Interactive Dashboard Accountability Tool (iDAT): A quick and effective tool to manage functioning of agents in the BPO industry

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Tuhin

Back Office Automation servicesThe Customer Care industry has its footprints all over the world and scale of companies in this industry has a wide continuous range. Let’s consider an example of a call center where agents take incoming calls for a wireless carrier such as AT&T, Verizon or Vodafone. The activities and availability of agents taking calls are generally tracked using switches.  So on a broad level, the detailed and comprehensive tracking data for each agent is available in call centers especially to the Operations and Technical teams.

But, is looking at this “raw” tracking data sufficient to form decisions about an agent’s Presence, Performance and productivity? We have defined these 3 parameters as the 3Ps.

Based on my experience looking and examining volumes of call center agent data, my answer would be “No”.

The raw tracked data is difficult to be formulated into decisions/actions to be taken on agent’s activity over a period of time. Why? The reason is, qualitative analysis of the raw data consumes a lot of time and energy of the operations team and therefore, it might not  be a feasible approach.  However, the good thing is that the solution to this issue does not lie very far away from this tracking dataset. The tracking switch data could be cleansed, processed and analyzed (ETL, stands for Extract Transform and Load) to produce actionable Agent Level Dashboards. These dashboards are vital for both the floor TLs (Team Leads) and Operations teams in order to identify and correct agent performance, Productivity and Presence related challenges. Agent Level Dashboards show aggregated and calculated numbers that are well organized. Some of a few important metrics (mind you, there are plenty more that have not mentioned below) which outline the activity level of an agent are:

  • Schedule adherence
  • Occupancy rate
  • Average handling time

These agent level statistics are then compared against the SLA’s followed in the call center process and necessary actions and improvement roadmap can be formulated for each agent. For example, if the average occupancy rate of an agent is 60% which might be lower than the SLA occupancy rate for the call center process or Average Handling Time (AHT) is significantly high, then such an agent could be pulled out by TLs to take corrective steps such as coaching, training, etc.  This forms an important tool for the Call centers’ Quality process/back office processes/ back office automation services to ensure an efficient and smooth process of managing the activity of agents on the floor.

In my next blog post, I will discuss some of the widely used statistical method/approaches that could be used to take the idea of the Interactive Dashboard Accountability Tool to more robust and predictive capabilities.

Posted in BPO, Back Office Support, Data Analysis | Tagged , , , | 154 Comments

Cloud Computing – Are you ready to party?

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Perry

cloud computingEveryone out there is talking about Cloud Computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and Visualization these days. Every techie guru is talking about it, every major technology publication is printing about and major national and international conferences are taking place on this seemingly “HOT” topic. Google is boosting of millions of new users that its adding each year that are accessing its suite of applications and so are its competitors (both old and new ones).

However, CIOs have learnt that adopting new technologies and realizing tangible benefits from these new technologies is no easy task. So how do organizations rationalize internally if they are ready and which cloud model(s) would fit best? In our opinion, CIOs looking to adopt cloud computing must understand and carefully analyze its cultural, organizational, financial, and technological implications. CIOs must also attempt to answer some of these questions before they formally commit their resources and budget to cloud:

  1. What are the viable path(s) of migration to cloud? E.g., Conduct application rationalization exercises internally.
  2. What are the architectural implications?
  3. What complimentary cloud services exist that I can take advantage of?
  4. What skills and organizational changes do I need to adopt to cloud?

One will see an evolution of both private and public infrastructure cloud over the next five years. We feel that both business and IT organizations can and will benefit from this new era of Cloud computing as long as organizations take time to evaluate theirs needs, all costs (those pitched by vendors and “hidden” ones), and implementation partner objectively and pragmatically.

Posted in Cloud Computing | 16 Comments

iPhone Applications: are they really beneficial for your business?

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Naddy

iPhone applications give employees the opportunity to access information easily from anywhere where they have access to the internet. Every week even more businesses are realizing the benefits of mobile applications and web-based access. Besides increasing overall employee productivity, mobile applications boost efficiency and internal revenues by unifying communications with entire business structure.

There are two ways of using iPhone applications: they can be your business, or they can be made to help your business.

The iPhone market is still in the early stages and growing quickly, which makes it even more attractive for business owners. That is the reason why the popularity of iPhone applications within corporations is growing. Apple is trying to do its best to support business apps development. It allows the developers to sell additional services within applications and the developers use these new features to create a better and more distinctive application.

Being an innovative first-generation device, iPhone captured the hearts of a vast majority of people. Apple has reported that over five hundred million applications were downloaded and about a billion dollars was gained only in apps this year. Apple’s counterparts, Google (Android), RIM (Blackberry), Microsoft (Windows Mobile), and Qualcomm (Palm) have announced launching app stores as well. Running application business is at the height of its fame.

An iPhone application is a product that can be used to promote your business or it can be sold as a consumer product. A mobile application is a good way  to produce as well as invest at the present time.

Posted in Mobile Application Development, iPhone | Tagged , , | 28 Comments