to see how OpenSpan clients are addressing these issues with Desktop Automation, be sure to drop me a line!

Now, try and sing along.... 

------------------------------

One the first day of Christmas,

Our customers like to say

Why do we need such delay

On the second day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the third day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the fourth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the fifth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the sixth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the seventh day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the eighth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the ninth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the tenth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

I know my date of birth

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the eleventh day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

When will this nightmare end

I know my date of birth

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the twelve day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

Goodbye from me to you

I know my date of birth

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

Activity Intelligence - the new weapon in measuring worker activity

Today, OpenSpan announces a significant new product that fills a missing void in the Call Center and Back Office worlds (in fact, for any computer user across the entire Enterprise). Sure, both of these worlds are full of highly successful (and many not so), detailed analytics on what your users are doing and how their work is going. Speech Analytics, Voice Recordings, Screen Recordings, activity reports, transaction analysis etc., - all deliver value to varying degrees.

However, when it really comes to knowing what your workers are doing deep down, technology has been lacking. Within every enterprise, there are many types of desktop applications being used to get work done and workers can go in potentially hundreds of directions through these applications to do so. Employee cost is where you spend most of your budget and yet you don't know what workers are really doing, how they interact with these applications, why some people are better than others, what is the REAL gold standard, which all should be striving. It has just been too hard to collect this level of granularity - and yet, if you had it, this level of detail would change how you manage and optimize your work force.

With OpenSpans new technology, Activity Intelligence, we have now closed the loop on this missing and significant piece of insight to date. Not to be confused with other technologies like Desktop Analytics, Activity Intelligence changes the way we capture the granular level of detail of activity and it does so, with very little configuration on the part of our customers.

Activity Intelligence is deployed through a highly secure SaaS model, taking care of virtually all of the infrastructure required to deliver the collection, intelligent analysis and reporting capabilities. With a simple lightweight run time on every users desk, with little to no configuration, OpenSpan's Activity Intelligence collects virtually all activity from each users desktop, masking out secure and sensitive data for compliance purposes on the way. Once we've collected this "activity" of your workers interactions across all of their applications, then the core part of OpenSpan's product kicks in. This is the powerful analysis and pattern matching Intelligence we've built to identify unique workflows across your organization. Once we've identified a pattern, say as an "address change" process, we can then find all other users who perform address changes, and then compare how they complete them from an efficiency standpoint. Other examples could detect identifying a wire transfer pattern initiated by a bank teller, a mortgage verification process completed by a back office worker or the booking of a customer call-out from a contact center agent.

Whatever the patterns we find, identifying unique processes, we can then drill into the detailed make-up of of those processes, across continents, or work-groups, and compare them with each other, to a defined gold standard or to agreed performance levels.

Finally, with Activity Intelligence, all levels of management can obtain a near real-time view of the activity of the core of their productivity workers across the entire enterprise. Whether you are interested in monitoring compliance activity, boosting performance or using it as feedback to your process optimization groups, Activity Intelligence will set the bar for how worker productivity is measured in future.

Webinar for anyone that cares about Call Center efficiency!

The latest ContactBabel US Contact Center Decisions Maker’s Guide is out and includes data from more than 200 contact center leaders across the US.

OpenSpan is a platinum sponsor of this really informative report, and Steve Morrell from ContactBabel and I are co-hosting an enlightening webinar about the agent desktop and the strategic role it plays in today’s contact centers. 

During this lively session, Steve and I (a fellow Brit) will discuss the findings from this year’s report – what are the hottest trends, where is contact center management struggling and how are companies dealing with specific issues, to name a few.

In response to Steve’s portion of the session, I’ll dive into OpenSpan’s core capabilities and how we are helping companies across the globe impact their contact center operations by driving agent performance and improving the customer experience. Why are we still forcing agents to perform time-consuming manual processes that the COMPUTER can do more easily? How can our contact center implement a 360 customer view without heavy lifting from an IT perspective, or costly integration consulting price tags?

These are some of the questions we will answer during this webinar – and I hope you’ll be there to participate.   Tell your neighbors and friends and I look forward to seeing you there.

http://www.openspan.com/program/ws/2013/#top

Call Centers Can Be Wasteful

I know, it’s an attention-seeking headline so don't take offense. Although it’s true, it’s not deliberate and if you think about it from a human resource standpoint, there really IS a significant amount of time that your agents are forced into wasting for things like redundant data entry, manual activities, inefficient system navigation and much more.

Ah, but there’s help!

There are new technologies that allow you to eliminate this massive waste in the contact center. Companies are realizing tremendous ROI – close to millions or tens of millions of dollars – so why not see for yourself what I'm talking about – Desktop Automation.

You see, Desktop Automation is the new secret of the world’s top class call centers – and you’ve probably never even heard of it! Yet, Desktop Automation is now the number one way to eliminate the costly waste I am talking about. So what do I really mean by “waste”?

Just one example of waste is perhaps, at the end of every call, your agents are trained to “manually” enter notes about the call and the type of activity that was performed to service the customer.  Sometimes known as “Call wrap-up” or “Disposition Notes,” it can be a pretty time-consuming, yet essential part of the customer interaction. Notes are important but it is wasted time if your agents are having to take the time to enter this data themselves.

To give a bit more clarity on this “wasted” manual effort, perhaps it’s easier to break this down to a more Monty Python like “sketch”:

Johnny (Trainer): “So Billy (Agent), what we want you to do, is type in what you did on the computer after each call, in that little box there.”

Billy: “Why?”

Johnny: “Why? We want to make sure all of the activity is included on the customer account so the next time the customer calls, we know how the interaction with them went”

Billy: “No, I mean, why do *I* have to tell the computer what I did? Doesn't it know?”

Johnny: “Of course it knows! It’s a computer – it knows everything!”

Billy: “Then why do I need to tell it, if it knows everything? Does it forget?”

Johnny ; “No, Billy, the computer doesn't forget, it remembers everything.”

Billy ; “Then why do I need tell the computer if it can remember all this by itself?”

Johnny: “Billy, I don’t know why but it only takes a minute for you to do it”

Billy: “Yes, but you said I was one of 300 people doing this, 40 times a day…so that's what…… 12,000 minutes a day, which comes to 4,200,000 minutes a year  ….. and that's about 70,000 hours that we are all sitting here, typing something into the computer -  that it already knows.”

----

Whether it would normally takes 20 seconds or two minutes for your agents to take notes during or after your calls, using Desktop Automation, you are effectively training the computer to collect the notes in real time and thus you get this same information, in seconds and error free.

Eliminating the agents’ wasted time in this case means the agents can move to the next call almost immediately, thereby increasing the number of calls they can handle during their shift. Time and money savings from eliminating this type of waste are astounding!

With Desktop Automation there are hundreds of these mini use cases that can be automated in just a few weeks, even if you don't own the applications you want to automate. This is not a massive IT project and this now means you are empowering your contact center with technology that enables agents to do their jobs better and faster since you are removing the time they waste having to do something the computer can do for them.

Workforce Optimization (WFO) and Worker Optimization are NOT the same

For these last few years, as I have watched OpenSpan grow (130% increase in license revenue last year), I have been lucky enough to help educate a number of executives on why "Worker Optimization" is an important differentiator to WFO. WFO is not new and that's obvious but why do people think that WFO is typically the main route to take when you are looking to optimize your workforce?

WFO typically takes a swathe of workers (or call center agents) and attempts to break them down into their refined areas of expertise and efficiency levels. It might even go so far as to help identify processes those workers follow and suggest alternatives or retraining. WFO then starts to match the necessary tasks or calls to the correct workers with the right skills and proficiency. WFO also makes sure you have enough workers around as peaks and troughs in demand occur and helps ensure you don't have people sitting idle for too long. All good. Nothing wrong with WFO.

However, when you break it down to the actual worker, all the worker primarily uses to do their work is a computer, a keyboard, a screen and a mouse. I know I'm pointing out the obvious, but bear with me, this is going somewhere! Through all of the screen navigating, searching, clicking and typing at the desktop, a worker can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes to hours or days to complete their tasks or complete a call with a customer. The worker (human) is really only as fast as they are at their keyboard and mouse. Their desktop applications and complexity may contribute to their work taking longer along with their own ability and speed. The desktop is "where People and Technology meet" and represents the place where the real work is done today and thus, the biggest cost to the business.

What then, could we accomplish, if we could make the interaction between the people and the technology better? That's where Worker Optimization is realized, through Desktop Automation - making the worker better and faster and as well as more accurate. If it takes 15 minutes for a worker to complete a task normally, but with Desktop Automation assisting in the task, it only takes 5 or 10 minutes, wouldn't that be where the real value comes from?

So whilst WFO is important, if the workforce is not optimized, you are not getting the biggest part of the value. You are leaving massive amounts of money on the table if the worker needs 15 minutes to do something that could take just 5 minutes. Every second truly counts in the workforce and for some customers, a one second reduction on every call or task can mean millions in savings. Imagine then, reductions of minutes or hours. That's what Desktop Automation delivers. It takes what your workers already do and speeds it up through automation - right there on the desktop - where your people and your technology meet.

WFO should be used around an optimized workforce. Priceless.

Happy 40th Birthday, Copy and Paste (give or take a year).

Actually, it's older than that if we include scissors and tape but I'm talking the revolutionary "technological" version still in use today!

On most desktops, copy and paste still thrives en-masse, costing our businesses BILLIONS of dollars in the manual labor cost (it takes a computer user approximate 5-10 seconds for every click, copy, toggle, paste, toggle back). Training a human on what to copy, when to copy along with mistaken copies, adds billions more. It's because in reality, our desktops (and smartphones) are still cluttered with many applications our employees need to simply do their jobs.

Call Center agents witness this every day. They sit on a desktop with 4 or 5 open applications and toggle all day long, collecting and moving data between them (costing the Call Center lots of time, money and frustration). I call this "manual work" because it's just that. Humans, bashing away at the keyboard trying to figure out where data resides, apply their brain-trained rules and move it around. Manual work and wasted time.

And it's not just legacy applications. As a big Salesforce user myself, you'd think this super-duper, SAAS based cloud thingy wouldn't be tarnished with the same brush, right? Well, you are dead wrong. Most applications built yesteryear and today have little to no ability to be connected cost effectively to much else. Sure, there are plug-ins for salesforce and office to cut back on the number of manual integrations but that just makes the cloud application, bigger, clunkier and slower. Either that or have a development team constantly customize your salesforce and plug-ins until they too make just one new legacy mess.

After 40 years it's got a little better to be fair. Click on a phone number in an email on your smartphone and there's a good chance (unless it's an international number with a zero in the wrong place) that number will be magically dialed for you. Yippee, progress. However, if you have a 100 employees, or a 1000 or 10,000, sitting at a desktop, manually navigating applications, they have been trained (and hopefully remember) on, the Average Wasted Time (AWT)  adds up. Especially in a call center where AWT is unacceptable (Cost and Customer SAT score impacts).

I say, if you can't beat them, join them but do it automatically instead. Desktop Automation enables business and IT to figure out the appropriate joins quickly (automate application and human interactions) and eliminate AWT. Desktop Automation allows you to train the computer to do the things the computer is perfectly capable of being trained to do. This way, humans (Call Center Agents, Back Office works etc.,) can focus on the stuff the computer doesn't do well (human interaction, discretion etc.,). AWT costs money, lots of it. Desktop Automation can eliminate most of it, and customers of Desktop Automation are rewarded with the clear financial ROI as well as the virtual elimination of errors.

Screen Scraping, Macro's and Scripting are old tech. The new Desktop Automation technologies allow Agile, Drag and Drop automations to be built and rolled out quickly. Take a look. Your "human" workers will thank you for it, and your desktop computers likely won't care that they have to work a little harder for you :)

Of course, Desktop Automation can do much much more than just help eliminate AWT but since it's a birthday for our copy/paste nemesis, I thought I'd give it it's own special post ;)

I'll post some use detailed cases shortly but here's a quick one for you. A recent Desktop Automation project that took 12 weeks to implement allows 50 people to do the work of 300 people (about $1.5m a month savings). Yes - the numbers are big!

The Agile Desktop for Call Center Agents and Back Office workers

So, what is the Agile Agent Desktop?

Imagine you could design a car in a few hours? Sure you need the off-the-shelf "Body" and the "Engine" but after that, imagine if the rest was up to you. Want a digital fuel gauge or a old indicator style? You choose. Want really comfy seats, deck chair or tight sports leather? You choose. Want a wooden dash, brushed metallic, gold? You choose. Want a GPS system, Google Maps on a Tablet in the dash, iPad? You choose. Want a CD Player, USB drive, Bluetooth, LP's <lol>? You choose or have them all.

You get the idea, choose the car, the engine and the main body and the rest you can configure, and change as easily as using a smart phone with a few touch selections. OK, not possible yet is it? But for the desktop - your every day work dashboard - it IS now a reality!

Your workers and agents arrive at their desks every morning and are stuck pretty much with the same old apps, the same old complex work flows and the same old slow painful navigation across all those apps to get their job done. Not only is it pretty uninspiring, it is often incredibly inefficient (with so many apps). Agents have hundreds of options (and have to be trained on each of them) and dig around the screens to get their job done.

Enter the new AGILE desktop. Where you can take your existing desktop (your PC and the applications on it) and improve it quickly with dashboards, automation and helpful guidance and navigational tools that make your workers more productive - WAY more productive. As in the car, it doesn't change how the car works and doesn't risk you steering off into a lake in the middle of nowhere. The Agile desktop takes what you have, and just makes it better. It doesn't even have to do it all at once, you can change what you need to improve, as you need it. The same engine (applications) run underneath and there's no risk to transactions or business logic being missed or bypassed. The ROI of the OpenSpan Agile desktop customer base is typically 20% straight in the first year and closer to 30% for the back office workers. And it doesn't stop there. Our customers continue over years and years to use OpenSpan to improve the workforce as needs change. It's flexible, it's fast and it works.

The Agile Agent desktop for the Call Center Agents or the Agile Worker Desktop for the Backoffice workers just plain makes sense. Check it out, it's so easy, you'll wonder why you didn't think of it yourself :)

http://www.openspan.com/solutions/contact_centers/agent_desktop.php

2013 Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Call Center Executives

I was thinking to myself on New Years Eve (resting up after tearing a calf muscle doing Zumba earlier in the day!), what would be the best way to start my 2013 blog schedule. It had to be a traditional top 10 to go with the untraditional me (how many guys do YOU know who do Zumba?).

So, here we go, a traditional top 10 for the new year, with all the trimmings. Enjoy.

What are your goals for optimizing call center operations and impacting revenue for 2013? 

Consider these top 10 resolutions for world-class call center performance!

10.	Stop measuring what you cannot fix - it's meaningless. Look to key insights from Desktop Analytics to drive change and impact your agents, customers and bottom-line
9.	You are not just a cost center -- you are a revenue generation center; change your contact center this year through actionable data driven from Desktop Analytics
8.	Focus on improving your agent's desktop environment -- your agents and your CSAT scores will thank you!
7.	Be picky! Partner with only the best – see why over 300,000 agent desktops use OpenSpan over all other agent improvement options
6.	Instigate the best new measure for agent standards from fact based, real time Desktop Analytics
5.	Make introducing innovation a joint business and IT initiative
4.	Understand why an Agile Agent Desktop strategy succeeds and a Unified Desktop strategy fails
3.	See how Desktop Automation changes the way you think about agent desktops
2.	Remember AWT (Average Wasted Time) is the new thing to "cut"
1.	Investigate new technologies revolutionizing cost reduction in the Call Center