OVERVIEW

The emerging market of tactical call center tools for compliance purposes and quality monitoring is being prematurely described as Customer Experience Management. The end game here, however, has more to do with the ability to richly index and map customer transactions for a host of other customer experience and revenue improvement purposes, than with literal voice recording.

The recording of customer calls arose out of the need to collect data for dispute resolution, such as a trading error in the stock brokerage industry or public safety emergency. This essentially grew into call logging, which captured the call center industry s attention as the best way to accurately receive and handle high risk or high value calls, with the implication being that a mistake was costly in terms of a financial error or an endangerment to human life. By the late eighties there was a growing frustration within the call center industry due to the pure telephony reporting focus of ACD systems, which only gathered data on productivity, i.e. the numbers the quantity of calls handled by an individual or a group in as short as possible time.

This data enabled call center management to determine that although certain agents took longer to process a call, they achieved more sales, while the agents that handled more calls actually closed fewer sales. It also brought to light a dilemma: there were specific agents who processed not only more calls, but achieved more sales, so what did they do better than the...