Logging And Monitoring Roundup.

Contact centers are on the front line of all customer-facing activities. The skills, abilities and conduct of your agents are determining factors in customer acquisition and retention, and directly impact your company's bottom line. Logging and monitoring solutions enable businesses to collect important customer data and manage both the performance and quality of service provided by contact centers, identifying trends in volume, agent performance, team performance and quality of interactions. A good system integrates with other data/customer management systems in your business for attaching caller/customer information, agent skills data and other critical elements. It should offer options for recording and playback, sampling, archiving, the ability to append comments to recorded files, etc. The information provided by a logging and monitoring system, in the form of recording, real-time reports and analyses, allows supervisory personnel to devote more time to developing better agents and building improved qual ity of service, A logging and monitoring system that integrates with your workforce management system (for forecasting and scheduling agents) can also help automate the scheduling process, based upon rules you establish in the system. Also, the ability to automatically analyze individual agent or group trends in performance will enable you to more quickly identify development needs and implement effective coaching and training programs. (For a list of complementary technologies, see our April 2001 Workforce Management Software Roundup -- ed.)

Today's logging and monitoring technologies are feature-rich offerings that can provide you with a competitive edge in qualified and confident agents delivering superior service levels and satisfying customers in both voice and data transactions. Whether you are looking for a technological "quick fix" or an omnibus, enterprisewide, scalable solution, thoroughly research products before purchasing and, as we advise our readers each month in this space, know your business processes and goals before you begin your research. Glamorous? Perhaps not, Necessary? You bet!