In parallel with the Exhibition, Business Systems hosted a specialist conference focusing on techniques and technology to improve performance in contact centres. Judy Smyth from the Call Centre Association (CCA) started the conference with a keynote speech that highlighted the most pressing issues for contact centre managers. One common challenge for call centre managers was the need to secure support and involvement at board level. History shows that without board involvement, operational targets and standards are at risk of not being in line with the company’s strategic objectives. In addition, adding insult to injury, operational improvements that are made may not be fully understood or appreciated at the strategic level. In contrast, by securing board support, call centre management are better able to justify expenditure on developing quality monitoring and performance improvement programmes. Judy also outlined the CCA strategy to ensure best practice in staff recruitment and retention, an area that is seen as the most common challenge faced by call centre managers today. The conference tackled specific customer issues and focused on the necessity to resolve customer queries early, thereby avoiding escalation and potential loss of business. Chris Files, Quality Development Facilitator at FedEx Custom Critical gave Firsthand experiences of providing a 24/7 guaranteed service to clients across North America. Integral to the success of this service, FedEx realised they needed to provide and maintain a high quality of service at all customer-facing levels. High quality does not just happen by accident and FedEx knew they needed a sophisticated monitoring and coaching programme to deliver the results. Using the latest in call recording and analytics software FedEx explained how using word spotting and emotion detection enables managers to find specific calls or groups of similar calls to analyse. These included calls with specific customer issues or specific business opportunities that would have been missed on an individual basis. For example, calls mentioning ‘Mexico’, which allowed the company to analyse the possibility of branching into this area. Chris also explained the added value of using screen-capture and synchronising it with the audio recordings. The resulting benefit was that management identified where improvements were required in the agent desktop software and that in turn led to greater efficiency and significant savings, a real ‘win-win’ for everybody. Don’t miss the next conference! For those who missed the London event the 2006 Call Centre Conference will be in Leeds on February 22nd. The event is free and hosted by Business Systems and NICE Systems. The CCA will be providing the keynote talk and industry leaders from US based call centres, including Saxon Mortgage, will be sharing their experiences of improving staff performance and customer service. Places are currently available and will be allocated on a first come firrst served basis (note – the London event was fully booked). Written by: Business Systems UK
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