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ICCM: The Phrase Of The Day Is Real Time
Editorial Director,
Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine
In the earliest days of the call center industry (back when call centers were still referred to as "boiler rooms"), workforce management consisted of doing a manual headcount to make sure everyone had shown up more or less on time. More skilled call center managers crunched numbers via sophisticated and mysterious formulas known only to those few people who paid attention in trigonometry class in high school.
I was not one of them.
Later, we saw more modern workforce management that enabled companies to schedule work days in the future based on the historical call center traffic of the past. Later generations of these solutions allowed companies to take into consideration extra data, such as holidays, new marketing campaigns and weather problems that might affect the attendance and performance at one of the call centers in the hub.
Regardless of how much information was put into these solutions, they always showed you where you'd been, not where you were right now, nor where you were going. Errors were caught only after reports were run at the end of the day, the week or the month, or until customers began inexplicably escalating, screaming, or defecting. Or all three.
Nowadays, for workforce optimization and analytics solutions, the key phrase is "real-time."
I spoke this morning with Stuart Granger, President and CEO of Informiam, a company that specializes in collecting, aggregating and interpreting business data on a real-time basis, and he likened today's solutions with real-time abilities to GPS in ship's navigation.
In the old days of sailing, a navigator with a sextant would take readings occasionally...perhaps every 50 miles. The captain would then correct the ship's direction based on those periodic updates. Rather than a straight line, the ship followed a zig zag pattern that wandered a bit when the ship was momentarily off-course. The ship arrived eventually, but later than it would have had it traveled in a straight line.
Today's sailors, of course, use GPS technology to keep themselves on course at all times. They can determine their location almost immediately, accurate to within a few feet. GPS allows them to travel in a straight line, constantly correcting any deviations from course, enabling more efficient sailing.
Real-time data in a call center, said Granger, works in the same way. Rather than finding out where you went wrong yesterday or last week, you can find out immediately if there are any problems occurring right now...and take immediate actions to correct those errors.
Many solutions providers are using the term "real-time" with increasing regularity. Not only does having real-time data (and, more important, understanding and utilizing the information) improve the customer experience, it can save contact centers time and money in a dramatic way.
And saving time, money and customer loyalty is, of course, what business is all about.
Unless you are a cable television company, in which case data from September 1987 will do just fine. For everyone else, think "real time."
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