New call monitoring technology produces a win-win process

Telemarketing & Call Center Solutions, Jun 1996 by Judson, Jim

Silent Monitoring! Service Observance! Agent Evaluation! In many call centers, the simple utterance of any word synonymous with monitoring of call center agents elicits a collective groan. And often, the groan is coming from the management team who perform the monitoring, not from the agents! If this sounds like your call center, don't despair. New monitoring technologies are available that can turn your call monitoring process into a win-win program for both agents and management.

For call center management, monitoring of agents is a classic catch-22. The "end product" of a call center is the agent's interaction with the caller. How well the agent satisfies the caller may determine, in some cases, if the caller re mains a customer in the future. So managers know one of the best ways to measure the quality of the "end product" is through silent monitoring. But, in many call centers, silent monitoring has a down side. First, managers need to wait until an agent is on a call, which is time consuming, and they can only listen to a call live, making it hard to remember what was said. Reviews with agents are subjective and, at times, confrontational. Consolidating evaluation forms for a report can be an ordeal. Since call center managers nearly never have a surplus of time on their hands, silent monitoring becomes a double-edge sword. Call centers are forced to weigh the benefits derived from silent monitoring against the time it takes to perform the monitoring.

Put yourself in an agent's shoes for a moment. You have taken 130 calls since 9 a.m. yesterday. At 3:30 p.m. you meet with your supervisor to receive your evaluation scores for calls she monitored. Reading from one of her evaluation sheets for a call monitored yesterday at 10:10 a.m., your supervisor tells you your tone of voice was not upbeat and you processed the call unacceptably slowly. You cannot recall anything about the call itself, but you do remember that computer response time was unusually slow yesterday morning. Here lies the agent's dilemma with monitoring. Agents are professional and they want to perform at their best. They crave objective feedback and tangible information they can use in their daily work. In this example, it will be difficult for the agent to take corrective steps based on the subjective feedback received.

Which System Is Right For Your Center?

The common thread linking all of the latest monitoring technologies is the automation of the monitoring process through scheduled recording of calls and events. This new breed of monitoring system is specifically designed to provide samples of agent performance as opposed to recording every call like a voice logger. There was a time when adding new technology meant also adding a team of engineers to support the technology. Using today's monitoring systems is as easy as playing solitaire on your PC, and there are systems right for any call center. The new monitoring systems come in three styles.

Voice Recording (Basic System)

Some years ago, a basic recording system would be defined as a tape recorder. Today, basic voice recording systems are PC- or server-based with calls stores digitally on hard disks, DAT tapes or CDs. Supervisors build a recording schedule at a central PC in much the same manner a VCR is programmed, specifying an agent to record, and start and stop times for the recording. Recording takes place unattended through physical connections to the telephone equipment. The recording system is voice activated so no dead time is recorded. Replay can occur from a monitor station PC or through a touch-tone telephone. These systems significantly reduce the time it takes to monitor, they eliminate cassette tape hassles, and possess all the basic playback features (fast forwawrd, replay, etc.) for efficient call review.

Expert Voice Recording Systems

Expert systems bring a new level of sophistication to the monitoring process in a call center. Use of the term "expert" denotes system intelligence. Expert voice recorders are linked to telephone ACDs or scheduling software products to record by call or even by call type. The same links used by computer-telephony integration (CTI) products provide the expert recording systems with real-time call status information for each agent. Instead of monitoring for, say, 30 minutes per agent, expert recording systems let you monitor 10 calls per agent, per month. These systems will randomly make the recordings to nsure a mix of days and times for the total agent sample.

A subset of expert voice recording systems fills a void in the voice logger world. Instead of recording every call, the expert recording system differentiates between types of calls and records only the calls required by the user. Expert voice recording systems determine where each agent is sitting each day by querying the station log-on information in the phone switch.

Several expert voice recording systems include an evaluation form/ report generator as a standard feature. Forms are created and databased under a user-designed layout and summary reports are completed in seconds. Many of these packages are ODBC compliant, allowing for transfer of data between other company databases.