Agent profiling analyses individual endeavour - 15 April 2008

Call centres are traditionally revolved around the technology infrastructure and the tools that enabled managers to measure call volumes and forecast future volumes based on historical information.

However, the focus is moving to quality management, which includes monitoring calls to ensure agents follow the right process and have the knowledge to handles calls effectively, as opposed to just efficiently, and listening to customer responses.

"Listening to customers helps to identify business process, products and services that are not working, and this information can be fed back to the business units," says Scott Forrester, business unit executive at ATIO.

He says one of ATIO's clients reported that its call centre was not coping with call volumes. On analysing the types of queries agents were handling, management discovered the problem stemmed from an inefficient process in the billing department.

Companies are starting to view the call centre as an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and fix broken processes, and not just as another channel of communication, says Forrester.

He says some are also using software tools to match performance, time-keeping and retention records of their agents to the profile of the people they are hiring to get to the root of problems. It enabled a manager to trace problems with time-keeping, late-coming and absenteeism to hiring school leavers who lived far from the call centre.

in another call centre, management was looking at introducing a business-class rest area for top performers but discovered on profiling the agents that they were mostly young people. The management staff realised they should have been analysing what drove the younger agents to perform.

"The agents wanted certificates saying what they had achieved so that they could use it to build their careers."

Agent profiling is one of the functions of workforce optimisation solutions, which is also used to analyse the performance of individual agents nd the overall call centre operation, says Forrester.

He says typically in the past workforce management, quality management, e-learning and performance-reporting tools were sold and implemented as separate solutions that worked in isolation, which made it difficult to get a full picture.

As a result, information had to be combined in spreadsheets or pulled together by homegrown systems.

But packaged solutions are now available that will pull information from each of the separate tools and gather and analyse information from customer interactions and back-office application, says Forrerster.