Gerry Johnsen, Product Manager, Calabrio, Inc. You Asked How can I show measurable value from my monitoring and recording system?

It is important to implement quality management tools, such as monitoring and recording, to achieve measurable, strategic business value. The contact center is a tremendous storehouse of data that can support business goals, but reaping these benefits requires first capturing the right information.

Quality management can be automated and leveraged to positively impact business. To achieve measurable value, consider the following steps:

Identify your primary business goals and key performance indicators. This will help you determine what to evaluate within the contact center, such as revenue, first contact resolution and average call duration. Making this connection will help to determine how your contact center must perform in order to contribute to the overall business.

Determine which types of calls to record. Identifying key performance indicators will enable you to set the parameters for which calls to monitor and record so you don’t spend time reviewing endless amounts of irrelevant data. These parameters should relate to which call elements have the greatest impact on business objectives, such as driving revenue and maintaining customer satisfaction. For example, to evaluate contact center performance against a goal of driving revenue, you could establish parameters that capture calls with customers who generate a specific annual revenue minimum. Supervisors can then review transcripts from these calls to evaluate agent performance.

Determine evaluation criteria.Implement a formal evaluation form that clearly spells out the factors used to measure and rate agent performance. Keep this criteria limited to no more than four measurements based on “yes” or “no” answers. For example, evaluation criteria might measure whether an agent uses the correct customer greeting, or whether an agent correctly enters an order into a contact center application. Finally, this should be a flexible form that you keep up-to-date, so switch out criteria in line with agent performance and mastery of specific skills.

Standardize evaluation processes and criteria.Make sure you’re evaluating all agents against the same quality standards. This will help to clearly define quality and expectations for everyone, and should take into account cultural and geographical discrepancies.

By following these steps, you’ll be well positioned to collect the right metrics and related knowledge from your contact center that can help you grow your business.

Gerry Johnsen is a product manager at Calabrio, Inc., a provider of workforce optimization and unified contact center desktop software that enables continuous business improvements in productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction. He can be reached at gerry.johnsen@calabrio.com. Calabrio, Inc.