Thales' AQM Performance Analysis and Monitoring System Chosen by Afni.

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

HERNDON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 7, 2001

New Agent Quality Management solution records voice and screen, provides live monitoring and integrates with workforce management and

other enterprise data sources

Afni, Inc., a leading provider of call center services, has purchased Thales Contact Solutions' (formerly Racal Recorders) recently launched Agent Quality Management (AQM) 3.0 performance analysis and monitoring system for its new contact center in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The Afni AQM system in Bowling Green is among the first in the U.S. Based on its early experience in Bowling Green, Afni is planning to install the Thales Contact Solutions system at three more sites within its organization over the next few months.

Headquartered in Bloomington, Illinois, Afni provides contact center services to Fortune 500 clients in the communications, financial services and energy industries. It services inbound inquiries, including calls about billing, technical assistance and cellular-phone activation, and manages outbound sales and telemarketing functions from 1,740 CSR seats located in five sites in the U.S..

The 260-seat Bowling Green center uses a Nortel Meridian 1 switch and CCTI's Prism for real-time contact center reporting. The Thales Version 3.0 AQM system integrates with the Prism middleware to realize the Environmental Factor Analysis capability of the system. When using that feature in conjunction with voice and screen replay, the call evaluator can now hear the CSR's interaction with the customer, see the CSR's interaction with the IT systems and understand the external contact center factors that affect how the CSR behaves. These external factors could include key productivity metrics such as call volumes, the number of calls in queue, the average customer wait time and the number of calls abandoned. Taken together, those factors can go a long way toward telling an evaluator why some specific event occurred.

Simultaneous voice and screen monitoring

AQM permits Afni supervisors as well as a separate quality control support team to monitor simultaneously voice and screen data for the center's CSRs. With Thales' AQM, Afni supervisors can record and monitor in three ways: CTI-driven random recording, real-time live monitoring or supervisor record on-demand.

"Flexibility in recording was something we very much needed," said Jeff Badger, Afni's Director of Operational Technology. "With our previous voice-only system, we were limited to scheduling a set period of time for recording each CSR. If the CSR was not receiving calls during that pre-assigned time period or had logged off the phones, the system would record no calls for them. The new capabilities of AQM and its potential for systems integration were decisive for us. It allows us the ability to do sophisticated rules-based selecting of calls to record based on many criteria that were previously unavailable to us."

When to record: rules-based decisions

"For example, I might want to record a CSR's first call after coming off break," he said. "The Thales Contact Solutions system can easily interface with the center's scheduling system and do just that. Similarly, it can read a CSR occupancy and record a CSR during busy and slow periods to give us an idea of how that CSR reacts to stress."

"It's a significant step forward for contact centers," said Michael Andrews of Thales' contact center applications business unit. "Thales Contact Solutions has really raised the bar for all QA tools on the market. Supervisors can now have an accurate reading of all the important things that were happening in the center at the time of the call. They not only understand what the CSR was doing, but also appreciate the external factors contributing to that CSR's performance."

System Database Integration

AQM is integrated to the Aspect e-WFM system database via the CCTI Prism server, making all CSR information in the Aspect e-WFM system, such as the group and project to which CSRs are assigned, available directly to the AQM system. The integration means it is no longer necessary for the contact center to maintain two separate databases for the two systems.

Each CSR is assigned to a client and to a function for that client, e.g., mobile phone activation. Each supervisor works with 15 CSRs and monitors each CSR on an average of two calls per month. In addition, a 65-person quality assurance group is required to monitor three calls per CSR per month with the expectation of improving process and workflow and assist with CSR assessment.

"The system and its outstanding screen-capture capability are giving us a much clearer idea of what's going with our CSRs," said Badger. "When we review voice and screen together we can identify processes that need improvement and we can adjust our software development accordingly. Recently we discovered that a website our CSRs use was timing out, causing CSRs to lose time reconnecting. We've uncovered problems that are fairly easy to solve, but we weren't aware of before."

About Afni, Inc.

Headquartered in Bloomington, Ill., Afni, formerly known as Anderson Financial Network, Inc., is an outsource provider of contact center services. Founded in 1936, the company operates five contact centers in the U.S., ranging in size from 120 seats to more than 600. Afni has more than 2,750 employees delivering a comprehensive set of services including order processing, card activation and billing inquires, as well as first- and third-party collections. Afni can be found on the web at www.afninet.com.

About AQM

The Thales' Agent Quality Management (AQM) Environmental Factor Analysis suite was developed in cooperation with Call Center Technology, Inc., of Atlanta. AQM uses CCTI's award-winning Prism integration software to allow AQM to integrate with any enterprise data source that impacts on the CSR's performance, as well as typical CTI data sources such as ACDs and dialers. This unique capability enables features such as `Environmental Factor Analysis' in addition to all of the individual benefits of AQM and Prism. The result is that contact centers will have access to solutions that would have historically required custom development, in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.

About Thales Contact Solutions

Thales Contact Solutions, whose US headquarters are in Herndon, Virginia, is one of the world's leading manufacturers of communications recorders and sophisticated application software for customer contact performance management. Its extensive customer base includes call centers, financial institutions, emergency service providers, public utilities and airport authorities in the US and 140 countries around the world. The Thales Group employs more than 65,000 people worldwide and has revenues in excess of $8 billion. Visit Thales Contact Solutions at www.thalescontactsolutions.com.