The oblivion of yesterday the obsession of today. Irony, or may be not, the post-bubble era is bringing customers and citizens into the limelight for the first time in countless centuries of market history. Often perceived as the inescapable evil, the call centre of the past is slowly emerging as the corporate touchpoint par excellence. In the quest for a tangible ROI, the contact centre of today is turned into a complex puzzle and yet with a sole goal: to provide the best experience to custizens in their double mask of customers and citizens. Finding the best match, though, is still the paramount challenge. Europe Contact Center kicks off today the first multidisciplinary Performance Management Taskforce which will open new widows over the contact centre industry. On the very next weeks the focus is on a pivotal piece of the puzzle: the Quality Management market.
Developing from a niche space, the contact centre is now becoming company-pervasive. Performance Management, away from being a packaged IT solution, is rather a roadmap to contact centre optimisation. Like every well devised roadmap, it must be divided into stages, which, stacked up in the end, will provide a more concise view of the contact centre as a whole.
Despite being too broad a concept, Contact Center Performance Management relates to all activities, processes and technology aimed at collecting data from custizen interactions, unveiling trends, opportunities and problems embedded in those contacts to finally close the circle by popping up actions that impact the performance of individual departments or of the contact-centre-enterprise as a whole.
Our task at Europe Contact Center will be to dissect the complexity of such a concept into the different components that make possible this integrated, 360º view of the contact-center-enterprise. A myriad of specialists from different and often opposite sides of this industry are invited to participate, making sure that every different perspective and point of view will be given proper balance.
The Contact Center Performance Management Taskforce will be committed to this integrated fashion of thinking and acting on its daily activities themselves. The Taskforce will be responsible for the publication of free-to-view and subscribed information (including opinion articles, White Papers and reports), for the organisation of thematic events and the provision of associated services in this area, namely consulting and conception / implementation of operations.
During the following weeks, our insight will be on the Quality Management / Liability Recording market, coinciding with major announcements and initiatives in this area, and due to the strategic importance this niche market plays on the contact centre industry as a whole.
The Quality Management market has realised a massive blossom in the last five years: from being entirely telephony recording and playback-based, the top-notch suites now include the ability to record voice and data activities simultaneously, the capacity to handle multiple requests (telephony, email, chat, etc.), computer telephony integration interfaces and analytical software. Some of the players have even enhanced their suites with Business Intelligence features, speech analytics and e-learning capabilities, as if divining the inevitable path towards Performance Management.
Being conscious that this is just the first stone in our overall initiative, Europe Contact Center will work equidistantly with the industry actors to generate value-added knowledge and services, reinforcing its mission as a hub of different cultural and commercial realities involved in the call / contact centre industry.
Filipe Samora
Editor-in-Chief
2004-02-10
Performance Management