Automation at the Expense of Customer Satisfaction
September 6, 2005 -- Innovative Contact Centers (ICC) are in their infancy. They are evolving out of traditional call centers, which initially were created to centralize the handling of inbound customer calls. Early call centers acquired a reputation as sweatshops, with agents locked away in darkened rooms with the single objective of handling the maximum number of calls at the lowest possible cost. Their operation was measured by poring over huge piles of data obtained from the Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system and then producing largely inaccurate spreadsheets that subsequently were used to predict future call patterns and required agent profiles. As customers called more, costs skyrocketed and companies looked to more automated methods of call handling in order to manage the costs. However, the price for this cost cutting has been a dramatic lowering of customer satisfaction.
Ventana Research asserts that in today’s highly competitive markets and with a generation of less loyal customers, this must change. Customer contact processes must mature at a faster rate and companies must pay much closer attention to managing the performance of what are now key components of their business. Real attention must be paid to customer satisfaction. Technology will play a role, but without proper attention being given to the business processes and contact center agents, much of this investment will not yield the expected returns and customer satisfaction will remain at extremely low levels.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Contact Center Performance Management Research Agenda
May 6, 2005 - Ventana Research maintains that Performance Management requires organizations to optimize their business processes while aligning them with operational strategy and IT systems. For many organizations, the first, and sometimes only, touch point for customers is a Customer Contact Center. These centers therefore play an increasingly strategic role in influencing the performance of the organization, not just as a vital, discrete entity within the organization but also within overall business performance. They can have a major impact on customer acquisition and retention, the generation of additional sales revenues and even the identification of improved ways of working and product development. Conversely, they can be a prime reason for customer dissatisfaction and termination. The Contact Center Performance Management practice of Ventana Research will focus on three major research topics during 2005: the overall mandate of the Contact Centre and its role in improving business performance, how to make the Contact Center more effective and efficient, and new innovations in the Contact Center. Each of these will be examined from both a business and IT perspective, as well as what best practices organizations need to adopt to achieve optimal performance.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Contact Center Performance Management Research Agenda for 2006
The Contact Center Performance Management practice at Ventana Research is dedicated to helping organizations improve the efficiency and effectiveness of multichannel contact centers. In 2006 we will focus on how companies can become more customer-centric and more efficient at managing interactions with customers. We will examine the people and process issues behind customer operations management, new customer interaction technologies now available to support customer interaction management, ways in which companies are reviewing their strategies for customer relationship management (CRM) and the emergence of next-generation CRM.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
CRM – The Success and Failure
April 26, 2005 - Survey after survey indicates that call centers are still failing customers. Much of this problem is attributed to the failure of the associated CRM projects, since these were expected to solve everyone’s problems. Unfortunately, like earlier ERP projects, the focus for many CRM projects was to automate the transactional flows. Systems included some rudimentary reporting on the transactions, but most didn’t provide any in-depth analysis, let alone the derivation of customer and business intelligence from the data.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Customer- and Process-Focused Performance Management
August 3, 2006 - Recent research by Ventana Research shows that most contact center managers labor under severe cost constraints. This burden makes it very difficult to meet a corporate mandate to improve customer satisfaction. Since agents represent approximately 70 percent of the cost of running a center, managers constantly must struggle to match the volume of customer calls with the smallest possible number of available agents. Yet most of the causes of calls lie outside their control. We believe the only way to maintain a balance between containing costs and satisfying customers is to conduct root-cause analyses to understand the origins of calls, communicate the results to operational management and then provide incentives to change practices so that many of the drivers of calls are eliminated.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Enkata 6 Supports Operational Performance Management
May 25, 2006 - For several years Enkata Technologies has supported operational performance management in its chosen vertical markets, Healthcare and Telecommunications. The new release of its product adds not only functionality for these two sectors but also a specialist module for consumer-directed healthcare plans, a new module to support Financial Services and technical changes to improve performance. Ventana Research believes that companies in these new markets will benefit from the experience Enkata has already gained from its existing markets and that all of its customers will benefit from the improved performance.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Envision Performance Suite Helps Improve Operations in Contact Centers
July 12, 2006 - Envision sells an integrated product suite that supports the three core areas for operating a contact center: customer management, agent management and interaction management. The latest addition to the suite, SpeechMiner, enables businesses to begin making full use of recorded calls, which in combination with other information should help business become more customer-centric. Ventana Research believes that maturing contact center technology like that from Envision will help organizations improve the efficiency of their operations.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Experienced Advice for Contact Centers
November 21, 2005 - In order to improve the performance of their contact centers, organizations need to align their agents, their processes and systems to a common set of goals and objectives that are derived from their overall business needs. Prior to the release of the latest version of its product, Opus Group supported this process through a combination of its consulting services and the business intelligence (BI) application it designed specifically for contact centers. The new release, version 3.0, not only adds new functionality to the Performance Management Analytics module but it encodes what was previously proprietary consultant knowledge into an electronic knowledge base.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Finding the Right Performance Measures for Contact Centers
May 25, 2006 - Ventana Research recently completed a study that shows companies use a variety of measures to assess the performance of their contact centers. The most popular are based on measuring how efficiently calls are handled. First-time resolution of problems is high on this list because managers see it as impacting both costs and customer satisfaction. But our observations suggest that many companies distort the real results by applying questionable operational practices. We recommend that companies seeking real performance improvements scrutinize these practices and supplement efficiency measures with others more directly related to their business goals.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
HardMetrics Maps Data Delivery
July 13, 2006 - Historically contact center management has focused on how many customer calls a center can process in a day and how well agents meet their goals, which have been centered on how well they handle those calls. Research recently completed by Ventana Research shows this is about to change: Nearly 50 percent of centers indicated they will make their incentives for both management and agents more business-related. To support this transition, businesses will need to deploy sophisticated business intelligence (BI) tools that can take full advantage of all the data sources available in a center. HardMetrics provides one of the few BI tools that specifically supports these initiatives in contact centers.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Merced Systems Addresses Performance Management in Contact Centers
June 2, 2006 - Although there are several dimensions to consider when assessing the performance of contact centers, the performance of the agents is central. Good agents can go a long way toward overcoming process or technology deficiencies; the reverse is less true. One company we have spoken with has improved its complete agent lifecycle using Merced Performance Suite from Merced Systems.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Onyx Expands CRM Offering
May 26, 2006 - Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most turbulent software markets today. Despite major takeovers, an abundance of partnerships and the emergence of a strong on-demand segment, many organizations are questioning the value, and indeed the basic concept, of CRM because they have gained only mediocre results from their CRM projects. Onyx Software has been selling a stand-alone CRM product for several years, with limited success. That now could change as its new focus on process management and analytics propels it into a market in need of new approaches.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
SAP Enters on-demand CRM Market
March 29, 2006 - At the beginning of February, because of customer demand and no doubt competitive pressures, SAP announced that it has entered the on-demand market for customer relationship management (CRM). Through a strategic partnership with IBM, SAP will offer the mySAP CRM software suite as a service that will be hosted at IBM. IBM also will provide all operational support and ancillary support services and perform customization as required. This appears to be a powerful offering from two industry giants, and it already has two large customers. Ventana Research sees this as an intriguing step by SAP, but a large step towards mainstream use of on-demand business software.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
SAP Takes One More Step in its On-Demand Strategy
June 1, 2006 - Like many other vendors, SAP likes to take advantage of its major user conferences to herald the unveiling of ground-breaking solutions. At Sapphire ’06, the company made two major announcements in the customer relationship management (CRM) space: the release of SAP Marketing on-demand and the future availability of an upgrade called SAP CRM 2006s. Ventana Research believes the first will be welcomed by companies thinking of adopting an on-demand supply model for their CRM needs; the latter disguises what we think is an admission that SAP has recognized that in order to remain competitive, it had to simplify its entire user interface.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Service-Oriented Architecture Has Yet to Arrive In the Contact Center
June 29, 2006 - Our recently completed research on Contact Center Performance Management shows that more than 80 percent of businesses rate improving customer satisfaction as their number one driver. Many businesses interpret this as improving the efficiency of their contact centers. However, mature businesses recognize that achieving that goal involves more than the contact center and that the journey needs to begin by examining the total customer experience. As with any performance improvement initiative, this effort will require changes in people’s behavior, business processes and information technology. Part of the challenge is that contact centers have become isolated business silos that must be integrated back into the business and made more customer-centric.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Technical Developments Are Broadening Customer Relationship Management
March 29, 2006 - After enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) is probably the most talked-about enterprise business application area. Analysts and vendors have touted it as the cornerstone for building customer-centric companies. But CRM has been tarred with the brush of failure as too many initiatives have been reported going wrong. Ventana Research believes a new wave of initiatives that could redeem the reputation of CRM is building, as more technologies come into this domain and companies try again to improve the effectiveness of managing their customer relationships.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
The Failed Search for a Single View of the Customer
October 17, 2005 - Responding to questions at two recent forums, 95 percent of the attendees, representing approximately 100 organizations, agreed that improving customer satisfaction was among their company’s strategic objectives. However, less than 5 percent of them said that they knew what would satisfy their customers. Is this a problem of culture, a failure to balance efficiency and effectiveness, a result of broken business processes? Or, as Ventana Research suspects, is it simply the lack of an enterprise-wide, coherent strategy for information management?
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Wrong Metrics, Wrong Behavior
May 20, 2005 - Companies today have become obsessed with metrics; everything from top-line executive measures (sales by product, region, customer etc.) to detailed operational measures (expenses by salesmen, etc.). Techniques and technologies to produce the numbers behind the metrics have proliferated; Data warehouses, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Reporting, etc. At Ventana Research we see measures as just one small aspect of Performance Management. Performance Management is the discipline of bringing together business and IT to agree on, align to and execute a strategy, supported by a series of process changes and IT systems that improve both business and operational performance. Organizations should make their metrics more relevant, consistent and auditable to support Performance Management and drive behavioral changes that are supportive of overall business objectives.
CRM Project Volume 6, March 02, 2006
Enkata Enhances Contact and Operational Performance
August 19, 2005 - Until now, Performance Management in Contact Centers has been quite immature. With the announcement of version 5 of its Operational Performance Management applications, Enkata addresses some key issues faced by Contact Center and Operations managers. Two features stand out. One, the applications span both front and back offices, which enables users to identify the root causes of customer contacts and instigate corrective action plans that will reduce the number and cost of contacts. Two, by analyzing past performance, the applications make it possible to handle new calls more effectively, improving customer satisfaction while also reducing costs. Ventana Research believes organizations in their chosen specialist markets will get great benefit from the best practices embedded in the applications as well as by working with Enkata’s experienced support staff.
CRM Project Volume 5, October 06, 2004
