Upstream Works has focused recently on Business Interaction Management. Can you tell us a little bit about what this means and how it impacts the customer experience?

Business Interaction Management encompasses the planning, design, and execution of strategy for managing customer interactions right across the organization. Contact centers are very labor intensive with a large amount of legacy overhead – both in technology and in management behaviors.

I think the true value of business interaction management in the contact center is in eliminating the very specific and real management silos between different applications or channels – understanding what an agent is doing on the phone, but also being able to manage them consistently for email, chat, or even off queue manual work items. So what we are seeing is an industry that is really in need of solid, auditable, detailed information on how they interact with customers and on how their agents behave. And we often hear that businesses already have the data the need, but they are still missing information. With traditional BI methods, in many cases, it’s garbage in garbage out. And what we found at Upstream Works is that the missing piece – the secret sauce - for really understanding and impacting the customer experience, is capturing every customer interaction, from every customer communication channel – in context – directly from the source; as it happens. That makes the data clean, accurate, and actionable.

Upstream has moved away from its FCR message. Why is that?

First Contact Resolution – or “FCR” – is still a big focus for us – and actually I’m saddened by how it’s being used – or misused. Our focus has always been on providing FCR numbers for improvement of the customer experience – identifying which agents are best at solving specific types of calls, and which calls are the ones that are not resolved. But the industry generally is looking for that silver bullet – and I think the FCR numbers people are getting – usually from surveys, or from an estimate based on some spreadsheet massaging, quite frankly, give you a nice stake in the ground so your boss can say “good job”. But it’s like getting your kids report card that says the school’s average mark was 67%. I mean – that’s nice to choose a school maybe. But it wouldn’t be acceptable as a mark to you as a parent, right? As a parent you’re concerned about your child and their marks in each subject. You want the break down across individual subjects for your child specifically so you know what you need to spend extra time on.

With Business Interaction Management, we’re collecting data from one of our customers across 21 sites, with dissimilar technologies, with multiple legacy application interfaces, pretty much no automation, and providing detailed FCR information per contact type across all sites. They know that Sally got a 72 in Math, and which tests she failed. And that’s the really useful information to them, because handle times can shorten a call by a few seconds; but First Contact Resolution eliminates whole calls. And understanding WHY people have to call you back again – that’s the first step in actually fixing the problem.

Business Interaction Management provides a lot more to a business than just FCR - it gives you a ton of information you can use for process improvement right across the organization.

How does a company improve customer experience with Upstream Works?

By using the data we provide for improving processes, personalizing service and eliminating calls. Using FCR as a day to day management tool to manage agents to specific call resolutions, which directly helps reduce repeat calls. By tracking contact drivers and contact reasons for all channels so that you can get hard data to improve processes across the enterprise. By tracking contact patterns and trends to reduce customer effort, or to determine context for why people shift from web to call center, or IVR self service to zero out. By linking together the total customer interaction chain, you can improve the customer experience.

How can you help balance the conflicting agendas in the call center - between getting the call done as quickly as possible, and the customer wanting as much attention as the customer wants?

Many contact centers really don’t know what they don’t know. So when you start to put dollars and cents to it, it still comes back to handle times. And that is the bane of this industry. I don’t think that customers want as much time as they want, I think they want as much time as is needed to efficiently do the job right. And back on the FCR kick again – I challenge any contact center to stop measuring handle times and to manage based on solve rates alone. Our clients have not seen any increase in handle times when improving FCR, so it’s not about making calls longer. But let me give you an example. One of our customers in Tennessee looked at the distribution of calls they were getting. They saw that they were getting between 10 and 20 thousand calls a month for three basic reasons, and those three reasons had some of the poorest resolution rates – so they were driving a lot of repeat calls. So they focused on fixing those processes only. They ultimately drove something like 80 seconds a call out of their handle time, but they also reduced the number of repeat calls they were getting by 10% of their repeats. So it wasn’t about getting the customer off the phone quickly – which the customer also wants by the way - they just wanted to make sure that their time is well spent and not wasted – it was about doing things right the first time using a better process.

Upstream is in the analytics space. Upstream is in the desktop space. Which is it?

Well, we straddle both really. Business Interaction Management is all about understanding the customer experience in a 360 by 360 fashion – that is – 360 degrees across every channel that they may interact with you, and 360 degrees between the customers and the servicing agent or application. If you had to pigeon hole us into one area vs. another, I would say we’ve got a very strong agent desktop application that collects information and delivers agent value, but with the collection of interaction information and subsequent customer experience or agent experience reporting not left as an exercise for the end user. It’s thought through ahead of time and a huge amount of system value actually comes from using the information we collect for everything from management reporting to six sigma analytics, to providing a live customer interaction history to the agent whenever they take a call.

How do you help personalize the customer experience?

Aside from the process improvement aspects of the system, role tailoring the agent’s interface for the contact center gives the agents easy access to customer information – through optimized CRM screens, or through enterprise searches. But most importantly it gets back to the role of interactions in a contact center. In my opinion, a contact center agent is not dealing with a customer relationship they are dealing with a customer interaction. And it’s the sum of these interactions that makes up that relationship typically. Where CRM has stopped is in providing agents the tools to track these interactions easily, and then – and this is key – giving the information back to them easily when they need it. So that’s the theory – but let me give the example. If you contacted a business and the agent knew that you had called last week, got the run around through transfers, sent an email that was never answered, and bailed out of the Voice Portal because they were tired of pressing 2 or saying “NO”. If they knew what you knew – that would be a huge step forward in personalized service. And that’s what we provide – a way for the agent to know exactly what the customer has done on any interaction channel at a glance so they can personalize every interaction with every customer.

Sounds like CRM. Is it?

For the personalization aspects, it could be. Nothing says that you couldn’t do interaction capture and delivery within your CRM application, it’s just that no one really does it that way. I think the best way of looking at what we’re doing with the interaction capture is to look at it as a CRM plug in. We’ve got the capture mechanisms, the storage formats, and the databases, and you could re-create everything with Siebel or Salesforce, but it’s a lot of work. It’s just easier to get the plug in and use that. And quite frankly, our customers who are using this system who don’t have CRM have found that it meets all the needs of the contact center, and now the sales and marketing groups are asking to get access to the data for their own uses. Which is sort of CRM driven from the contact center out, which is backwards to the way it works a lot of the time.

So give us some concrete results here, Rob.

I’ve talked about a few items. We’ve done things like reducing handle times by 22 seconds across the board through straight desktop optimization. One of our customers had a six week training time, and reduced it to four by understanding where they needed to apply the training to meet the bulk of their demand using our Business Interaction Management solution. We’ve seen First Contact Resolution improvements of 10% with a corresponding reduction in incoming calls. An insurance company improved their staffing levels and compliance by mapping agent’s skills to the call demand coming into the contact center. Another organization reduced their incoming call volumes by almost 10% just by continued process improvement efforts based on our data (and none of the improvements were actually in the contact center itself. They were all external changes in other departments, and it saved them around a million dollars). All of our customers justified their system purchase with an ROI of under two years, and no one to date has even included the unknown upside from the interaction analytics that they’re getting. It’s a case of you don’t know what you don’t know, so getting those numbers is difficult, and as such, getting analytics is problematic to get past many CFOs. Putting some solid Return on Investment numbers in place really helps the purchasing decisions move forward. And reporting back that you’ve exceeded your ROI targets by 146% definitely helps, which we’ve seen from another company.

About Rob McDougall

Rob McDougall is the President and co-founder of Upstream Works Software, providers of business interaction management tools that make every interaction visible, accountable and controllable to businesses that view their customer service organization as a strategic competitive advantage.

Rob McDougall can be contacted at rmcdougall@upstreamworks.com; 905.660.0969 x358

About Upstream Works

Upstream Works delivers business interaction management to improve customer experience; reduce costs and improve retention. Upstream Works provides contact center solutions that track and manage all of your customer interactions across multiple communication channels.