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Q:  How can performance management increase contact center effectiveness?
 
A consensus of contact center managers and supervisors would reveal their most looming pressures are increasing the level of customer satisfaction while continually trying to reduce the overhead costs of maintaining an effective contact center operation. Yet most would also say it is difficult to accomplish both. So what choices do managers have of achieving these?

If you believe that timely information on the contact center (and agents) most crucial metrics, available one time on the desktop to the right people is part of the answer, then you are ready for to look at performance management.

How many times have contact center managers heard comments such as:

"We used to get reports done by 10 a.m. Now they're arriving later and later."

"I have no way of easily understanding why products are selling better on the web than through our contact center."

"We have no way to assess the effectiveness of our training and incentive programs."

As contact centers grow in strategic importance by enterprises intent on improving their customer interactions in order to drive revenue, the need to understand how multiple factors affect contact center performance will become far more critical.

Traditionally, companies have looked to production reports as the source for performance information. But, because many contact centers rely on data from multiple sources, they have no aggregated view into it. Planning departments and management are often left with the task of lengthy manual generation and analysis processes. Often, they produce reports that are incomplete or inappropriate, leading frustrated users to turn to other sources for actionable information. Custom Microsoft Accessâ databases and complex Excelâ spreadsheets come to proliferate as users take another shot at answering their own complex questions.

High-level (contact center) performance can only be measured with key performance indicators (KPI's) that directly address corporate goals and objectives. Hence, contact center managers need an easy way of consolidating and analyzing all of the relevant sources of data and a way of gaining a single view of the data from different dimensions, such as Customer, Product, Geography, Market, Time, and Delivery perspectives. Performance management applications address this challenge, providing managers and agents with a single version of the truth from multiple sources and perspectives in an actionable form that enables timely business decisions.

Performance management applications can help pinpoint a cause and effect relationship in near real-time. Managers can analyze campaigns mid-stream, in real-time, watching trends and making changes to the campaign quickly and easily. Say for example, a select team is making contact calls to cross-sell customers the opportunity to transfer credit card balances at a rate of 1.7% APR. Performance management provides the manager with a detailed analysis showing that the trend, just hours into the campaign, is that customers with balances less than $1,000 are far less likely to take advantage of the offer.

Management can make a quick decision to reduce the rate to 0% APR because they can run "what if?" scenarios based on current and past trends. The manager analyzes the trends after the change is made to the campaign, and the up-take rate for customers with the lower balances improves dramatically.

In summary, performance management applications not only serve to reduce costs and optimize productivity but also enable more effective interactions. This is the driver to increased revenue and customer retention and satisfaction. The most effective solutions are those not only optimize the agent's productivity but also optimize the overall call centers performance and can feed corporate performance management systems.