CONTACT OBSERVATION ASSESSMENT SUITE

The Contact Observation Assessment Suite is an automated data capture, call structure and analysis tool, designed to give a detailed understanding of all aspects of what makes a great call. Think of a Contact Observation (CO) as combination of Time and Motion studies plus Customer Centric Quality Management, e.g. trying to identify what makes a great call from a customer’s perspective.

There are four basic sources of data we capture:

1. The customer and call characteristics.
2. The quantitative call characteristics (the call processes, segment timing, systems usage and navigation etc). We call this the “hard data”.
3. The agent competencies and behaviours displayed on the call.
4. How the call rated against the desired business outcomes.

The information is captured into the CO Assessment Suite that runs on the analysts laptops. There is no need for any systems integration as the information is entered manually, either through live side-by-side call listening or through playbacks of call and data recording. Ideally we target 500 samples for each major call type to ensure the results are statistically valid.

The data is loaded into the CO Analytic Dashboard where the data can be reviewed, charted and 'sliced and diced' to build a full and complete picture of the current end-to-end customer experience. Because the Dashboard has all the analysis tools built in there is no delay between loading the data and commencing the analysis and publication of the results.

CO will uncover a very detailed picture of the key customer satisfaction drivers and provide a detailed analysis of how much time is spent on the productive and unproductive elements of a call. Collectively this provides a clear and compelling picture of the current causes of customer dissatisfaction, wasted effort, and inefficiency.

CO also supports a range of detailed drill-downs at individual agent level which can be used to identify the competencies and behaviours of best practice agents and the performance variance across the agent population. Armed with this insight it’s possible to develop tailored training programmes to deploy best practice throughout the contact centres. Because best-practice is based on observations of in-house agents there is an added benefit of rapid deployment and momentum through the “pull” from the agent community – through achievable goals supported by clear definition of competencies and behaviours that make for “winning conversations”.

Typically a CO assignment takes between 2 and 4 weeks depending on how many major call types are sampled and how many sites are included. Many of our clients who have undertaken a CO assignment train their staff to become accredited in our approach and largely self-sufficient. This enables them to undertake subsequent assignments with minimal consultancy support from InsightNow.