Operational Performance Management: Aligning the Customer Experience with Corporate Goals

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1 Business White Paper Operational Performance Management: Aligning the Customer Experience with Corporate Goals Table of Contents Introduction... 1 Customer Service Delivery Challenges... 2 Beyond Measurement: Combining Long-Term Goals with Immediate Feedback...4 The Benefits of Operational Performance Management...5 Conclusion...6 Introduction In today s dynamic business environment, executives need to collect timely, actionable information in order to make well-informed decisions, meet performance metrics, and ensure superior customer service. That s why so many are turning to operational performance management the practice of understanding, optimizing, and aligning operational activities and processes to a common set of goals as a critical step toward continued success. By deploying a balanced operational performance management solution that joins the strength of historical analysis with the urgency of real-time response, you can achieve a more optimized approach to managing customer-impacting activities, identifying problems wherever they emerge, and taking immediate action to address them. This combination of up-to-the-minute metrics and longer-range business information helps close the loop so that you can attain greater visibility into customer service operations while maintaining alignment with overall corporate objectives. While business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence (BI) tools can prove helpful, most provide only partial solutions for accessing the actionable information that businesses need. With these tools, a time gap typically two to three hours often remains between the occurrence of an event and the generation of a report about it. Genesys flexible and scalable Performance Management Solution addresses both historical reporting and real-time management across the enterprise. Businesses can therefore gain unparalleled visibility into both the mission-critical data and highlevel business intelligence that can make each customer s experience as positive as possible. That s a major benefit for your customers and a clear competitive advantage for you. May 2009

2 A Business White Paper: Operational Performance Management page 2 of 7 Customer Service Delivery Challenges In the customer service arena, the delivery of an optimal customer experience depends on response times measured in minutes rather than hours. A two-hour response gap is impractical at best, and seriously detrimental to your business at worst. Under such circumstances, by the time management hears about a customer service problem, the damage has almost certainly been done. What s more, too many companies still approach customer service as if it were an isolated cost center rather than an integral part of their overall business strategy. Even though they almost certainly have applications in place to manage other major areas of the business such as finance, quality control, manufacturing, and human resources they haven t implemented applications that intelligently manage and report on customers experiences. For example, they have no way of knowing whether operational drivers for customer service are aligned with business goals. As a result, even when individual employees or lines of business are responsible for the customer experience, they re never really in control of it. Companies need as much visibility into their customer service operations as they do into every other functional area of their business. Yet that level of visibility can be particularly challenging when, as is often the case, customer service divisions are more decentralized than other parts of the enterprise. First Financial Let s take a sample scenario. Like nearly all businesses, First Financial is weathering a stormy economy and looking at strategies to ensure continued success. Executives analyzed their customer base and discovered that the company: Gained the most profit from Platinum customers Generally broke even with Gold customers Routinely lost money on Silver customers In order to maintain profitability during the downturn, it was crucial that First Financial minimize customer churn for the Platinum group. Conversely, applying limited resources to reduce the churn of Gold or Silver customers would do very little to maintain the stability of the business. The goal: maintain as many Platinum customers as possible with existing resources. Here s how operational performance management could help them do it. Using Interactive Insights, First Financial s executives could easily turn to analytical tools to help them understand past performance, and gain access to crucial data, without relying on IT. That way, executives could keep a direct eye on trends among their most profitable customers. With the Advisor Suite of products, managers could be notified immediately whenever issues arise for instance, if the contact center experiences a sudden influx of Platinum customers in the queue to enable quick course correction. By combining easy access to historical data with real-time response to emerging issues, the company is better positioned to meet strategic goals and maintain as many Platinum customers as possible.

3 A Business White Paper: Operational Performance Management page 3 of 7 Large Transportation Company This global transporter of timesensitive documents, packages, and other materials needed to monitor 16 contact centers from one location. The solution had to enable it to improve efficiency and enhance customer service while quickly identifying service-level issues; support root cause analysis for appropriate action; view all contact center information on a single screen; and better manage the scheduling of customer-facing organizations. After implementing Genesys Performance Management Solution, the company reaped the following benefits: Problem identification time reduced from 45 minutes to just seconds Projected cumulative five-year net benefit of $4.4 million with an 11-month payback period A return on investment (ROI) of almost 300% A 1% efficiency improvement in customer service-facing employee utilization from improved call management and routing; improved intra-interval scheduling; and agent occupancy Improved adherence to corporate goals by customer service employees In fact, much of the personnel responsible for customer-related activities work outside of brick-and-mortar contact centers. Contact centers today are becoming virtual operations with: > Home-based agents > Multiple global locations > Business support and sales personnel who are often mobile or scattered across multi-site campus environments At the same time, many customer service contact centers rely on applications that measure agents performance on a minute-by-minute basis. Yet those applications are so tightly focused on the microcosm of agent activity that they fail to offer a broad enough business context to enable managers to make more informed customer-impacting decisions. Additionally, people and geographies are typically supported by a variety of technologies from multiple vendor platforms to hybrid SIP and TDM connectivity. This presents significant challenges for any company attempting to offer consistent customer service across the enterprise service that not only provides a seamless experience for customers, but also aligns precisely with overall corporate goals. Whatever the specifics of your approach to customer service whether you focus on boosting customer loyalty, ensuring first call resolution, or driving more revenue on a per-call basis all of the employees and managers responsible for customer service must work in concert to achieve your corporate objectives. Because operational performance management can drive performance standards to every customer-facing employee in real time and also instantly reveal any deviation from business standards, it can serve as the catalyst for more coordinated, data-rich, and strategically sound customer service activities across the enterprise. With the right solution in place, you can: > Achieve greater visibility into your operations which allows you to balance the latest updates with long-term business goals > Be alerted to problems as they arise so you can respond faster and more proactively to emerging customer issues > Make timely and accurate decisions which also help you maintain strict alignment between discrete customer service activities and enterprise-wide strategies for continued business success

4 A Business White Paper: Operational Performance Management page 4 of 7 AT&T Mobility This wireless telecom giant needed universal real-time visibility into its 22 contact centers located around the globe while better managing its contact center resources and holding down additional staffing costs while maintaining service levels. The solution needed to replace hundreds of real-time views across multiple Cisco WebView and Avaya CMS screens, and to improve customer service rates without adding staff. Additionally, the firm needed a faster response time to any problems that arose, and to quickly reassign resources and staff as necessary. By implementing Genesys Performance Management Solution, AT&T was able to achieve: $6.4 million cumulative fiveyear net benefit with a 29% savings in reduced staffing and 71% reduced abandonment rate 201% annual ROI with a 10-month payback Annual $75 increase in revenues per customer service employee Problem identification time reduced from 30 to 45 minutes to less than one minute More than 92% accessibility rate without additional staffing costs Beyond Measurement: Combining Long-Term Goals with Immediate Feedback If you respond to emerging issues with no clear business strategy, you will repeatedly tackle the same challenges and issues in different guises. And if you only focus on long-term business goals without tracking minute-by-minute problems as they emerge, you may be able to maintain a consistent business strategy, but risk frustrating your customers because of your inattention to their immediate needs. This tension between short-term needs and long-term goals can only be satisfied by closing the loop between potentially adverse customer-impacting events and longterm standards or best practices. A balanced operational performance management solution does exactly this by enabling you to take immediate action to address issues that arise then helps you ensure that those same actions are applied to relevant customer service strategies going forward by helping you create repeatable standards. By achieving this you: > Generate information that everyone can use. A business-centric solution that enables you to monitor, measure, and manage performance will bring real benefit to everyone in the organization, regardless of role. All employees will be empowered to use comprehensive, up-to-the-minute information so that they can better understand how their actions contribute to larger business objectives. > Combine flexibility with precision. An effective operational performance management solution should be flexible enough to mirror the high level of responsiveness and resourcefulness that you expect of your best customer service representatives. At the same time, operational performance management should be precise and accurate enough to meet your ever-changing business challenges without losing sight of business goals. > Gain multi-channel visibility. Any operational performance management solution must allow enterprises total visibility across all channels, and work seamlessly with major PBX and ACD products to form a comprehensive, multichannel customer service system. This provides a complete virtual view of enterprise contact center performance no matter what platform is used or where it is located. > Implement comprehensive performance indicators. Unlike products that limit their focus to individual agent performance neglecting to consider how those individuals function within a larger organization a leading operational performance management solution will simultaneously address the performance of the agent, the team, the contact center, and the totality of all contact centers across the enterprise. What s more, this diverse group of users will be able to view information in a business context, ensuring that the data they see is most relevant and useful to their respective areas of responsibility.

5 A Business White Paper: Operational Performance Management page 5 of 7 Too many executives assume that a gap will always exist between the most current intelligence and broad strategic goals. Yet by using a best-in-class operational performance management solution, you can help close the loop that exists whenever real-time data fails to sync with overall business objectives. Not incidentally, you can help ensure that your customer-facing employees have the tools they need to resolve customer issues more quickly and satisfactorily than ever before. The Benefits of Operational Performance Management Best-in-class companies focus on operational performance metrics that tie day-to-day decisions to larger corporate goals. The numbers speak for themselves 1 : > Best-in-class companies are nearly 40% more likely to automate the tracking of operational performance. > 95% of these companies measure customer satisfaction as part of their operational performance strategy. > Best-in-class companies are also 79% more likely to enable access to, and analysis of, operational data within an hour of a business activity taking place. An effective operational performance management solution gives you the tools you need to understand current and emerging conditions, optimize those conditions by making the necessary corrections, and align your operational drivers with company objectives. With an effective operational performance management solution in place, you can: > Combine the most current information with the proper context. When you join the strength of historical analysis with the urgency of real-time response, you ll achieve a more balanced approach to managing customer-impacting activities, no matter where they take place within your business. > Do more with less. By detecting and even anticipating customer issues long before they escalate, you can use fewer contact center resources while maintaining higher levels of customer satisfaction. > Keep your employees accountable. Measure the real-time effectiveness of customer-facing employees without losing sight of larger business goals. > Identify areas of inefficiency. With detailed, ad hoc analysis of agents interactions with customers, you can discover far more opportunities for coaching your customerimpacting employees and identifying your strongest ambassadors. > Capture events for later analysis. If you are unable to identify the root cause of a problem as it emerges for instance, a spike in calls transferred by specific agents during a specific timeframe you can accurately capture the event for more detailed review at a later time. > Collaborate across the enterprise. Approach issues head-on with teams throughout your organization, working collaboratively regardless of location or role to devise and execute practical solutions. 1. Aberdeen Group, Operational Business Intelligence, 2/09

6 A Business White Paper: Operational Performance Management page 6 of 7 > Improve your accuracy. When you have more information collected more efficiently and organized more effectively, you ll have the tools you need to make smarter, more consistent, more accurate business decisions. > Learn from experience. Customer behavior isn t static, so your approach to customer service shouldn t be, either. Adapt your analysis and conclusions to the changing conditions indicated both by real-time data and by inevitable shifts in overall corporate strategy. Conclusion Business intelligence and operational metrics are both key to understanding the performance of your customer-facing teams but neither is enough on its own to achieve a truly balanced approach to operational performance management. In order to understand, optimize, and align operational activities and processes to a common set of objectives, you need a comprehensive solution that delivers historical context and trend analyses combined with real-time visibility into customer service operations. With such a solution in place, you can create a genuinely closed loop that identifies problems as they emerge without losing sight of high-level business strategy. An operational performance management solution will only be effective so long as it spans all of your customer-facing operations, no matter where they are located throughout the enterprise and around the world. That s exactly what Genesys provides: a flexible, scalable, global solution for today s global enterprise. It delivers concise, easy-to-understand insights to business users enterprise-wide, measuring performance across all channels and encompassing a full range of customer-facing activities in multiple contact centers. Genesys Performance Management Solution addresses both historical reporting and real-time management through two industry-leading applications: > Interactive Insights. This product delivers a shared understanding of historical trends and patterns, analyzes performance within a larger business context, and permits users to answer their own questions. With so much practical business-ready information at your disposal, you ll be better able to make strategic decisions that both enrich the customer experience and keep your business going strong. > The Advisor Suite of products. This includes Contact Center Advisor, Workforce Advisor, Frontline Advisor, Agent Advisor, and Mobile Advisor. These applications enable faster recognition of all issues that impact customer service, revenues, and costs throughout your contact center operations. By deploying the Advisor Suite of products, you ll have the real-time intelligence you need to enhance visibility, accountability, collaboration, and flexibility enabling you to respond more quickly and accurately to emerging issues.

7 A Business White Paper: Operational Performance Management page 7 of 7 Genesys software directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day for 4,000 companies and government agencies in 80 countries. Our customers depend on us to deliver industry-leading solutions that help them innovatively and effectively achieve even the most complex customer service goals. With Genesys Performance Management Solution in place, you will have the critical tools you need to coordinate, analyze, and act upon a full range of operational business activities related to customer service all while keeping your focus on a common set of corporate goals for continued business success. As a result, you ll have a more responsive organization; your customers will receive service informed by the latest business intelligence; and you ll have the industry-leading tools in place to maintain your competitive edge. Genesys Worldwide Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the world s leading provider of contact center and customer service management software with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries. Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions every day, dynamically connecting customers with the right resources self-service or assisted-service to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use agent resources. Genesys helps organizations drive contact center efficiency, stop customer frustration and accelerate business innovation. For more information visit: or call GENESYS or v.1-05/09 U.S. Americas Corporate Headquarters Genesys 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd. Daly City, CA USA Tel: Fax: info@genesyslab.com Europe, Middle East, Africa EMEA Headquarters Genesys House 100 Frimley Business Park Frimley Camberley Surrey GU16 7SG United Kingdom Tel: Fax: Asia Pacific APAC Headquarters Genesys Laboratories Australasia Pty Ltd Level 17, 124 Walker Street North Sydney NSW 2060 Australia Tel: Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby recognized Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.