The appeal of technology is that the potential of what it can do seems to be apparent before anyone uses it. But that's where assumptions about technology can be costly. A hammer is designed to drive a nail into a block of wood, but how precisely it accomplishes this effort depends on the carpenter. The hammer is useful because the carpenter know his or her profession.

In call centers, we can credit technology with transforming a process like scheduling agents or routing calls from an art to a science. For the past few years, there has been an analogous effort to transform the evaluation of a call center's performance into a science as well. The problem is that performance management isn't something you can easily render in the form of a tool. And even if you have such a tool, its efficacy in improving your call center's performance depends on you.

Some types of call center products, like headsets and electronic displays, define themselves. Other types of products require broader explanations. With call monitoring, for example, what distinguishes a call center manager's approach to using this technology isn't necessarily how and when the center records calls, but what the manager learns from listening to conversations. If call monitoring only refers to processes it automates, like recording and playing back calls, then call monitoring isn't sufficient to make call centers run better. Call center managers recognize that since recordings don't evaluate themselves, they need to enable agents - and the companies they work for - to improve the outcomes of subsequent conversations agents have with customers.

Similarly, when we talk about performance management, we have to be clear about whether we're referring to a product category or a business strategy. We've already come across this type of confusion with customer relationship management (CRM). As is true with regard to strategies for maintaining connections with customers, companies have to establish strategies for continually improving their performance because they lose customers and money when they don't. But referring to a piece of equipment or software as a CRM or performance management tool reveals practically nothing about what the tool does.

Our call center community has adopted the convention of affixing the CRM label to software for keeping track of information about customers. It's entirely possible that we'll adopt a similarly consistent definition of performance management software to refer to a type of tool that lets call center managers wrap all the measurable things they care about into an index or scorecard.

With that said, it's important to remember that improvements in performance don't come about by using software; they're the result of posing the right questions. As Keith Dawson has written in the Editor's Page in Call Center Magazine's May 2005 issue, the best place to define performance is to look at why your company has a call center in the first place. Is your call center's function interchangeable from your company's Web site? Or do agents offer service that makes both the center, and your company, unique? How do you measure and prioritize the needs of your customers with the needs of your company and the people you supervise? It's not hard to envision how answering these questions can inform your priorities for hiring agents and selecting technology.

To achieve precision in how we define performance management software, we need to achieve precision in how we think about performance. Tracking metrics is easy; choosing metrics is hard. Call centers need far less guidance with calculating than with identifying metrics that matter to them. The goal of performance management isn't to validate the purchase of performance management software; it's to improve, on a continual basis, how your call center fulfills its role.

All software can do is automate the process of tracking performance indicators. If your criteria for evaluating your call center are at odds with your company's mission, then how you track these criteria is immaterial.

Only call center managers like you can recognize what underlies and sustains your call center's performance. Call centers are becoming more adept at evaluating their performance, thanks to teamwork among call center agents, team leaders, managers and customers. Call centers are listening better to customers, both to their conversations with agents and the feedback that follows, instead of requiring agents to ask, "Did I provide great service?"

Call centers are also taking it upon themselves to align how they hire, train and evaluate agents, even if these disciplines are under the auspices of separate departments within their companies. Rather than focus on how long it takes for an agent to answer a call, call center managers are articulating what these centers contribute to their companies and customers.

These are the stories about performance management we need to hear about. Nobody learns anything if we reduce a call center's efforts to improve its performance to a statement like "And after using So-and-So Inc.'s software, we improved our performance by 314.15% and achieved a return on investment of 271.82%!"

Progress in performance doesn't come from collecting more types of data; it's the result of incorporating perspectives from a greater variety of people. If we equate performance management software with a performance management strategy, then we are like carpenters who seek advice from hammers and nails rather than from other carpenters.

You and your fellow call center managers are the best sources of ideas for improving your call center's performance. We need to encourage this collaboration, and enable it to occur among companies and across industries. We need to share and highlight effective strategies that originate with the people who make call centers run. By focusing the story of performance management on people, and not solely on technology, we'll be better able to demonstrate why call centers, and the customers they serve, are worth keeping. Posted by Joe Fleischer at Art Rosenberg On Customer Contact Outcome Metrics and "NBR"

Feedback from the esteemed Art Rosenberg (of fame) on a recent Call Center article:

Just read your Call Center Magazine editorial about , and, while I don't disagree with the premise, I don't think that's all there is to it. I think you and others are finally getting the message that customer contact outcomes are the payoff metrics, but there is still some confusion when it comes to comparing the apples and oranges of customer needs.

On the one hand, there is the potential value of the customer, on the other hand there is the actual outcome. Then, there is the real need of an actual customer for a given individual circumstance, compared with other needs at other times. Yet, we try to second-guess what customers want by simply identifying them or looking at their past activities, rather than finding out what they need this time, and then exploit "skills-based" routing logic to assign the call.

We really should change the name of SBR to "needs-based" routing (NBR) to reflect the emphasis on what the customer really wants for a current contact attempt. We also shouldn't guess about whether a customer wants to wait in queue or can be contact within a reasonable period of time. After all, returning a contact to a customer with a cell phone, IM, or email is not the big problem it has been with a location-based telephone number! With IP-based network infrastructure, "virtual" customer-initiated contacts will become more multi-modal and, therefore, "transmodal," as customer needs are dynamically treated. This will enable customers to be handled efficiently based on their particular needs and circumstances, regardless of their initial mode of contact, which , by the way, may becoming more and more web-based, rather than telephone-based. "FCR" may well involve a strategic combination of live assistance from one or more customer-facing staff in combination with self-service applications.

Art, for the record, I agree - and the more I think about it the more I think the place where call center management has failed in the last few years has been in grasping the changing nature of what customers want and how to measure outcomes intelligently.

In next month's editorial, I'm gonna write about the fact that we don't even know where they're calling from, in an era of IP phones and wireless. The industry really hasn't faced up to the challenges these problems pose, including the ones you point out. Posted by Keith Dawson at The Secret Lives of Agents

If you want an inside look into what agents are really thinking, just search the Web. Recently, we came across a couple of interesting blogs said to be penned by call center employees.

One of our favorites, is practically a guide on how not to run your call center. The author describes his blog's mission as: "Exploring the mind numbing insanity and childish corporate culture of an unknown call center employee."

The anonymous agent waxes on about everything from his relationship with supervisors, motivation and morale, hold times and angry customers.

A more disturbing (but equally amusing) blog is . But what makes this blog so unsettling is that it's authored not by an agent, but by a call center manager. Although the author recently resigned from his job (which is probably a good thing), it's worth the read to see how far up the chain disillusionment really runs.
Posted by at April 11, 2005 Walt Chimes In On Speech Rec

I've received some interesting (and on occasion a bit heated) responses to my last , in which I expressed a little skepticism about the quality of most speech-enabled IVR applications. Walt Tetschner of ASR News, a longtime observer of the speech rec industry, is someone who doesn't pull his punches when he evaluates trends, developments, vendors, or, as I've now learned, bloggers. This is a most admirable trait in journalist. He seems to agree generally with my premise (there are too many bad speech apps out there), but he made some excellent points in some e-mailed comments that I'd like to share:

Walt suggested that I was far too focused on testing procedures, and not sufficiently attentive to flaws upstream in the design process. But my paraphrase perhaps doesn't do justice to his words. What he actually said was, "...the large number of poor speech-enabled implementations is directly related to the basic design process being flawed. Additional testing does not improve a poor design very much. Many of the poor implementations are performing precisely as they were designed and intended. Reality is that you cannot make chicken salad from chicken poop."

Walt's absolutely right (I tried that chicken salad thing, and it really doesn't work). Any design process that doesn't have the needs of the end-users in mind, and any set of testing specifications that doesn't address those needs, is doomed from the start. Good testing will not improve an otherwise bad application.

Still, usability testing should be an effective gateway to deployment, as well as an important step toward making post-deployment improvements. A good call center manager would not think of hiring an agent without putting him or her through a battery of , usually including simulated calls. I'd suggest that the same approach to testing speech recognition applications is healthy, if not always practiced.

Walt also said that it wasn't fair to compare a limited vocabulary enterprise app such as Avaya's UCC (which, by the way, I still find impressive) with more open-ended customer-facing speech rec apps. That's fair enough, so here's a more appropriate example that several readers have recommended to me:

Amtrak's Julie reservation and information system (1-800-872-7245) is a customer-facing speech app that is well designed, flexible, user-friendly, and properly tuned. She's very clear, she recognizes a variety of answers (she missed "You betcha!" as an affirmative response, but "Yup!" worked just fine), she offers important information (she told me that my hypothetical trip from Washington, DC to visit my uncle in Greenville, NC was subject to delays), and she's not shy in offering the option to speak with a live agent. All-in-all, Julie easily passes my "modified Turing test." Not bad for a four-year old.

The telephone directory assistance application from Tellme Networks also earns high marks in my book. If every speech app I dealt with were as good as these two, I would have written a much more positive, albeit more boring, blog. (BTW, Walt had an observation on these choices, too¡ªhe warns that preparing a speech interface that is stong on personality is expensive, and poses the risk that some people might not like the system. He, too, liked Julie, though).

Some of my more astute readers have discerned that the purpose of my speech rec blog entry, and the related contest, was to identify the best practices in speech recognition, not to vent my ire (OK, some of it was venting, too, but that was secondary¡ªyou try to get prescription info from Medco's IVR, and you'll want to vent, too.). In the best of all possible worlds, I'll receive so many first-rate speech app contest entries that I'll have to put my criticisms to rest for good.

Nothing would make me happier than having to eat some humble pie on this issue in the pages of Call Center magazine. But, until that happens, I'm going to remain skeptical about the whole business. Posted by at April 08, 2005 Have You Seen Our IP Research?

Our own Team Rosenberg (that's Art Rosenberg and Allan Rosenberg, no relation) have crafted the most exhaustive study ever done on IP migration strategies for call centers. It's a keeper. Posted by Keith Dawson at 10:41 AM What Europeans Care About

The European 2005 Contact Centre Trends Market Survey is out. This is a study conducted on behalf of Aspect by research firm Strateco.

The highlight: "customer satisfaction" emerged as the highest priority key performance indicator (KPI) for interviewees in both German-speaking countries and in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The study involved interviews with 520 contact centre professionals across Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and the UK.

In German-speaking countries, 36.8% of contact centre professionals said that "customer satisfaction" is their highest priority KPI. In the UK and Ireland, 29.8% agreed. Last year the the highest priority KPI reported was "adhering to service level." Posted by Keith Dawson at 10:38 AM The Little Fraud Heard Round the World

From a , now circulating around the English-speaking world:

Three former employees of Indian BPO firm MphasiS have been arrested for allegedly siphoning off $300,000 from Citibank customers after stealing account details while working at an offshore call centre in India.

According to local press reports, the three former MphasiS employees were arrested in Pune, India along with nine others.

The former staff, who left MphasiS in December last year, are accused of stealing money from four Citibank accounts after obtaining customers' usernames and passwords while working at the vendor's call centre in Pune. The stolen funds were transferred into new accounts that were set up under false names and e-mail accounts.

The theft came to light when the Citibank customers noticed the funds missing and notified the bank. According to reports, the US bank tracked the activity back to Pune.

The arrests have again raised fears regarding the security of customer data at offshore centres. John McCarthy, vice president at Forrester Research Asia Pacific, told reporters in Australia that the thefts could result in a 30% reduction in the amount of call centre work Western companies offshore to firms in India.

In my humble opinion, Mr. McCarthy ought to have his analyst's license revoked. There's going to be a 30% drop in offshoring because three morons stole from four accounts? Please. This kind of thing, though unfortunate, happens every day in the US, the UK, and around the world. The fact that such a small scale theft came to light shows that the process actually works: customers report missing money; missing money is returned to customer; people who steal are caught. The fact that it's worldwide news is the shame.
Posted by Keith Dawson at April 05, 2005 Call Center Pay Up

Onrec.com, a site devoted to news from the personnel and recruitment industries in the UK, reports that:

Call centre staff saw salaries rise by 3% at the median over the past year, in line with figures for the whole economy at that time, according to research from IRS (Industrial Relations Services) and the CCA (Call Centres Association).

But the study shows that one in three call centre operators (32%) then had to go back and revise pay rates in mid year for at least one group of staff. With nearly two-thirds of organisations (63%) reporting that they had increased staffing levels this year, the indications are that the tight labour market is feeding through into better pay rates for employees ¨C particularly for those on the lower grades. Posted by Keith Dawson at PBX: Beginning of the End

An article in the Canadian IT press reported on a panel discussion with some interesting perspectives. Some highlights:

"I don't know if any of you are comfortable with IP telephony in the call centre space," Alexander Carroll, general manager of BCE Elix, asked the audience. Bell Elix is a division of Bell that focuses on contact centre solutions." Regardless of their comfort level, Carroll said, it's a change that's being forced on the industry. Vendors are no longer putting R&D into the PBX space, he said, and the benefit of IP telephony is that it takes down the geographic barriers of PBX technology.

One panelist from Telus said: there are 15,000 call centres in Canada, but only 1,000 are large enough to justify the investment in technologies such as speech recognition. However, more organizations are starting to ask about speech recognition, even if they can't afford it at this point. "No one is buying systems without compatibility for speech down the road," he said.