CRM - November 2007 - (Page 29)

MASTERING THE METRICS MAZE tion to tell the supervisor the percentage by which the agent surpassed his sales goal. “The next day the agent comes in and sits down at his desk, and there’s a bonus check sitting there waiting for him,” Stockford says. “You not only get a measurable ROI in terms of eliminating manual intervention in the process, but you also get the added benefit of an intangible ROI from what one can assume would be a happier agent:‘Somebody recognized that yesterday I did really well and here’s the bonus check to prove it.’” these component technologies and optimizing their use can place a heavy burden on professional services.” Even as these issues persist in hindering widespread acceptance, vendors claim to be striving toward CCPM solutions that are more affordable and manageable. For example, CCPM applications are becoming more plug-and-play types of tools equipped with more prebuilt data connectors, which can help companies save the time and money that are usually spent on heavily customized integrations. Moreover, some market players have extended their product-delivery models beyond on-premise to hosted and managed-services environments. In addition, some CCPM providers are also looking to lower the risk of entry by enabling their customers to bite off smaller, more modular chunks rather center,’” Davies says.“But there’s a need to have more of an end-to-end process view of performance management.” Davies also expects CCPM will soon shed its standalone status. “It’s going to be part of a broader suite, either workforce optimization, CRM analytics, or just CRM,” he says. There’s already been some recent activity on the workforce side of the equation, including: Witness’s 2005 acquisition of WFM vendor Blue Pumpkin; the acquisitions of Performix and WFM player IEX by NICE, which already had strong analytics functionality; Spanlink Communications’ 2006 purchase of Calabrio, another WFM vendor; Verint’s purchase of Witness this year; and Aspect Software’s 2006 acquisition of quality monitoring vendor SophistiCom Technologies and its 2007 partnership with Merced. (Merced, for its ADOPTION ANGST It’s important to note that performance management’s penetration into the contact center has been sluggish at best. While the market will expand by 27.5 percent this year and 28 percent in 2008, the adoption rate for CCPM tools was at a paltry 1.03 percent in North America in 2006, according to DMG Consulting. The market’s poor adoption rate is the result of several underlying dynamics. In addition to the need for the market to clearly communicate the value proposition of such systems, CCPM applications aren’t exactly easy on the checkbook. Best-of-breed tools are typically sticker-priced at about $1,000 per user, according to one analyst. Another huge impediment to stronger CCPM adoption boils down to the nuisances of integrating data from multiple systems. “The more complex the call center environment is and the more tools you’ve got in there, the more complex it is to actually do the implementation, and that has been a hindrance in the past,” Davies says. Companies must commit to data integration, and that means business and IT have to be aligned, adds Merced’s Selcow. “There are obviously incredible benefits that are derived when you integrate all that data and there’s a common fact base,” he says. “But business and IT aren’t always aligned. Sometimes just the daunting nature of undertaking that data exercise can get people to say,‘I’ll do that next year.’ ” And, Ri Pierce-Grove, analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor, says, “Effectively uniting all www.destinationCRM.com “If you’re trying to juggle three metrics, then performance management is a good tool to use because you can have all three metrics expressed, and you can begin to see how they interplay with each other.” than take the all-or-nothing strategy, according to AIM’s Smitheman. That approach may pay off handsomely. “If you break things into modules, people can understand them better,” Fluss says. part had previously partnered with IEX delivering PM functionality powered by the Merced Performance Suite.) Vendors such as Envision Telephony have developed WFO capabilities internally. Other expected developments include a much-improved focus on workflow and applications becoming more industryspecific—tailoring out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, and workflows for particular verticals. And there will also be continued interest in making use of real-time stats. “Call centers that are successful with performance management are looking at the overall historical record of the agents’ performance, as well as monitoring and measuring their performance in real time,” says Larry Skowronek, vice president of product management at Informiam, a performance management vendor specializing in real-time applications. “It’s about, ‘See a problem now, fix it now.’” Contact Associate Editor Coreen Bailor at cbailor@destinationCRM.com. 29 THE FUTURE OF CCPM Clearly, the market is still far from achieving widespread recognition—but that may change, according to Saddletree’s Stockford. “Once it’s more widely accepted in the contact center and the benefits are better understood, we’ll start to see performance management applied to back-office functions,” he says. Another area that is expected to generate more interest is CCPM’s use throughout the customer lifecycle. For example, a customer may phone a contact center, but a direct result of that interaction may be a field service visit by an engineer, a process that can be tracked with a PM tool. “At the moment we see contact center performance management as just ‘how the agents are performing in the contact CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | NOVEMBER 2007 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - November 2007

CRM - November 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity Have You Caught It? The Mother of Enterprise Information Market Focus: Technology: The Simple Truth about Complex Manufacturing Q&A: Gianforte Talks CRM Required Reading Predicting Profitability Checking the Pulse of the Contact Center Cast a Narrow Net Modern Times, Modern Methods Primos Hunting Calls Snares Efficiency Nailing It Down Moving in on Mortgage Delinquencies RDS Delivery Delivers on Service Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - November 2007

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