FORT WORTH, Texas -
These are types of contact center calls for which an agent could use a little coaching from a manager-and they're the type of calls that CUNA Mutual Group here can now instantly cull from its database of recorded calls, thanks to a new voice recording and analytics system.
CUNA Mutual went live one year ago at its three contact centers with the new system, called NICE Perform, said Gary Schmidt, contact center process leader, quality, at CUNA Mutual.
"In the past, we had to hunt and peck for hours to find a certain type of call" that would help develop an agent's customer-delivery skills, explained Ann Olson, vice president, customer operations support.
"Word-spotting" capabilities within the system allow CUNA Mutual independent team of evaluators to search recorded service and sales calls by agent for different types of calls, such as calls regarding products, claims or queries, Schmidt continued. The evaluators can also search by words or phrases such as "I'd like to make you an offer," "I'll send you my business card" or "I'm unhappy."
After finding a suitable sample, the evaluator scores the call and passes it to a front-line manager, who delivers the evaluation to the appropriate agent.
But the analysis and coaching doesn't stop at the content of the call. Evaluators can also search the call database for significant shifts in emotion on the part of the agent or the caller. The system identifies emotions as swings in volume.
That means "we can take a look to see if our agents have the discipline to listen or if they talk over a caller," Schmidt said. "It can show us a call where the agent got excited."
Perform also features a screen capture module that allows managers and callers to see how the agent navigates the front-line system. "Sometimes an agent will use the wrong screen, and we can then show them how they could have found the information faster with another screen," Schmidt went on.
The system also tracks holds, transfers and talk-times, said Gary Hartung, solutions architect at CUNA Mutual.
"We can look at patterns, such as if one agent is putting a customer on hold more than another agent, or if one has longer talk-times," he said. "We can then listen to some of those calls and drive up the root cause analysis."
CUNA Mutual chose the technology to support a new quality assurance program, Schmidt said. "We want to make sure that we give the right support to our contact center agents, for example, to increase revenue by sales, tell the agents where they're doing well or to help agents handle emotion with a customer. That way, we can hold the agent and the management group responsible for a certain level of performance metrics."
In turn, CUNA Mutual's credit union customers and its members should benefit from a more "consistent, repeatable experience," Olson said.
Hartung added that the technology itself is more dependable.
"We were using a combination of four different systems that ranged from an older version of NICE, to a competitor's product, to a system native to the phone system itself, to a recorder attached to the phone," Hartung explained.
NICE offers a single platform with centralized administration, from which evaluators and managers can pull calls, calibrate their scores, modify the scoring rubrics or create forms, he said.
The icing on the cake is the new NICE IEX TotalView workforce management system, which is integrated with NICE Perform, allowing the quality assurance group to schedule agent coaching sessions at times when call volume is manageable, Hartung said.
more
Read more about contact center technology at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
* How Navy FCU Uses iDashboards To Focus On Key Indicators, for a story on real-time charts, graphs that illustrate performance on key indicators such as call volume.
* Making 'Contact Us' Count: How One CU Makes Most Of Member Feedback, for a story on how Utah Community CU solicits member feedback online - and how call center agents respond in less than two hours.
* Getting On Schedule, for info on how 1 CU uses an call center scheduling tool.
for more info on this story
* CUNA Mutual Group, www.cunamutual.com, NICE Systems, www.nice.com
