Welcome to our new Forum for those looking to be at the lead of the sea-change that is taking place in how quality and performance is managed in our customer contact operations.
For anyone who remembers the early days of call centres 15-20 years ago, the basic performance disciplines involved using the mass of statistics around call handling and agent productivity - while balancing this with monthly call monitoring - usually 4-6 calls per agent per month.
While many organisations still work in this traditional way, the delight of working with innovators, as we do in the Planning Forum, is to see how the conventional wisdom is at last being seriously challenged.
Firstly, we have managed what we can measure. Now the industry's leaders are finding ways to measure the things we really want to manage - such as customer feedback at agent level.
Secondly, it has become clear that a random monitoring of only 4-5 calls is nowhere near enough. That's where analytics software can help - turning gigabytes of call recordings into the kind of searchable information on which call centre performance disciplines have always been based.
Now we can track and monitor what is actually going on within transactions - and provide instant access to hear the direct customer experience, to support learning and coaching.
But this is not just about analytics. For the data to be used managers need the right ways to engage people. And we need the right analytical skills to get the data that will really support this. That's the major change that's now going on - a whole new field of analytics is opening up - that is of huge benefit operationally and not just to marketing or sales strategy.
Why not read how the following companies improved Quality and Perfomance? Each were award finalists at Contact Centre Planning 2010:
Ventura Speech Analytics - Overall winner for Quality and Performance
Orange
Invesco Perpetual