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on a small budget and the results can beused to convince management to do morecomplex projects.

Finally, you should define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to beconsistent with your new findings. It is agood idea to link KPIs to the “Volume /Complexity Matrix.”Take, for example,

handling a complaint.This type of transaction usually requires a longertransaction time. A complaint call is muchmore complex than a simple account balanceinquiry. Therefore, a “Transaction LengthKPI” for a complaint call would be judgeddifferently than the length of a transactionand resulting KPI for an account balanceinquiry. That is to say it is reasonable to beon the phone longer to handle a complaint.Simply put, you should avoid generalizationsin developing KPIs. Instead, consider the“Volume / Complexity Matrix” whenestablishing KPIs.

In summary, you can improve operationalefficiencies and also customer satisfaction by establishing your own customer touch-pointmethodology.This requires frequentsynchronization with touch-pointstakeholders, and an ongoing analysis of customer profiles, transaction taxonomy, andautomation candidates.

Oracle offers a full spectrum of solutions forthe blended contact center allowing you toimprove customer satisfaction while reducingcosts. For more information visit

www.oracle.com/crm and visit our blog at:http://blogs.oracle.com/crm

One of the biggest dangers inestablishing best practices for your contactcenter is to do so in isolation from yourself-service stakeholders. Instead, allcustomer “touch-points” must be viewed aspart of a continuum. Customer touch-points include Web Self-Service,Interactive Voice Response, ContactCenter Agents, and Face-to-Facetransactions. By tracking the interplay between these, you can more easily identify meaningful key performance indicators.

SYNCHRONIZE YOUR STAKEHOLDERSCorporate strategic initiatives may

seemingly contradict individual contactcenter goals. For example, your VP of Customer Service may want to improvecustomer satisfaction scores by 10% this year – but your CFO may want to decreaseheadcount through attrition. In thisexample, you must contemplate improvingcustomer satisfaction with fewer people. This suggests some amount of automationand improved agent efficiency. Acombination of the two is suggestedbecause there are important linkages

between these touch-points. For example, web self-service can link a customer to alive agent chat. Or a detailed webtransaction may prompt a call to yourInteractive Voice Response (IVR) system. Itis all part of a continuum.

It is therefore a best practice to assemblelive service and self-service stakeholders todiscuss the balance between touch-points.A good starting point for discussion is to jointly characterize your customers. Choosecharacteristics that are meaningful for yourbusiness. For example: 1) Customer Types(e.g. retail customer in good standing, retailcustomer in poor standing, wholesalecustomer, etc.); 2) Monthly transaction

volume for each type; 3) Customer ServicePriority for each type, and 4) the relativecomplexity of transactions.

ASSESS TASK POPULARITY & COMPLEXITY It is also a best practice to create a

taxonomy of transaction types. This makes iteasier to track the trends of task popularity across different customer touch-points. If paying bills can be done on your web site and your IVR system, and of course by speakingto an agent, it is valuable to observe the shiftfrom one customer touch-point to the otherbased on incremental improvements made ineach area. A web site “bill pay” usability improvement may decrease IVR and Agentutilization drastically.

AUTOMATION CANDIDATES AND KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Once you have data on customergroupings and transaction types, figuring your automation candidates isstraightforward. You can create a simplequadrant matrix using Transaction TypeVolume and Transaction Complexity as X/Y coordinates. For example, in a FinancialServices / Credit Card scenario, you may plot “Account Balance,” “Make Payment,”and “Increase Credit Line” as all being high- volume transactions, but in terms of complexity, they are simple all the way tocomplex respectively.

You may wonder which ones should beautomated first. As a general rule of thumb, you should automate the high-transactioncandidates first, starting with the leastcomplex ones. The rationale for this is to

make for quick successes that you can grow on. “Quick Hit” improvements can be done

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Best Practices in the Call Center:A Customer Touch-Point Methodology

Figure 2. Grid for Tracking Task Popularity.This is a utility industry example.

Figure 1. Grid for Characterizing CustomerGroupings. This is a utility industry example

Figure 3. Matrix for Plotting Volume andComplexity. This is a Financial Servicesindustry example. Here, the triangular partrepresents what the stakeholders maychoose as an area of concentration for theirparticular needs.