Web 2.0 in the Contact Center: More than Just a Passing Twitter

Paul Stockford, Research Director, National Association of Call Centers and Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research, Paul.Stockford@nationalcallcenters.org

As we continue our series on the expected impact of Web 2.0 in the contact center, it is important to remember that Web 2.0 services will mean more than just managing Facebook and Twitter among agents and customers. Web 2.0 as a business strategy will also extend into the technology architecture of the contact center itself. As operational managers gear up to understand and manage the impact of social networking tools on the customer service function, information technology (IT) managers will as have to start thinking about how they will eventually migrate their contact center to a Web 2.0 framework.

Web 2.0 services will bring to the contact center the type of flexibility that the industry has been seeking for years but has yet to find in such past developments as computer-telephony integration (CTI) and customer relationship management (CRM) software. These solutions offered the user a great deal of customization, but the Web 2.0 framework will offer the contact center user a great deal of flexibility.

By definition, Web 2.0 provides interconnectivity and interactivity of web delivered content, whether on a handheld device, a social networking site or on the user’s desktop. Users of Web 2.0 on the desktop, such as agents, managers and executives, will find an unprecedented degree of flexibility in the ways in which they will be able to create a customized, personalized desktop with a minimum of intervention on the part of the IT staff. Agents will find the freedom to work in the same way that they have become accustomed to communicating with each other. Managers and executives will be able to support employees’ desire to use Web 2.0 services in the workplace while still being able to monitor usage and integrate Web 2.0 into workflows in a controlled manner.

Regardless of their position in the contact center, all users with a Web 2.0 enabled desktop will be able to take advantage of bringing together relevant services such as wikis, blogs and RSS feeds and combining them with other displays and functions to create an ultimately useful and efficient work experience. Users of Web 2.0 enabled desktops today often refer to this unified combination of services from different sources as a mash-up. In the contact center, a mash-up could consist of a single view of the Web 2.0 services described above along with commonly used desktop tools. Web 2.0 application processor interfaces (APIs) will enable the flexible integration of traditional tools with new services, presenting the user with a single log-in and a common look-and-feel across applications.

Although this all may sound too good to be true, development of the contact center Web 2.0 framework is already underway. Companies like Calabrio (www.calabrio.com) are embracing social networking and are creating a Web 2.0 framework that will work in concert with their workforce optimization offerings and other common contact center applications. They showed their Web 2.0 container desktop at a recent tradeshow and are expected to have a product ready for delivery before the end of the year.

It’s true that when most people think of Web 2.0 today they think of services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. For contact center executives, however, it’s time to start thinking of Web 2.0 in the broader context of its role in the customer service function not only as a familiar communications tool for the next generation of workers, but as a framework to build agent desktops and customer services that interact seamlessly to address customer needs and requirements. Web 2.0 is rapidly evolving from a fun way to stay connected to the basis for a serious customer service strategy. It will change the way we deploy and manage the customer service function in the near future. Web 2.0 is clearly more than just a passing Twitter.

From the Trenches

Technology Optimization Part 2: Reporting

Lori Bocklund, President, Strategic Contact, Lori@strategiccontact.com

If I were to poll a cross-section of call center leaders, I’d probably find a love-hate relationship with reporting software. They love the technology for cranking out tons of data and reports. But they’re not crazy about how difficult it is to find the meaningful information among all that data. Since reporting is the key tool for assessing the health of the center and identifying areas for improvement, and one nearly every center invests in, let’s talk about how to get the most out of that investment.

First, I hear and appreciate the frustration with many vendor reporting packages. One hundred or more standard reports can be overwhelming. It’s tempting to provide access to lots of reports for fear that a useful insight might otherwise be lost. It’s equally tempting to avoid the overload by using a few reports for a few simple things or worse, the wrong things, thus missing the opportunity to create focus on the business goals. Apparently the strongest temptation, because we see it so often, is dumping data into Excel or Access, presumably to get it into a manageable form in a familiar tool. The latter may “work,” but it’s not a good long-term strategy.

It pains me to see clients spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on management reporting packages to accompany their routing and skills capabilities, and then deploy small armies to manipulate data in spreadsheets. Beyond the obvious hit to the bottom line, it’s a time-intensive, error-prone coping mechanism that doesn’t scale. The mysteries of these one-off reports result in second-guessing and data distrust, and sometimes independent calculations that reap different results. Heaven forbid one report (which we’ve even heard referred to by the author’s name, such as the “Bob Report”) from one data manipulation guru – I mean analyst – says something different about a crucial performance indicator than another report.

I’m also concerned about folks who focus almost exclusively on historical reports and the “I know what happened” explanation that comes with it. Real-time reports offer the possibility of doing something about what is happening, addressing key performance requirements such as Service Level. Reports aren’t meant to be yesterday’s news. They are calls to action – both tactical and strategic.

Here are some actions you can take to optimize reporting technology and its application in the center:
1. Define a metrics strategy to focus on the right key performance indicators for your business and operational goals. Then specify what information should go to whom, how often, in what form, via what channel. Create a consistent focus across the organization and use reporting to reinforce and optimize performance. [Stay tuned for a discussion of scorecards and dashboards in my next column.]
2. Create a business analyst role to maximize the value you get from your real-time and historical reports. Define “triggers” to address performance issues in real-time along with appropriate action plans. Use trending and analysis to define strategic changes in processes, staffing, technology use, and more. Work with routing and skills analysts, quality monitoring staff, training, and IT to institute changes and track results.
3. Use the systems on which you’ve spent the big bucks. Invest in training so your people know how to use the tools and customize only when necessary. Make sure your front line supervisors and managers work effectively with the information they receive. And help CSRs understand how the information can help them balance productivity with quality service to the customer.
4. Define governance for report creation and distribution to avoid becoming slaves to the system and constantly creating unique, little used reports. Have a business reason for creating new reports, adding new metrics (more is not always better), and distributing more information to more people.

Call Centers and the Economic Stimulus Bill Part II

David L. Butler, Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers, David.Butler@nationalcallcenters.org

In the Stimulus bill, starting on page 14, the bill provides for a "Broadband Technology Opportunities Program" in the amount of $4,700,000,000. This bill provides this huge amount of money to bring broadband internet access to areas that are underserved at present within the United States. The philosophy of the bill is that the internet, and internet commerce, is like the US highway systems after World War II, or the trains before that is the main communication link with the country and the world and as such everyone should have an equal access. Everyone can and should have access, and if you are bypassed, you miss out and a person or a community can whither. So what does this have to do with call centers?

To be competitive to land a call center in a community, the town must have available a strong IT infrastructure. This was true 10 years ago, and since that time, call centers, like most organizations, are eating up more bandwidth and have become IT and energy hogs. So the access to IT is even more important today than it has ever been. I have received scores of phone calls over the years from smaller communities who say, "we have great workers, they have skills, they don't need much to live since cost of living is low, can you help us get a call center for our community?" Invariably, these communities had many of the right ingredients but after a quick check, they did not have access to IT. It is this lack of access to this infrastructure that has left out regions, inner city and rural areas, where such infrastructure does not exist. Interestingly, since call centers are labor-intensive industries they often seek out inexpensive labor. Often the inexpensive labor is in the same locations where there is little to no IT infrastructure. So there is a chance, when this broadband network is built out fully, that some inexpensive labor areas that were not on the potential list for call centers can now emerge as completive locations potentially balancing out what has to date been an unbalanced location strategy for call centers.

Moreover, as call centers continue to expand in the United States as they have for the 14 of the 15 quarters we have tracked the data, they often feel as if they have run out of good available options to choose from. A city that looks promising to one call center often looks promising to another ten call centers and before you know it, the promising aspects of that city, namely lower labor costs and less competition for labor has turned into just the opposite. So with this new broadband network in place throughout the US, there should be more choices for business to locate in areas that were previously not accessible which will help to keep labor prices in check and give you more choices for location. Additionally, for communities, this allows these towns who before could not imagine hosting a call center to become more competitive for these jobs and sell their lower costs, better standard of living, hard working and loyal citizens to call center companies. 

Call Center Comics!

If you like this comic and would like to see more write Ozzie at callcentercomics@yahoo.com and visit his website at http://callcentercomics.com/cartoon_categories.htm or just click on the comic to take you to his page. The NACC appreciates Ozzie letting us use some of his comics in our newsletter.

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