OVERVIEW

The leading ACD vendors quickly learned how to provide reams of quality quantitative data and the other channels, such as email and eCRM systems have vendors who are beginning to integrate similar tools. To make this data ultimately meaningful it needs to be used specifically to improve the performance of each individual customer contact, agent, group and campaign in a customer contact center, then manage the physical resources to serve this business. (The next chapter deals specifically with the qualitative side of this same data.)

From the beginning one of the major ACD values has been its information collecting, processing, reporting and presentation. With information from the present and the past, business progress can be tracked and understood when, and how your business arrives as much as from whom; then, how well your business captures these opportunities by the way you serve your callers. Customer focused email requests are no different.

From a staffing and skill perspective, a business can tell its most productive customer service and sales agents, groups and supervisors. From this data predictions can be made about the future customer call and contact center behavior (short, medium and long term). When that s coupled with a good forecasting, staffing and scheduling program, you can plan and organize your trunks, staff and ACD facilities to optimally meet the business demand that callers and business campaigns place on your customer contact center.

The first true ACD vendor managed to eclipse the Bell electro-mechanical technology of the mid-seventies, with...