The summer is almost over in Seattle (it seems like it just started), but it’s sizzling here at Envision, and Ventana Research just confirmed it!  Not only were we rated as a “Hot Vendor” in their 2010 Value Index for Agent Performance Management, but we’ve also earned the highest ranking of any vendor in the Customer Assurance TCO/ROI category.

According to Ventana, the TCO/ROI category applies evaluation criteria designed to assess the value the vendor delivers with its product. Ventana Research also ranked Envision as a “Hot Vendor” in the adaptability category, which applied evaluation criteria designed to ensure the products can be configured and customized to meet the needs of a given business.  So while we’re not normally prone to a lot of tooting of our own horn here, this time we’ve got the whole band playing!  Want to learn more?  Read this!

Every year, Envision recognizes some of our customer’s more note-worthy achievements at our annual Customer Forum.  The Envision Excellence Awards are given to customers who have implemented solutions that have transformed their businesses by improving quality and/or business performance to deliver exceptional customer service, from agents’ desktops to enterprise decision-makers. The 2010 winners are:

Quality Monitoring and Coaching Award:
Presented to an Envision customer that has applied an Envision solution for coaching and development and has integrated it into the lifecycle of their quality program to optimize agent performance and deliver legendary customer experiences.

Winner: Partners Healthcare

Envision Spirit Award:
This award is presented to an Envision customer that has demonstrated excellence in creating a high-performance culture. This customer exudes a high level of company spirit and has implemented a strategic program to build morale through motivating its contact center employees.

Winner: Delta Hotels

Envision Enterprise Value Award:
This award is presented to an Envision customer that has demonstrated excellence in proactively leveraging Envision solutions to deliver organizational value extending beyond the contact center to improve business performance.

Winner: Alaska Airlines

Envision Innovation Award: This award is presented to an Envision customer that has demonstrated excellence in market-leading innovation by leveraging Envision technologies to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Winner: WestJet

Congratulations to all of our winners!

First of all, a big thank you to everyone who attended the recent 2010 Envision Customer Forum. Attendees confirmed the value of the customer-oriented “Envision the Possibilities” forum through surveys, in which 100% of attendee respondents indicated being satisfied with the event and plan on attending again. 

During the event, Envision users previewed and responded to the Envision product roadmap, exchanged best practices information and offered information about their individual business drivers and the corresponding technology needs.  If you would like to request copies of the information presented during the 2010 Customer Forum, please feel free to contact us at events@envisioninc.com.

A special thanks to our keynote and customer speakers for the fantastic content they provided throughout to help make it such a valuable event for all of our attendees.

Do you know the actual ways to improve the productivity and efficiency of the call centers? In this article from Call Center Café, you will come across some of the most essential ways to kick up the efficiency and performance levels of the call center employees.

Having the right contact:

Why do your customers call for a live help? The answer to this question happens to be very simple. When your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is not capable enough to respond to the queries quite satisfactorily then it will be important enough for you to identify those reasons behind calls so as to reduce the total handling time quite significantly.

Some of the wonderful techniques like IVR recording, customer database, tick sheets, call coding can really help or ensure the less wastage of the time. If you can really ensure this above system, then you will be able to highlight what is likely from your company in terms of offering a range of quality call center services.

The need of Logical Skills:

It is the logical skills of the customer service representatives that can dramatically improve the call center output and reduce consumption of the total time on per service basis. In this respect, you can pair up both skills and work that are found relevant and symmetrical to one another in terms of customer services and knowledge retention. The administration should always be taking good care of the employees and not put much of burden on the employees in the process. This will help to improve the customer experience to a great extent.

Eyeing on the Recruitment Procedure:

Go for quality recruitment. Always make sure that you are conducting quality checks throughout the entire selection procedure. Be it a non-voice or a voice service, agents should always opt for rigorous procedures.

Choosing the best:

The workforce of any company happens to be your asset. Begin with picking up the gems right from the very beginning for your own customer service center. It will always be the experienced people or the quick learners who will be taking less time to learn and bring about the higher understanding of the job and their individual commitment.

Self-management:

There is no use of checking the call center employees 24/7. In fact there is no use of a strict reporting system unless the employees include the dedication towards their own commitment and work. To offer a suitable workspace while taking care of the work flow, the call center set-ups should also try to accept and maintain flexibility during the working hours.

Follow some of these above techniques and experience that this will surely help you to minimize the in-house costs. You will save your investment from draining out. Additionally, these ways will prove to be effective, fast and will never cost you. You can be sure of the methods to bring about the desirable results and efficacy at work.

Want to learn more? Check it out!

I recently read an excellent post on Peter Bregman's How We Work HBP blog that made a lot of sense to me on multiple dimensions. 

• Create an opportunity to fulfill a commitment, even when one doesn't naturally exist, and then fulfill it, not just once but always. 
• More often than not, the secret to customer loyalty lies in the little things that you can generate across the customers' experience of your product or service. 
• A complete picture of the experience life cycle cannot be gained by looking at just numbers.  It involves contribution from across your workforce - thus making it harder to implement and impossible to copy & replicate too - thus a sustainable competitive advantage.
• Not only did the GM consider it an honor to work for the Four Seasons, he considers it an honor to work with his employees.  Really.

Lessons learned.

Post tags: Contact Center Technologies

Post tags: ACSI, Elizabeth Glagowski, 1to1 Media, call center, call center best practices, contact center, David VanAmburg

Today's Call Center Quick Tip comes from Kathie Zeier of SUPERVALU:

Track Scores by Specific Attributes

We create a monthly report comparing team's scores by attribute. This is currenly done in an Excel spreadsheet. This format quickly identifies areas where perhaps not all evaluators are calibrated on an attribute or where additional training may be needed for a group or for everyone. In calibration sessions, we focus on the attributes with the most variation. 

Today Tom Vander Well wrote another great blog entry on call scoring and the curse of "Yeah, but..."s. As Tom stated, it can be difficult to be objective when you're scoring calls.

In the last center I managed, we made QA analysts put a quarter in the jar if we heard a "Yeah, but…" There were no "Yeah, but"s allowed. The only fair and consistent way to score was to ask ourselves to what level did "this" CSR on "this" call "this" time accomplish the skill. We were able to answer that question by reviewing our brief but clearly articulated definitions for each skill in our QA guidelines.

Read more tips and tricks about calibration in the call center and call center coaching.

Post tags: Tom Vander Well, calibration, call center agent, agent development, call center, contact center

flickr photo courtesy of bek_alkaline3

Post tags: Kathy Zeier, calibration, call center agent, agent development, call center, contact center

flickr photo courtesy of steveleenow

During today's Webinar with Andrew Roberts of Free & Clear^®, one of our guests inquired about making sure that evaluations between home-based supervisors and supervisors within the corporate offices were consistent.

As a best practice, I would say that the key to consistent evaluations, regardless of where supervisors are physically located, is calibration. I have written a few entries in the past about calibration that you may want to reference as you are setting up your QA programs:

• Calibration: Removing Variation in Interpretation
• Outcome & History in Calibration 

Ultimately, your program will be most successful if you have open lines of communication and hold regular calibration sessions.

Post tags: Andrew Roberts, Free & Clear, home-based agents, calibration, contact center, QA, teleworkers

flickr photo courtesy of Walkabout Wolf

This week, Tom Vander Well wrote a great blog entry about the role of history and outcomes in scores. His article got me thinking about calibration. Here is how I responded to his entry:

Calibration credibility and objectivity are crucial to the overall success of your quality program. Here are two things you can do to ensure the integrity of calibration:

1. Have clear definitions of what it takes to accomplish each skill. This is especially important when dealing with soft skills. With “empathy” for example, your definition might read something like “Convey understanding, helpfulness and concern when customer is inconvenienced or shares an empathetic experience by acknowledging the callers emotion by expressing empathy through words or through acknowledging statements.” When evaluating based on this definition, the evaluator will be looking specifically for acknowledging statements such as "I'm so sorry that happened to you."

2. Score subjective skills such as empathy on a 3 tier basis. Did not demonstrate the skill = zero points, Developing the skill = partial points and Mastered the skill = maximum points. This type of scoring along with a good definition takes some of the subjectivity out of the equation and back to the task at hand. Did the agent, on this call, this time, accomplish this skill?

I've talked about calibration in the past, and I'm sure that this is a subject that we'll touch on again. How do you handle calibration in your contact center?

Post tags: contact center, contact centre, call center, call monitoring, calibration, call scoring, call metrics, QA, Quality Assessment

This week, Envision launched a new solution to help companies protect sensitive data within the contact center. I encourage you to learn more about the solution and let me know what you think. Is this something that your company is grappling with?

If you have more than one person who is evaluating your call center agents, you better be calibrating on a regular basis. Why? Because a lack of calibration can undermine the inegrity of your contact center quality progam. In fact, many say that a lack of calibration is the #1 reason that quality programs fail. It is not uncommon for one evaluator to rate a particular skill as “meets expectations” while another evaluator scores the same call as “exceeds expectations.” Quite simply, people just view things differently. The variance of this interpretation is unfair to agents and can have an extremely negative impact on your center. Implementing a process by which you remove variation in interpretation — calibration — is the best way to prevent perceived favoritism or inequality because it teaches evaluators how to score or grade using the same criteria. Successful calibration is not easy or quick. It will take many heated hours of discussion, considerable commitment and a lot of patience, as people will fight for what they believe. In order to achieve successful calibration, you must first identify and document the performance criteria to be evaluated. Most centers have done this with their evaluation form. Next, identify and document a definition or standard for each criterion. If you’re grading using “Yes” or “No,” then your definition should state what it takes to achieve “Yes.”  If you are grading using “1, 2, 3” or “meets, needs or exceeds,” then list a definition for each of these measurements. You will use these definitions when evaluating and calibrating.

The next thing you’ll need to do in the calibration process is to train your contact center evaluators on the performance criteria and outlined definitions. Once this is complete, you are ready to start scheduling evaluator calibration sessions. Calibration sessions allow evaluators to get together and listen to customer interactions, evaluate the interactions based on predetermined standards or definitions and compare their scores. Evaluators should discuss the differences of each evaluation until they come to agreement on a common score.

Be sure to check out my archived Webinar entitled "Calibration: Remove Variation from your Quality Program."  It is listed on the Envision Web site under "Web Events."

Post tags: contact center, calibration, contact center coaching, call center, contact centre