Contact Center Metrics: Image of the DayContact Center Metrics: Image of the Day

Zack Taylor has an interesting visual on Avaya's blog. That CSR definitely doesn't know what she's in for.

Zack Taylor has an interesting visual on Avaya's blog. That CSR definitely doesn't know what she's in for.I like Zack's analogy of the rat and the mongoose here, though frankly where I thought he was headed was toward a nightmare scenario where emboldened mongooses (mongeese?), having vanquished the plague of rats, now rule the streets of the beleagured city, like wild monkeys are threatening to do in New Delhi.

To Zack's point, the question of efficiency versus effectiveness is addressed in a couple of December BCR articles. Bob Bellman takes on the issue of first call resolution versus average hold time, and Ike Mitchell gets into detail on customer intelligence (sorry, not on line yet). The "new investments in technology, business process and integration" that Zack mentions in his blog are explored in some detail in these pieces.

We're going to be covering these issues more extensively in our Contact Center Conference-within-a-Conference at VoiceCon Orlando; the big picture is, as we've noted before, contact centers are really on the cutting edge of Unified Communications. This may be something of an oversimplification, but in general you can say that the network infrastructure is able to increase efficiency (i.e., getting calls to the right person the first time); while the business application integration (i.e., customer intelligence) gets you better effectiveness.

Easier said than done, but that's the goal.