performance management for call centersinsight.evidant.com/media/148183/evidant_call_center...social...

Whitepaper

Evidant Inc., www.evidant.com (949) 609-1494

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.

http://www.evidant.com/

BRIDGING THE COMMUNICATION GAP

BETWEEN IT & BUSINESS

1 HOW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AFFECTS CALL CENTERS

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.






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.






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.

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.

“Traditional IT

monitoring often

does not account

for end-user

experience.”

The typical IT infrastructure monitoring fails to identify the impact on call center agents.






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 end-

user’s perspective.

Although this last sentence seems simple it is often misunderstood. To truly capture the end-

user’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.”






THE SOLUTION

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.

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

“Determining what

to monitor is as

critical as

determining how to

monitor it.”






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.)






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 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).

The “Too Cool” to Understand Dashboard






Visualizations

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






Build a Strategy & Action Plan

Once there is an understanding of the gaps in putting together an end-

user 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:

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.

“The goal is to have

a Valid, Valuable

and Accurate

representation of

end-user

experience.”






Establish an End-User Experience Team

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 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”.

o 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.

o 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






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.






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.






ABOUT EVIDANT

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.


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