Managing contact center performance has never been more challenging. Not only are operations facing even more pressure to cut costs amidst a difficult economy, but are often also being asked to maintain service levels and to cross sell/upsell to retain customers and grow revenues. Many of the solutions to these needs lie in the data contact centers collect. It can be used to identify problems from customer information such as spikes in calls, find out what is going on, then report issues to prevent or limit rising costs and customer churn. It can also help improve sales and collections. The insights that can be gleaned from them can help justify existing [budgets] and possibly budget increases and investments in new solutions.

The sources of this data are in the vast amounts of reports: from ACDs to call recording, CRM, CTI, predictive and progress dialers, and workforce management (WFM) that contact centers receive. Yet these sources are too often rarely if ever consolidated to give that clear picture.

"You can't understand what is going on if you've got 25 reports sitting on your desk," explains Jim Davies, a research director with Gartner. "You need to have that single view so that you can then start to dig into data and look for trends, patterns, and correlations between the different applications and data streams."

Enter Performance Management

That's where performance management (PM) software comes in. These tools enable contact centers, like yours, to optimize their productivity by assembling and drilling down through vast repositories of data to find the information you and your colleagues need to make decisions. These can include typical operations metrics such as average handle time and wait times. They can, and are increasingly including, customer-retention related metrics, chiefly first contact resolution (FCR).

Performance management software is the next evolution from simple scorecards that...