According to officials of ProtoCall One, 27 percent of contact centers surveyed recently said their contact center is using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure agent performance.
But on a more depressing note, the same study also found that 30 percent of the contact centers surveyed do not have a reliable method of measuring customer satisfaction. That’s right -- one in three contact centers don’t bother to measure their customer satisfaction.
The poll of senior contact center decision makers by ProtoCall One, a contact center consultancy and systems integrator, shows that contact centers are slowly -- oh so slowly, as in glacially -- moving away from operational-based metrics to customer-centric metrics, but still don’t give a whole lot of priority to customer satisfaction data. Rapid call turnover is still king.
Call volume metrics aren’t going anywhere -- nearly all (95 percent) of the respondents use such call volume metrics as call abandon rate, average speed of answer and average call length to measure agent performance, as if those somehow translate into more or less satisfied customers. Workforce metrics are still used widely, the survey found schedule adherence is used by 64 percent of respondents.
Read more here.
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KnoahSoft has introduced their Harmony Suite, Contact Center Edition, billed by company officials as a modular, Web-based tool for IP-based contact centers, “built for VoIP from the ground up.”
It does all the basic things you’d expect a good product to do, supporting call recording, quality and performance management needs and initiatives, but company officials are marketing it as a way to help “build a collaborative work environment by giving all contact center constituencies – executives, managers, supervisors, QA specialists, coaches and agents – the information they need to do their jobs.”
For instance, it has tools to give a total view of the contact center, with the “Evaluate” and “Analyze” modules, giving customers “not only a workflow-enabled quality assurance evaluation environment, but tools to create customizable, role-based scorecards and dashboards to measure the performance of all agents, queues, teams, groups, sites and lines of business supported by the contact center,” as company officials put it.
The “Evaluate,” basically the quality management module, has multi-channel recording and archiving capabilities to let users evaluate voice and support transactions, such as chat and email. It has a conversation graph to flag problematic calls -- elevated lines in the graph may indicate elevated voices, among other indicators.
Read more here.
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How to make sense of the facial-recognition app Google’s working on? According to CNN, it could tie in to social networking pots Google has boiling after a few signal failures in that area –Orkut anyone? Buzz?
They’re still trying, though: “This month, Google redesigned its Profiles pages in a change that more closely resembles Facebook's site. On Wednesday the company announced a new social-search tool, called +1, that allows people to share helpful search links with their friends.”
And now this. As CNN says, “Google plans to introduce a mobile application that would allow users to snap pictures of people's faces in order to access their personal information.”
No drive-bys, though: “In order to be identified by the software, people would have to check a box agreeing to give Google permission to access their pictures and profile information, said Hartmut Neven, the Google engineering director for image-recognition development.”
Right. And as we all know, such impenetrable firewalls have never been breached. It would certainly be beyond the capabilities of any 19-year old to snap a picture of a pretty girl in a bar, hack into a database, find out her info and stalk her.
Read more here.
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At the recently-concluded ITEXPO 2011 East in Miami, TMC’s Erik Linask had an opportunity to interview Spiceworks’ IT Marketing Manager, Nicole Tanzillo.
The company is based in Austin, and was founded with the idea of looking for a way to help IT pros do their jobs better, Tanzillo said, adding that the focus was “those guys, maybe there’s one or two of them in a small business, they’re isolated,” but they’re the ones who have to handle all the IT issues for the business – the printers, e-mail questions, the server, networking, everything.
Traditionally those guys don’t have a whole lot of support in their job, as Tanzillo said, and had to use different tools. So Spiceworks created a single application to help them “do everything IT.”
It covers many of the common IT functions, such as network management, inventory, help desk and ticketing, and probably most importantly, “a discussion forum, where this organic thing happened, users could get together and share best practices in a way they couldn’t before.”
That part of Spiceworks has “exploded,” Tanzillo said. “We now have 1.3 million users, interacting, sharing best practices, and it’s all for free. They pay zero dollars for the community discussions or any of the products.”
Read more here.
