Bear Witness to All Your Call Center Interactions

Software Magazine, Feb, 2000 by Paul Desmond

It's no secret that companies are interacting more and more with their customer via e-mail and the Web. But are those customers getting the same level of service they would if they used the phone?

Most companies simply can't answer that question yet, and it could be costing them. While tools for monitoring phone conversations in corporate call centers have been around for years, similar tools to check up on e-mail contacts and Web-based communications are just now hitting the market.

Witness Systems Inc., Alpharetta, Ga., (www.witsys.com) recently launched its eQuality suite of tools for monitoring, recording, and analyzing call center interactions of all types. The eQuality Response component handles e-mail customer interactions, while eQuality Interactive monitors and records Web chat applications, collaborative browser, and page-push communications. The company has long had voice recording and monitoring systems with its flagship Witness system.

"In order to properly run a contact center, you really do need a holistic view," says Blair Pleasant, director of communications analysis for The Pelorus Group, a consultancy in Raritan, N.J. "The telephone is just one aspect of it now."

Improving Interactions

The key to the eQuality products is they capture an agent's responses to a customer in context, says Kevin Hegebarth, director of product management for Witness Systems. If it's a voice conversation, it is captured in conjunction with whatever data the agent is looking at on their desktop. If an agent is chatting with a customer via the Web, each keystroke is captured along with whatever pages the agent was seeing at the time.

All these interactions are recorded, so supervisors can review situations with call center agents and educate them on what they did well and what needs improvement. The tools also help companies to determine agents' core strengths, Hegebarth says. Maybe some are more suited to handling e-mail interactions than voice, for example.

Witness also offers a Performance Analyzer, which collects data from all the other modules as well as from ERP systems, automatic call distributor records, and customer relationship management systems. The analyzer can crunch data in myriad ways, enabling you to create trend reports, ensure consistency of agent response across mediums, and determine data such as the average number of sales per call or even average dollar value per sale.

In that fashion, you may determine that one agent doesn't handle as many calls per hour as another, but nonetheless brings in more revenue per hour.

The eQuality suite is all software based, running on Windows NT. The eQuality Response application is priced at $49K; eQuality Interactive is $30K. The eQuality Analysis component is $26K and an Evaluation module, for tracking agent performance, is $30K.