Chris Crosby

Speech Recognition is about identifying what people are speaking.

Speech Analytics is about figuring out what people are saying.

I noticed yesterday on weather.com that the temperature here in Boston was a lovely 92 degrees F, but the Heat Index reflected that it felt like 98 degrees F. This sent me on a tangent that I think is analogous for the call center.

Can a customer interaction look like one thing to you, but feel like something else to your customer? Let’s say that your trusty ACD report shows you that a customer’s handle time was 300 seconds, and 300 seconds happens to be your Handle Time Goal. That would seem acceptable, right? But what if 200 of those seconds the customer was on hold? How would that variable impact the customers perceived experience? Or hypothetically the call was answered in the goal of 20 seconds, but that was only after spending 2 frustrating minutes in the IVR?

The heat index takes variables like humidity and wind and makes a relative, plus or minus, adjustment to the absolute temperature value to reflect how it is actually perceived by people. Sound like a reasonable approach?

If it seems like I’ve been harping on customer experience measurement lately, its because I am. Stick with me here…

I’m out at a customer site this week and overheard the following conversation from the Workforce Management Team:

The difference in customer experience between 93% Service Level and 100% Service Level is negligible. But the difference in staffing cost to us is huge.

Now, I’ll spare you my full rant about Service Level (you can find it here) but I think this is indicative of a larger perception and education problem in the call center industry. Simply put: Service Level is NOT a measure of Customer Experience. It’s an opaque metric.

Let’s assume for purposes of this argument that the service level goal is 93% calls answered within 20 seconds. By decreasing the goal from 100% to 93% you’re saying that it’s okay for 7% of your customers to sit in queue for longer than 20 seconds. Logically, and most likely what the Workforce Manager was thinking, the effect on customer experience by being answered in 19 seconds vs. 21 seconds is unnoticeable. However the real impact to Customer Experience between 93% and 100% is actually immeasurable from Service Level alone. You have no way of knowing how many of the calls in queue longer than 20 seconds were answered in 21 seconds or how many were answered in 20 minutes and 21 seconds.

Try explaining to the irate customer that listened to hold music for twenty minutes that his difference in customer experience was “negligible”.

Last fall I participated again in the ICCM Canada Keynote Panel: 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes moderated by Paul Stockford from Saddletree Research. Dave Butler over at NACC recorded the session and has been distributing the ideas presented in his monthly newsletter. I keep promising him that I’ll expand one of mine into an article for him, but in the meantime here is the one he sent out today. Since it’s one of my favorite rants, I thought I would share (pardon my grammar):

Take out the garbage, I am not talking about employees or customers, I am actually talking about reports and data. One of my pet peeves, and I could go on for hours but I will go on for 45 seconds, is when you walk into a call center and you see the reports that supervisors are looking at every day and the first column you see is calls answered,  and this is for an agent. Johnny had 27 calls yesterday and was logged in for 15 hours, blah, blah, bah, blah. Step back and ask yourself what value you are getting out of this information. So take your 30 column report and pare it down to four or five columns that you can actually impact and actually take action on. If you can’t impact whether an agent is logged on for six hours or seven hours, get rid of the column. Just say, you know what, what was their schedule adherence, or what was their hold %? In other words, what are the columns that you can influence? Then write out the business value for each column on the report. Are you going to see service level on there, or outbound calls? Write down why you need to see that so you can articulate that back to the people that are managing to that data every day and why it is important.

I couldn’t have said it better myself

I recently realized that February 13th, 2007 was the 17th anniversary of my first day on the job as an outbound telemarketer. That means I’ve officially been in contact centers for more than half my life. Scary, I know. What’s even scarier is that some people reading this blog probably remember that shy, scrawny kid with the high pitched voice trying to sell Cititravel (a consumer travel service provided by CUC International as a private label to Citibank Credit Card holders for $49 a year

 
Needless to say I’ve changed a bit since then, and so has our beloved industry. When I started this gig, all outbound campaigns we’re manually dialed and managed from color coded labels that were stuck on “sales sheets” and “callback cards”. And things like VOIP, WFM, CRM, Business  Intelligence, Performance Management and Analytics weren’t even glimmers in our eyes yet.

Ironically enough, some things haven’t changed much. In February 1991, a Bush was in the White House, we were at War in Iraq, and the U.S. was in a recession…

On that note,  “Smile and Dial”

-Chris

Seth Godin has an interesting post about why your last impression with a customer is more important than the first (you know the old adage “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”).

He’s right, and I thinks its really about making every interaction count across your organization. When you consistently deliver you build credibility with your customers that leads to repeat business and the word of mouth marketing that Seth talks about. You may have a “great” sales team that wows your prospect on the first sales call, but if the rest of your team can’t deliver on these expectations then it doesn’t really matter.

This theory applies in mass when you look at a contact center where a customer may be calling (or emailing or chatting) with an agent about anything from placing a new order to questioning a billing issue. Its important to focus on every aspect of this interaction, from how long the customer sat in queue, to how long the agent left them on hold, to how professional and knowledgeable the agent was.

Sometimes you never know when the current interaction will be the last.

I want to pass along information on a webinar that AC2 Solutions, Latigent’s preferred Workforce Management Partner, is doing later this week. If you have never seen AC2 Solutions products you are truly missing out on the future of workforce management. These guys have a killer solution and a clear vision on where contact centers are going and how you’ll need to forecast and staff for them. 

Dr. Aykin is extremely knowledgeable and regardless of which WFM product you use you won’t want to miss their free events.  

You can register for the webinar here.  Please see below for the description of the event.

Each month, Dr. Turgut Aykin discusses relevant topics in the workforce optimization arena via free web seminars.  Every workforce manager can benefit extensively from Dr. Aykin’s knowledge and experience.
On Thursday September 6, forecasting, probably the most vital step in the workforce management process, will be the topic of discussion. Without a solid forecast in place, the best workforce management systems will falter. While forecasting methodologies range from simple gut feel to intricate mathematical algorithms, there are several that every workforce manager should be aware of to effectively forecast the center’s workload.

In today’s complex multi-skill, multi-site, multimedia contact centers, forecasting contact volumes and average handling times accurately can be an extraordinary challenge.  During this web seminar Dr. Aykin will review several techniques used for forecasting and discuss advantages and risks of each.
Participants will learn about the following:

• Why accuracy in workforce planning matters?
• Time series models
• Exponential smoothing
• Time series decomposition
• Box-Jenkins ARIMA Models
• Dynamic regression
• Curve fitting
• Expert systems for contact center forecasting
• Agent requirements forecasting
• Forecast accuracy tracking
• Overview of upcoming seminar:  Optimal Scheduling (September 21, 3pm ET)

To register, please go to http://www.ac2solutions.com/index.php/about/seminar-registration/

Be sure to join Dr. Aykin on future web seminars as well.

• Advanced Forecasting (Sept. 6, 3pm ET)
• Optimal Scheduling (Sept. 21, 3pm ET)
• Revenue Optimal Staffing & Scheduling (Oct. 4, 3pm ET)
• Safety Staffing (Oct. 18, 3pm ET)
• Multi-criteria schedule Bidding & Vacation Planning (Nov. 1, 3pm ET)

Dr. Turgut Aykin is the president of ac2 Solutions. He has published numerous scientific articles in refereed professional journals on contact center efficiencies, and he has routinely been invited to contribute at national conferences. He has served as an Area Editor and member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector (IJISSS), and is a member of the International Journal of Operations and Quantitative Management. He has worked with many Fortune 500 companies including Bank of America, Caterpillar, Celestica, Charter Communications, Convergys, Delta Air Lines, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Phillips, and Siemens (Munich, Germany) in improving their processes and performance.  Dr. Aykin holds BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

 

I have been asked A LOT lately if the Latigent Business Intelligence Suite provides cradle-to-grave call reporting for Cisco ICM/ IPCC and/or Customer Voice Portal (CVP). The short answer is yes, we do.

Without giving away any of our, or Cisco’s, proprietary techniques you can refer to their Solution Reference Network Design (SRND) for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal, Release 4.x which I found with a little help from Google.

BlueVue provides a pretty flexible and easy to use filtering and search tool over Cisco ICM’s call detail data. For example, you can run a report for all calls that meet a certain criteria (I.E. Talk Time > 20 mins, or Abandoned in Queue after 60 mins, etc.), or you can search for a specific call by ANI (caller’s phone number) or ICM Call Variable value. You can also drill-down into what we call the “Call Life Report”, which is basically a formatted and visual picture of what transpired on each leg of the call.

Pretty cool, heh? If you have questions or want to see a demo, give me a shout.