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Performance Management

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Strive to create the best possible customer contact centers for your company by focusing on the vital strategic area of performance!

Just as developing an effective contact center is a common goal for many companies, determining how to measure its success in real data and KPI’s proves to be an intriguing challenge. Read the reports below and be taught valuable lessons in effective agent optimization, training, coaching, best practices and many more important topics.

As you read, you’ll learn about the different types of software available from the best vendors. Be provided with unique insights, expert advice, top analysis and much more support about workforce optimization from the industry leaders.  To view  software vendors click here.

Performance Management

  • Dashboard Design for Real-Time Situation Awareness
    Few if any recent trends in business information delivery have inspired as much enthusiasm as dashboards. When they work, they provide a powerful means to tame the beast of data overload. Despite their popularity, however, most dashboards live up to only a fraction of their potential. They fail, not because of poor technology—at least not primarily—but because of poor design. The more critical that information is to the well being of the business, the more grievous is the failure, because the remedy is so readily available. Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design, describes the goals of "situation awareness" and explain how dashboards can be designed to monitor call center activity at this level.  Read More...
  • Moving Beyond the Queue —Focusing on the Real-Time Customer
    Forward thinking companies are developing new ways to refocus themselves on the new “real-time” customer and use customers in new ways to provide the organization with valuable information on what’s really happening. By appreciating the real-time customer and understanding the right things on which to focus, companies can position themselves for success in this new era of service. In this paper, Tim Montgomery, a highly regarded industry consultant, speaker and author explores new ideas on ways every call center can keep up with new customer demands. Specific topics include:

    --Five Attributes of the Best “Real-Time Customer” Call Centers
    --Communicating the “Real” Value of the Call Center
    --How to Make Others Want to Move Forward
    --The Key to Real-Time Resolution      Read More...
  • Smart Ways To Improve Contact Center Performance
    Businesses are acutely aware that competition to attract and retain customers has never been fiercer. As a key part of their attempt to win this contest, organizations are looking for new ways to improve the business performance of their contact centers, which are the source of their most valuable customer interactions. As part of addressing that agenda, organizations must put in place technologies that maximize the effectiveness of contact center managers and agents and help them deliver better customer experiences.  Read More...
  • How Performance Management Drives Strategic Objectives
    - Presented by Aspect
     Performance management applications allow organizations to measure business results through scorecards and analysis to help drive performance improvements like increased sales, improved collections or enhanced first contact resolution. Download this white paper to learn how to convert strategic objectives into actionable data that ensures employees are focused on the right KPIs.  Read More...
  • Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interactive Analytics
    - Presented by Autonomy eTalk
     Whether clients are contacting businesses through a website, email, or the customer contact center, organizations are constantly being held to higher customer service stan­dards. Ensuring optimum service requires all divisions of the organization to maintain a focus on the customer experience, from service to sales to billing. Download this white paper to find out how you can maintain your competitive edge with analytics.  Read More...
  • 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution
    - Presented by CallCopy
     "First call resolution is an essential metric for any best-in-class contact center for two simple reasons: it drives customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs."

    Learn how you can improve customer satisfaction and cut costs through increased first call resolution (FCR). 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution, the new eBook from industry thought leader Dick Bucci, provides an inside look at why you should implement FCR as an essential key performance indicator (KPI), and examines the challenges associated with doing so.      Read More...
  • On Demand and Enterprise CRM Integration: An Alternative Approach to Integrating CRM Applications
    - Presented by Cicero, Inc.
     When companies integrate their on demand or enterprise CRM applications with other business systems using desktop integration, they enable the solution to share information with other systems, streamline processes, enforce business rules, and deliver the promised ROI of CRM. Other CRM integration options – application connectors, middleware, integration hubs, mash-ups, etc. – are typically more complicated, take longer to implement, increase costs, and are not as agile. Learn more about desktop integration as an alternative approach to integrating your CRM application.  Read More...
  • The 5 Fundamentals of a Successful FCR Program
    - Presented by Enkata
     Industry analysts agree that First Contact Resolution (FCR) is the only true metric that delivers a clear measurement of organizational effectiveness and customer satisfaction. Improving your FCR can reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction, which in turn boosts customer retention and upsell opportunities. At the same time, a successful FCR program goes beyond the metric. Refocusing your efforts on resolving customer issues in one contact will likely cause a fundamental shift in the way your service organization operates. Sign in to download this white paper to learn the five fundamentals that help build and support a thriving FCR program.  Read More...
  • The Executive Guide to Agent Retention - How to Reduce Agent Turnover with Effective Performance Management
    - Presented by Enkata
     There is no single reason for high turnover in contact centers. Common reasons include strained relationships between agents and supervisors, poor hiring decisions, lack of career path, limited skills development, and the list goes on. Some of these are just a fact of life in the contact center. The environment can be a stressful place to work, and many of the agents are relatively inexperienced and transient. With the increasing trend of at-home agents, you have less exposure to the work habits and behaviors of these agents and they often feel isolated and ignored. The sheer volume of hiring means that some percentage of bad hires will slip through the cracks.

    But for the agents who want to be there—and who you most want to keep—there is a proven approach that has increased agent satisfaction and reduced attrition for service organizations in the highest volume industries. Effective performance management. In this paper, we’ll highlight the core best practices in managing for performance that lead to reduced turnover and the benefits related to higher agent tenure.      Read More...
  • Why are They Calling? The New Approach to Answering the Age-old Question of Customer Behavior
    - Presented by Enkata
     Why are your customers calling? If you don’t really know, you are not alone. Even those contact centers who think they know are using methods that are unreliable and ineffective at driving real change. This lack of clarity is costing you more than you think. From the 2-4 seconds agents spend to inaccurately tag a call reason, to the unnecessary minutes wasted by customers calling a second or third time, you’re wasting time, money and ultimately a chance to build customer loyalty.

    Download “Why are They Calling? The New Approach to Answering the Age-old Question of Customer Behavior” to read about leveraging technology to accurately and cost-effectively identify customer behavior to drive peak-performance and lower operating costs.      Read More...
  • Why are your Customers Calling? How Analytics-derived Call Reasons can Help you Optimize your Call Center’s Performance
    - Presented by Enkata
     Every contact center needs to know, why are customers contacting you? It is valuable knowledge. If you learn how to derive contact reasons, you can increase FCR, focus coaching and training efforts and ultimately improve the customer experience. Unfortunately, many methods used today deliver results that are not reliable or not actionable enough to drive the change you need.

    In this whitepaper, we will review existing methods companies are using to categorize customer contacts in order to:
    - Compare and contrast the call categorization methods
    - Discuss how accurate call categorization can drive improvements in contact center performance
    - Present real-world best-practices for using contact reasons to optimize the management of a call center’s performance to reduce incoming calls, increase CSAT, and improve the customer experience.

      Read More...
  • Critical Processes and Solutions to Maximize Contact Center Performance and Quality
    - Presented by KnoahSoft
     Effectively running a modern contact center with constant personnel, customer, competitive and cost pressures is an enormous challenge. Useful data can be hard to come by, and expensive to collect, analyze and operationalize. Contac centers can overcome the challenge with an integrated process flow and an easy to manage application that blends together organization-wide performance management data and tools. In this whitepaper, KnoahSoft will drill down into the integrated process elements and highlight the features and functions an effective solution must provide.  Read More...
  • Four Principles for Successful Performance Management
    - Presented by Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions®
     In today’s complex contact centers and back office processing areas, timely, well-informed decisions can significantly enhance performance and improve business results. But conventional solutions have shown that metrics alone will not transform service performance.

    In fact, these solutions often leave decision makers virtually drowning in data, unable to determine which performance indicators are truly key.

    This paper explores how one company put these four principles of successful performance management to work and shows how Verint® Performance Management can promote more effective decisions, more profitable operations, and more satisfied customers for your organization.      Read More...
  • Satisfaction to Loyalty – Understand your customer’s propensity to stick with you or shop elsewhere
    - Presented by Volt Delta
     Retaining customers especially in challenging economic times requires understanding the difference between satisfaction and loyalty and how a contact center experience can influence these perceptions.

    A significant percentage of customers actually consider their interaction with the contact center more important than any other experience they may have with a company throughout the entire life cycle of their relationship.

    How will you know if your contact center is tipping the scale in favor of excellence and retention, or poor performance and loss to a competitor? This White Paper examines methodology for efficiently capturing the Voice of your Customer as a foundation for encouraging loyalty.      Read More...
  • How Performance Analytics is Enabling Contact Centers to Achieve their Goals
    - Presented by VPI and Frost & Sullivan
     Now more than ever, organizations are looking for ways to enhance employee performance continuously and in real time, accelerate response to customer problems, and tap into opportunities to generate new business. In this Frost & Sullivan white paper, you will learn how advanced performance analytics solutions and integrated coaching and training tools can identify and address employee skill gaps and deliver the right information at the right time – enhancing performance and driving greater effectiveness in meeting customer needs.  Read More...