Transcript Stressing Performance Voice Watch The Business Case for Performance Monitoring Today’s Discussion  Importance of Self-Service Applications in Call Centers  Importance of Voice System Performance to.

Stressing Performance
Voice Watch
The Business Case for
Performance Monitoring
Today’s Discussion

Importance of Self-Service Applications in Call Centers

Importance of Voice System Performance to Customer
Quality of Experience and Reducing Operating Costs

Using Voice Watch to Proactively Improve Contact
Center Performance
|2
Most Customer Contacts Are Handled by the
Call Center – and This Amount is Growing
Summary
• Respondents indicated
that >57% of their
customer contacts are
handled by the call
center
• Call centers are
handling increasing
amount and percentage
of customer contacts -30% increase over
previous years
Source: Purdue Research Foundation
|3
Satisfaction With IVR Self-Service Applications
Varies Widely
Self Service IVR contacts represent a majority of
call center contacts in each industry
Significant room to improve
their customer Quality of
Experience with self-service
applications – even the best
performing industry does not
receive passing marks
Note: Customer satisfaction does not include applications that are enabled with speech recognition
Source: Purdue Research Foundation
|4
Strong Financial Reasons to Increase Customer
Satisfaction with IVR Self-Service Applications
7
7
Bottom-Line
5.5
6
5
•
Cost of an IVR selfservice call is only 6%
the cost of a call
handled by an agent (45
cents vs. $5.50)
•
Significant opportunity
to lower cost and
increase customer
satisfaction by
improving IVR
application performance
Dollars
5
4
3
2
1
0.45
0
Average $ Cost Per Contact
IVR
CSR
Web Chat
Email
Source: Gartner, 2001
|5
Today’s Discussion

Importance of Self-Service Applications in Call Centers

Importance of Voice System Performance to Customer
QoE and Reducing Operating Costs

Using Voice Watch to Proactively Improve Contact
Center Performance
|6
Many Components Need to Work Together Seamlessly
Before (if ever) a Call Reaches an Agent
Mainframes
IVR’s
Database
Servers
Internet
Switch
CTI
Servers
Web Servers
LAN
PSTN
Desktops
Email Servers
|7
Applications And Infrastructure Failures Can
Increase Costs and Customer Dissatisfaction
Carrier Issues
Dropped
Calls/Busies
System
Outages
PBX/IVR Issues
Incorrect/Clipped/
Failed Prompts
Higher Customer Dissatisfaction
Ring/
No Answer
Answer/
Disconnect
Higher Toll Charges and Agent Costs
Long latencies
/silences
Lost Revenue
Failed screen
pops
CTI/Call
Routing Issues
Calls Zero
out to Agent
Long Database
response times
Mainframe/
Database Issues
|8
Failures Are Common Across All Industries
and At Every Point in the Voice System
Transaction Failure Rate (%)
Types of Transaction Failures*
75
30
Network
Routing
2%
15%
28.3
Worst
22.6
25
Average
20
IVR/Prompt
26%
Best
15
10.3
10
5
6.7
4.4
1.9
5.1
2.4
0
0
Wireless
Brokerage
Airlines
3.5
0.6
Switch
37%
Database
20%
Credit Card
Bottom Line
Transaction failures increase customer frustration
and can turn 45 cent IVR calls into >$5 dollar agent
handled calls.
*Empirix Benchmark Study of 12 leading credit card providers. February 2002
|9
Cost of Voice System Failures: Banking Example

Major Financial Services Firm
– 70%+ of calls handled through IVR

One 20 minute VRU outage/slow
down created 4 hours of call
center overload
– Calls that normally end in IVR “Zero
out” and swamp CSRs
– Customers calling back swamp
systems

Costs of VRU problems:
– Extra Staffing expense in the call
center
– Extra Toll expense of slow downs
– Low Customer Satisfaction levels
– Lost Business Opportunity
Benefit of Monitoring
• Alert triggered by
system slowdown or
call failures
• Problem detection
reduced from 4 hours
to 12 minutes
• Estimated annual
savings of ~$2 million
| 10
Today’s Discussion

Importance of Self-Service Applications in Contact
Center performance

Importance of Voice System Performance to Customer
QoE and Reducing Operating Costs

Using Voice Watch to Proactively Improve Contact
Center Performance
| 11
What is Voice Watch?
Voice Watch dials in to the
IVR, listening to prompts and
measures response times at every
step in the call flow
• Time to Answer for
network/site prompts
• Number of busies/dropped
calls
PST
N
ACD
or
PBX
Voice Watch
Monitoring System
IVR
• Call handling errors
• Prompt errors & prompt
timing
• VRU/Host response times
• Database response time
CTI
• Correct agent?
• Correct call
data?
• Latency?
Database
Servers
| 12
Why Use Voice Watch?
 Identifies hidden problems before customers do and before
they impact service levels in the call center
 Identifies performance, quality, routing and design
problems that don’t show up as hard equipment failures
 Alerts appropriate technical resource to problems
 Enables rapid detection and troubleshooting of problems to
increase IVR application uptime and reduce agent costs
 Helps isolate problems to the appropriate equipment
 Enables support from anywhere in country
 Provides error logs to document issues and fixes
 Provides objective data to document and manage Service
Level Agreements with Internal or external constituents or
vendors and improve performance overtime
| 13
Voice Watch Navigates Through the Call Flow -Alerting Technical Resources to Any Issues
Correct
Prompt?
No
Failure!
Page IVR Tech
Support
Yes
13500ms
Hammer
Patrol
VoiceCall
Watch
Hosted Monitoring Service
15000ms
18500ms
1-800-888-8888
3000ms
13000ms
Opening
Prompt
No
Failure!
Page IVR Tech
Support
Yes
Failure!
Page Database
Tech Support
Yes
Start
Stopwatch
Yes
Prompt for
Account #
Correct
Prompt?
Dial
IVR Pickup?
Say “1”
No
Failure!
Page Switch or
IVR Tech
Support
19000ms
Dial 123456
25000ms
28500ms
Prompt for
PIN #
Host
Latency?
No
| 14
Voice Watch Immediately Posts Results From
Each Call to the Web
Voice Watch provides a
Single Interface Into the
Real-Time Performance of
Your Contact Center’s
Performance
| 15
Voice Watch Immediately Posts Results From
Each Call to the Web: Database Problem
Sound clips help identify
prompt quality and prompt
errors
Detailed Results from Each
Test Call Show
Performance Bottlenecks
• In this case, Database
Response exceeded
warning threshold and
responded with wrong
prompt
| 16
Real World Examples: Catching a Switch Problem
 The
Problem: The call center
was being flooded with agent
calls for self service
transactions while IVR was still
active and taking calls.
1 2
3
4 5
6
7 8
9
8
#
*
The
Symptom: Voice Watch indicates initial greeting is
wrong, sound clip is an opera singer.
| 17
Real World Examples


(switch problem continued)
The Fix:
• The load balancer was configured to
think that each IVR only had 1 T1 in
each Trunk Group.
• In fact, each Trunk Group had 2 T1’s
which caused the Load balancer to
think that the IVR was full at 50%
capacity
• As a result, the load balancer routed
calls directly to agent queues
The Business Impact: Agent queue times
went up, toll charges go up, and customers
were forced to listen to music and
commercials
| 18
Real World Examples: Programming Error

The Problem: IVR tells customers that they
have no recent claim activity with the
Insurance agency even though a previous
call (within last 15 minutes) indicated that
there were outstanding claims.

The Symptom: The wrong prompt was
detected by Voice Watch while waiting for
account status. The problem only occurred 4
or 5 times during the day but ALL the time
between 2 am - 4 am.
| 19
Real World Examples
Fix: The connection to
the database was down.
Unfortunately, the software
was not programmed to
understand an ERROR
message that the application
could not connect to the
database.
(Software bug continued)
 The
CISCO SYSTEMS
 The
Business Impact: The application gave customers the
WRONG data regarding their account status – resulting in
increase amount of calls to agents and extra agent time to
resolve the discrepancies during the call and in
subsequent calls
| 20
Real World Example: Routing, Customer
Quality of Experience Problem
 The
Problem: The IVR prompt told
Voice Watch that it was being
transferred to an agent when the
system was down. Further
investigation found that Voice Watch
was NOT being transferred to an
agent, but to a different IVR

The Symptom: Voice Watch detect the wrong
prompt for the account balance – the prompt
stated that the call was being transferred to an
agent but instead another IVR picked up.
| 21
Real World Example:
(Routing, Quality of Experience
problem continued)

The Fix: This problem was particularly hard to grasp, because
all systems were functioning as designed. However, not
enough attention was paid to the user experience. In this
case, not enough consideration was given to just how
inconvenient it was to navigate an IVR, be told that you were
being transferred to an agent only to get to a 2nd IVR. Most
customers would assume this is a mistake and opt out. The
system could have been instructed to play the prompt – “Your
account is past due, you are being transferred to our
automated bill payment system that can accept credit card
payments.”

The Business Impact: Sloppy policies can result in a poor
Quality of Experience for the customer. Causing customers to
zero out for that individual calls and potentially “training”
them to bypass IVR’s all together and zero out to agents
immediately for future calls
| 22
Real World Example: CTI Middleware Issue
 The
Symptom: Database Response times are too high,
statistically the same 32 seconds each time.
 The Problem: Most customers tend to abandon calls or
‘zero out’ after 10 seconds.
Database Response Times
| 23
Real World Example

The Fix: The middleware that
tries to parse customer
information and populate a
CTI profile fails after a 30
second timeout – we can
deduct that CTI/middleware is
not properly configured or
down
(CTI Middleware continued)
cRLDistributionPoint
dSA
 The
Business Impact -- the agent will need to
ask the customer for their account
information all over again! Extra toll charges
and agent time.
| 24
Real World Example: Database Problem
 The
Problem: Callers can not
retrieve their account information
Database
SERVER
 The
Symptom: Voice Watch
detects “Sorry we cannot access
your records at this time” prompt
| 25
Real World Example
(database issue continued)
Database
SERVER


The Fix: The database
was re-started under a
new network address
and the router didn’t
know the new address,
so all request timed out.
The Business Impact: Customer calls
taking longer and then being routed to an
agent result in higher toll charges and
agent costs
| 26
Voice Watch Produces Reports To Track
Service Level Metrics
Summary Reports –
• Compares Key Performance
Metrics Week to Week
Technical Reports
• Provides detailed
performance metrics for
each step in Call Flow
Excel Spreadsheets
• Complete data set enables
more detailed analysis of
performance issues
Source: Standard Voice Watch Report – Accessible Off the Report Tab
| 27
Reports Can Be Used to Identify Performance
Problems and Document Service Levels
Database Response Times
Seconds
Consistent Pattern
of longer database
response times
• Network?
• Routing?
• Database Issue?
Distribution of Database Responses
• Are Response
Times Within
Service Level
Agreements?
12
Seconds
10
8
6
4
2
0
20%
40%
60%
Percentage of Calls
80%
100%
| 28