Performance Management for Call Centers

Performance Management for Call Centers The effort around assuring that the call center applications satisfy availability and performance requirements are typically not considered or are relegated to traditional IT monitoring. Whitepaper Evidant Inc., www.evidant.com (949) 609-1494

Preface There has been an explosion in the channels customers can use to interface with organizations today. The traditional channel is the Call Center, but now includes the vast array of internet services - such as email, blogs, social media (Twitter, Facebook, et. al.), websites (corporate and agents), mobile applications. The increase in the number of self-service channels is an enabler to meet market forces and customer expectations while allowing companies to reduce the costs associated with servicing these needs. These self-service channels, however, place greater pressure on service delivery by the call center, as customers who have not been able to accomplish a task via a self-service channel are now potentially frustrated. These frustrated customers will then reach out to the call center agent for problem resolution, making exceptional performance delivery critical. This challenge is further complicated by increasingly complex business processes, agent turnover and the ever driving need to reduce costs. This leaves call center executives with three levers to work with: People: The challenge of hiring, training and retaining effective agents. Process: The challenge of utilizing consistent processes across the call center BPM and CRM applications have helped tremendously in this area, but place a greater burden on IT performance being linked to call center performance. Technology: A lot of money is spent here supporting the other to levers. However, it is an area that business operations executives lack sufficient metrics to understand and manage the impact on productivity. This last element is typically only thought about when call center agents are complaining, and if not managed well can result in increased AHT, missed ASA service levels, frustrated agents, and can ultimately lead to poor customer satisfaction. Everyone has heard a call center agent utter the words, my system is a little slow today yet business operations managers typically have little insight into this issue until agents complain en masse. This typically leads to call center agents developing their own work-arounds (something we have seen in a majority of projects we have managed), masking the impact that system performance is having on their business processes. If this happens enough it becomes and organizational truism where, effectively, call center agents over-complain about technology, describing personally frustrating issues as having a higher impact than they actually do, leading management to believe IT performance is causing Service Levels to be missed or ACH times to increase. This paper discusses the challenge of how to effectively identify and monitor performance issues using valid, accurate methodologies. 1 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

Table of Contents PREFACE... 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS...2 COMMON PROBLEMS... 3 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE IS NOT ENOUGH OF A FOCUS... 3 CUSTOMER SERVICE APPLICATIONS UTILIZE MULTIPLE BACKEND SYSTEMS... 3 DEPLOYING MONITORING BUT NOT CAPTURING THE CALL CENTER AGENT EXPERIENCE...4 FAILING TO USE APM TOOLS STRATEGICALLY...4 THE SOLUTION... 5 CAPTURING THE MOST IMPORTANT CALL CENTER AGENT TRANSACTIONS... 5 CAPTURING THE REAL CALL CENTER AGENT EXPERIENCE... 6 ENABLING DASHBOARD VISUALIZATION OF THE CALL CENTER AGENT EXPERIENCE... 7 Visualizations... 8 BUILD A STRATEGY & ACTION PLAN... 9 Establish an End-User Experience Team... 10 On-Going Operations... 10 CONCLUSION... 12 ABOUT EVIDANT... 13 Evidant helps to align business and its technology partners throughout an organization. This is executed by developing and implementing a metrics and analysis strategy that utilizes business context to exemplify application performance. 2 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

COMMON PROBLEMS Application Performance is Not Enough of a Focus Understanding the effect of application performance on agent effectiveness is often overlooked when it comes to deploying or upgrading those applications. Typically, the greater proportion of effort is spent on business process flow and application usability. These elements are critical to help assure high compliance with expected business processes and to help reduce new hire training costs. The effort around assuring that the customer service application satisfies availability and performance requirements are typically not considered until after they are already a problem or are relegated to traditional IT monitoring which, by its nature, does not take into account user performance requirements. Traditional IT monitoring often does not account for end-user experience. By ignoring the impact of application performance upfront, hoped-for workflow improvements can be negated by users creating work-arounds for the screens that are slow. Or worse, it provides leverage for the seasoned reps to have disdain for the new application they are not used to and continue using the legacy application that they are more comfortable with. Customer Service Applications Utilize Multiple Backend Systems The trend toward reducing the number of applications that call center agent s need to learn and interface with has clear savings in terms of reducing new hire training time and instances when agents provide unnecessary or inaccurate information, and improving business process compliance and AHT. The problem is the core systems (usually legacy systems) behind the application were not typically architected with a BPM or CRM application as a consideration, resulting in these applications being bolted on to the existing platforms and infrastructure. It is challenging to assure that these core systems and the customer service application work well together to provide a seamless environment for the agent. Poor performance or availability of these applications can have an immediate impact on AHT and reduction in service levels. This impacts customer satisfaction scores, risks negative feedback on social networking sites and potentially results in the loss of existing and potential customers. Internally it can affect agent moral and turnover rates, particularly if remuneration is tied to performance. The typical IT infrastructure monitoring fails to identify the impact on call center agents. 3 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

Deploying Monitoring but NOT Capturing the Call Center Agent Experience IT organizations will typically rely on traditional server-based and/or network-based monitoring approaches to determine whether the customer service application is performing well. These approaches, while important, only provide a marginal indication of application performance from the perspective of the call center agent. Call center agents are managed, and their performance judged, by a large number of metrics. If the systems supporting the agent are not performing acceptably, and the organization does not respond to remedy this, it is natural for the agent to find work-arounds to maintain their own performance. We have seen organizations with 1 official way to handle an incoming call, and 15 ways agents actually handle the call (one for each team!). The disconnect between system performance and the standards that agents are measured to will drive this behavior. To truly understand and quantify the agent experience, a strategy around monitoring this experience itself must be developed. This means measuring the application from the enduser s perspective. Although this last sentence seems simple it is often misunderstood. To truly capture the enduser s experience it is important to satisfy the following criteria: 1. The response time measurements are taken as close to where the work is done. Active or passive monitoring (discussed more in the solutions section) ideally should reside on an agent workstation or as close as possible. Metrics that are representative or close to what is really occurring should be avoided, unless the network conditions are well understood. 2. An end-user transaction is not equivalent to either a server transaction, an application transaction, a database query or the time it takes to accomplish a business activity (e.g., handling, beginning-to-end, a customer call). An example of an end-user transaction is a call center agent looking up a client s information. The transaction begins when the agent clicks go, after entering the client ID, and ends when the screen has updated with the client s information aka click to glass. This single end-user transaction will potentially have multiple IT-transactions associated with it. In all cases the captured end-user metrics MUST be validated by testing this means hand timing individual transactions to validate they match what the tool is reporting. Failing to Use APM Tools Strategically There are numerous Application Performance Monitoring vendors that provide capabilities for measuring end-user performance and availability. However, the tools are not the issue. The challenge is having a strategy that drives the action regarding end-user experiences that can negatively impact call center performance. Tools do not deliver the value using the tools delivers the value. 4 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

THE SOLUTION BRIDGING THE COMMUNICATION GAP Solving these issues requires a collaborative effort between both business and IT partners. In order to implement a sustainable application performance management strategy the organization should include the following key components in the plan; Capture the call center agent experience monitoring both the transactions that are most important AND in a way that most closely represents it Enable reporting visualizations of this experience Establish an End-User Experience Team to understand, implement and track the end-user experience needs of business and establish programs to take action when IT performance negatively impacts the end-users. Make sure that business leaders responsible for managing the end-users are bought into the strategy and process. This way they become supporters of IT in these initiatives. Keep the costs within reason, and proportionate to the business risks identified. Implementing a strategy this way aligns application performance management with the call center agent performance requirements (AHT, etc.), identifies how reliant the call center business objectives are on application performance, and gives your IT partners objective data to direct their efforts in rectifying identified problems. An End-User Experience Team would be responsible for developing and delivering this strategy such that it works closely with business to represent the needs, not wants, of end users. We ve seen companies attempt to manage this strategy by cobbling together people in a part-time role (in addition to their full-time job) versus assigning a single team to focus on this effort. In larger, or competitive, organizations application performance management is too important not to give it a strong, defined, focus and executive support. Capturing The Most Important Call Center Agent Transactions Determining what to monitor is as critical as determining how to monitor it. Identifying the specific end-user transactions that should be monitored requires a consistent process based on what the call center agents do most frequently (i.e., have the greatest impact on call center performance). Often organizations will ask the application development team to identify the transactions that should be monitored. Typically, they will select the transactions that have received the most complaints or that exercise the most backend systems neither of which may have a real impact on the call center. In other instances they will ask someone in the call center to identify the top 10 end-user transactions for monitoring a better approach, but can miss out on the most impactful transactions due to the human nature of prioritizing by the most recent frustration, rather than what is done most frequently. Determining what to monitor is as critical as determining how to monitor it. The key to identifying which end-user transactions to monitor is to first identify the business activities, or call flows, performed by the call center agents (e.g., member call to change their address). This process leverages the BPM work already done in many call centers. The business 5 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

activities should then be broken down into the individual tasks typically these are associated with an end-user transaction. A model of each business activity and associated time study should be built to facilitate the service level needs of the call center agent by application transaction. This methodical approach, while taking a bit more time initially, enables both IT and Business to assure that the correct end-user transactions are monitored and what are reasonable service level needs associated with them. Capturing the REAL Call Center Agent Experience The key to successful strategy development is capturing the End-User Experience as close to what it looks and feels like from the call center agent s point of view. In the world of application monitoring, this effort centers around two basic methods: Active and Passive monitoring. Active monitoring simulates what a call center agent would do in the customer service application utilizing a robot to simulate the typical tasks that an agent would perform. This robot goes through a predefined set of end-user transactions that simulate what a call center agent would perform. Closely simulating the agent experience is critical in capturing whether the end-to-end network and infrastructure is delivering a satisfactory experience that meets the needs of the call center. This type of monitoring enables a baseline of the application performance, because it uses the same set of transactions over and over again; and it also establishes the availability of the customer service applications from a call center agent perspective. Passive monitoring captures the experience of actual users (it s often referred to as real-user monitoring ). There are a range of technologies available to accomplish this. Some reside directly on the end-users desktop; others reside on a network tap, close to the end-user desktop. The advantages of passive monitoring over active monitoring is the ability to capture: The application performance call center agents are actually experiencing The relative volume of these transactions to get a true perspective on how many call center agents are being impacted Sensitive update transactions (e.g., Pay a Bill, Submit a Claim, etc.) that can be difficult to monitor using active monitoring. There are a range of tools vendors on the market today that can deliver one or both of the solutions above. Selecting these solutions often becomes the key effort that an End-User Experience Team will focus on. During this process, it is critical to remember that tools do not deliver value; using the tools is what delivers value. Call center executives often incorrectly believe that they have an end-user experience strategy once a tools vendor has been selected. When in fact they should be asking, who will deploy and maintain the tool, how will the organization be able to visualize what customers are experiencing, and most importantly, how will the organization take action on this information. (This paper does not attempt to compare and contrast the various active and passive tools vendors. There are a number of providers and the selection process, although important, is the least critical element of executing a well-developed strategy.) 6 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

Enabling Dashboard Visualization of the Call Center Agent Experience The ability for an organization to visualize the end-user experience is the next important piece of an end-user monitoring strategy. It clearly doesn t make sense to capture the end-user experience if it cannot be easily viewed and understood by both business operations and supporting IT organizations. The following are some of the typical mistakes that organizations will make when trying to provide customer visualizations: Too technically focused. Tools vendors provide technically rich visualizations, which can be extremely valuable when doing root cause analysis; however, they are typically far too busy to be valuable for obtaining a rapid understanding of the customer experience. Excessive use of cool dashboard graphics. Tool vendors tend to promote a range of dashboard elements to produce a cool looking, but difficult to quickly interpret, dashboard. This dashboard is an example of one with multiple different presentation elements. This requires the user to understand and interpret the various elements before they can be used to make a decision. Simplicity, as with most things in life, removes obfuscation (i.e., keep it simple). The key to presenting a valid, valuable and accurate view of the customer service infrastructure is having a clear understanding of the needs of the agent and then measuring against those expectations. The following are some of the critical pieces to identify for call centers: The Too Cool to Understand Dashboard The key tasks that call center agents perform (e.g. member lookup) and the specific screens that the agent needs to walk through to satisfy the most important business activities performed by agents. The performance needs of the call center agent for each screen, ideally characterized, in seconds, into the following ranges: Acceptable: Good enough to meet the NEEDS of the call center Unacceptable: Call center agents strained but able to get work done if kept at reasonable levels and/or for short periods of time Critical: Slow enough that some call center agents are at increased risk of missing AHT or service level targets Unavailable: So slow that call center agents cannot reasonably handle customers. Although IT organizations don t view unavailability in this way, end-users definitely perceive application availability this way (i.e., too slow to get the job done). 7 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

Visualizations BRIDGING THE COMMUNICATION GAP Visualizations typically center around two aspects: Dashboards and Reports. Although different, there are common issues for both and should cover the following areas: Be Accessible: The dashboards and reports should be made accessible to any associate who has a business need to view and understand its contents. Tailored for the Audience: The dashboards and reports should be tailored to the groups of associates who will be using the information. Enable Effective Decision-Making: The dashboards and reports should be easy to understand and enable quick action. The dashboards should be relatively simple, enabling the consumer to quickly understand the information presented (i.e., avoid complex presentations) and present sufficient detail with enough depth so that the user is not mislead. Represent Business Impact: The information presented in dashboards and reports should indicate how application performance is impacting the company s business operations. The use of comparisons to averages should be avoided! Include Training: Some basic training in end user metrics and business impact goes a long way. Many times when reporting is first introduced, IT and business leaders overreact to a situation that has existed for quite a while but didn t know it existed until the metric exposed it. This new information needs to be used in proper context to add value and be properly prioritized into the overall goals of the organization. Call Center Agent Experience Dashboard that BOTH IT and Business can Understand Example of simplified visual: Level of Service Delivered, Avg Response, and Availability Delivered over a period of time 8 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

Build a Strategy & Action Plan Once there is an understanding of the gaps in putting together an enduser monitoring plan, the strategy should then focus on: What applications and groups of users will be monitored? This decision should be focused on those with the GREATEST BUSINESS IMPACT. Business impact should not be confused with number of users utilizing an application but the impact to the business if those users are slowed down or cannot perform their job functions in an acceptable manner. Communication and interaction between IT and Business organizations on service delivery Establishment of an End-User Experience Team (discussed in further detail below) Here are some pitfalls that should be avoided: The goal is to have a Valid, Valuable and Accurate representation of end-user experience. Trying to do it all versus do what is most important. It is far better to focus on the 20% of tasks that business users perform 80% of the time than attempt to monitor 100% of what they might do. The 80:20 Rule should drive this effort and will not only speed up the process but requires less time and money to execute. Trying to get it right the first time. Time to knowledge is critical and organizations will often waste time in an attempt to perfect reporting, versus taking an educated guess and then building off of it. It is not how much you know, but how soon you know it. Reporting that is oriented toward baselines versus business needs. A common mistake is to use previous application performance as the benchmark for what needs to be delivered to call center agents. This approach, although valuable from a technical, or even six-sigma, perspective misses the point. It is critical to understand the business needs of the call center agents in achieving their AHT objectives, not what are they are used to getting or even what do they want. Performance that fails to meet call center agent needs equates to potential risk of increased AHT and reduced service levels not to mention frustrated customers. At the other extreme, exceeding business needs, while it sounds terrific, potentially means you overspent on your customer service infrastructure. Avoid the use of averages. This is a typical IT view that focuses on average response time. The adage that a man with his feet in a freezer and his head in an oven, on average is just fine highlights why averages should be avoided. Instead focus on the volume of instances that meet or fail to meet business needs. 9 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

Establish an End-User Experience Team BRIDGING THE COMMUNICATION GAP Establish an End-User Experience Team that is focused on these metrics this can be a single person. A successful team will include these aspects: Own the end-user experience metrics. This team will have a deep understanding business processes, tools and underlying data to provide information on how the business is impacted. Communicate with business operations managers and key IT stakeholders about how monitoring information is indicative of the impact on end-users. This role needs to use metrics to provide an outside-in view of performance and end-user experience and does not need to be from IT. Maintain the metrics. This may seem obvious, however, it is the single area where application monitoring tool implementations fail. There is nothing more frustrating for business operations managers and their IT counterparts to find out when they most need these metrics that they have fallen out of maintenance and cannot be relied upon. It is common for organizations to start an end-user monitoring project but fail to assign someone to maintain the monitoring, or set it aside as a low priority task. It is preferable to have the team that is utilizing the end-user data to also be responsible for the maintenance ( one neck to wring ). Have senior executive support from both IT and the business. On-Going Operations Develop actionable alerts for the organization. There is an important distinction between alerts and those that are actionable. Actionable alerts focus on issues that support, or hinder, those tasks identified as business needs. In addition, as business needs change the alerting must reflect this or the results will be either the organization not getting alerts, or worse, getting so many alerts that it isn t possible to decide when to take action. Here are some keys to developing actionable alerts: o o o A best practice is to initially send out too many alerts (i.e., risk the potential of a high number of false positives ) to a small group, or individuals, who can then tweak or tune the alerting to those with a small number of false positives. The End-User Experience team needs to drive alerts to the team or individual that it relates to. The idea of sending out all alerts to everyone is flawed and misses the concept of actionable alerts. These alerts, in order to be actionable, must go the team or individual who are most likely to be able to address the issue. The alerts must have a sufficient amount of information about the problem so recipients understand the issue and how it is impacting call center agents, enabling them to take action. Review trends on a regular basis. The End-User Experience Team should engage business operations managers and IT stakeholders in regular reviews of the end-user experience against the needs of the business that were established. The trend analysis should review the end-user experience over weeks and even months to identify slow degradations and periodic events that could negatively impact call center agents. The business operations teams should bring to the 10 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

review reports of poor application experiences from call center agents to help identify gaps. The End-User Experience Team needs to drive this effort working across the organization. Use the End-User Experience information to make decisions about changes, improvements, investments and event to request IT to perform root cause analysis. This information should provide evidence for return-on-investment (ROI) decisions and then utilized to validate that the ROI was achieved. In addition the organization should use this information to validate that infrastructure changes do not negatively impact call center agents by integrating the End-User Experience Team into the organization s change control process. There is often a concern that the establishment of another team means more meetings and potentially less time for real work to get done. This is a reasonable concern and makes the selection of the End-User Experience Team leader, whether internal or external to the organization, critically important to the success of this initiative. 11 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

CONCLUSION The importance of call centers in customer support hasn t changed. In fact it is arguable the importance of delivering quality service has increased as the number of self-service channels has grown. To support this, call center executives have worked with their technology partners to implement CRM and BPM systems, to enable business process compliance, reduce training costs and still maintain service levels and customer satisfaction. The resulting complexity of these highly integrated systems is now driving the need to move beyond traditional IT five-nines metrics to more business focused performance metrics. To take these common issues and turn them into a strength of the organization, management teams should employ a sustainable end user experience management strategy. This would enable the linking of IT performance to the business requirements in a manner that also accounts for budgetary goals. This strategy also focusses on the business operations in a way that makes sense to the IT organization that is tasked with supporting it. 12 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

ABOUT EVIDANT BRIDGING THE COMMUNICATION GAP Since being established in 2002 Evidant has been a pioneer in aligning Application Performance Management with End-User Productivity requirements. Evidant's core belief is that the value to the enterprise of Application Performance Management (APM) does not lie in the capabilities of the tool alone, but in the way it is configured to match End-User Productivity requirements. This requires working with both the IT and Business units of an enterprise to form a common metric - and that is what we excel at. We partner with your IT and business units to define, implement, analyze and report on your APM needs. 13 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS