ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 6)

TECHNOLOGY BY JOE FLEISCHER for directors, managers, analysts and technology managers M CONTINUED FROM COVER — in a hosted fashion. Besides fostering a working environment that accommodates at-home agents, hosting also broadens labor forces for call centers to encompass regions throughout the world. As long as consumers feel entitled to service that is available by phone or on-line at a moment’s notice, companies will need agents to assist customers. Now that essential customer care technologies are accessible through a delivery mechanism such as hosting, companies can expand their workforces of people who communicate with customers to include local populations for whom commuting isn’t a viable option, as well as global populations in regions where customer care is truly a gainful way to earn a living. It’s tempting to attribute the emergence of hosting simply to the ubiquity of high-speed Internet service. But I would say that hosting, like the growth of customer service as a profession, is a cultural phenomenon. Just as companies are broadening their methods of interacting with customers (see chart on the following page), they are also broadening their methods of delivering technology that helps them serve customers better. As customer care teams become less dependent on where they’re located to serve customers effectively, they will increase their reliance on hosted systems. This begs two questions: How do organizations know when they’re serving customers effectiveicmi’s insight ly, and how can they improve their value to customers? To answer these questions, we need the assistance of a second key category of customer care technology, performance management, which is vital not only to sustaining call centers, but also to sustaining the businesses they’re part of. ANALYTICS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT Call centers have greater access to information about customers than ever before. But a more important development is that organizations are becoming more adept at making sense of, rather than merely gathering, data about customers. In recent years, I’ve observed that companies evaluate agents’ communication with customers based on whether agents do their part to retain customers. I’m personally not a fan of relying on a checklist of behaviors as a sole means of gauging performance. But if you’re going to create such a checklist, and you expect agents, at the very least, to gather customers’ information accurately and in a professional manner, isn’t it more important to track whether agents ask customers about their participation in a loyalty program than to nitpick about the words agents use to greet customers? Similarly, if we perceive every interaction with a customer as a learning opportunity for a company, then we have to be open to learning not only from exemplary outcomes, but from negative outcomes as well. If customers complain, isn’t it far more useful to record these interactions and to figure out what roles agents could have in addressing complaints or preventing them, instead of automatically documenting complaints as failures? Analysis is most valuable when it informs decisions about improving service to customers. To illustrate this point, let’s consider speech analytics software, which a number of developers of call moni| JANUARY 2008 www.icmi.com 6 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 Contents Customer Care Technologies Ad Index Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Prehire Tests In The Center Strategy: Video Contact Centers Show Preview Operations: Knowledge Management Industry Research Contact Centers Face Today's Realities: A Case for Consolidation 2.0 Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? The Key to Innovation Is Maintaining Your Strengths Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center's Role

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

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