ResearchPublication Date: 10 May 2006 ID Number: G00139596

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The Importance of Aligning Campaign Management With Contact Center Workforce Optimization Adam Sarner, Jim Davies

Campaign management response and conversion rates will improve when they are aligned with workforce optimization and growing contact center operations. Both departments need to align to achieve success.

Publication Date: 10 May 2006/ID Number: G00139596 Page 2 of 5

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

The action items across planning, skills/awareness and performance metrics start with simple steps (such as formal communication between departments) toward longer-term strategic initiatives. Begin with the first action item in each category, such as communication efforts, because each item represents nontechnical, lower-cost, quick wins. Aligning the marketing department and contact center across all these categories will deliver the most effective return.

STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S)

During the next two years, more than 90 percent of inbound campaigns will fail to align with an organization's workforce optimization portfolio, hindering overall campaign management conversion rates by at least 5 percent (0.7 probability).

ANALYSIS

Inbound and outbound marketing can make an impact by aligning with the contact center. Alignment with campaign management functionality, such as a real-time recommendation engine (see "World-Class Building Blocks for Multichannel Campaign Management") that deals with offer arbitration, is a good start, but there is also a need for alignment at a higher level with the contact center's workforce optimization solution. Workforce optimization aligns and optimizes siloed call center technologies spanning from quality management and workforce management to contact center performance management and e-learning for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness.

Inbound Campaigns and Workforce Optimization

For certain industries, such as business-to-consumer financial banking, telecommunications and insurance industries — where there are multiple products and services with significant interaction through a contact center — inbound campaign management initiatives can be highly successful. Marketers are seeing up to five times the conversion rate for campaigns that are offered within an inbound interaction than an outbound one. Formal alignment of the contact center with inbound campaign management initiatives by using workforce optimization will optimize response and conversion rates within an inbound environment. Inbound marketing campaigns — from planning to execution — should involve the contact center for agent scheduling, training, evaluations, incentives and metrics, but rarely do. During the next two years, more than 90 percent of inbound campaigns will fail to align with an organization's workforce optimization portfolio, hindering overall campaign management conversion rates by at least 5 percent (0.7 probability).

Outbound Campaigns and Workforce Optimization

Outbound campaign effectiveness can be influenced and tracked. Most contact centers are still "one and done" environments that do not track campaigns, identify leads, take orders or focus on aspects such as average handling time and first-call resolution percentages. However, agents who take an informed stance on a marketing campaign can influence a response for a campaign, even if the response happens elsewhere. For example, a customer calls into a bank to transfer some money and, during the conversation, mentions a recent TV campaign for a car loan. The agent has the opportunity to engage with the customer along the lines of, "Yes, it made me laugh too." Or the agent might say, "What a great deal. Are you interested?" The ability to track this outbound campaign receptiveness is often lost because it's not linked to the initial inquiry. Workforce optimization can help with:

• Training (awareness)

Publication Date: 10 May 2006/ID Number: G00139596 Page 3 of 5

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• Evaluations (checking for conversation engagements at the campaign level via call recordings)

• Speech analytics (tracking campaign receptiveness through conversation audio analysis)

Following are three key alignment needs and associated action items for marketing and contact center departments.

Staffing/Planning Alignment

Failure to plan for campaigns when agents are scheduled leads to longer customer wait times and increased dropped calls because of the increased call volume and misalignment with agent availability. Customers who choose to wait on hold for this prolonged period will have significantly lower satisfaction rates and are less likely to complete a transaction or respond positively to a campaign. Customers who hang up after waiting may not call back. As a result, the opportunity is lost.

Action Items

• Initiate verbal communication between the call center scheduler and the campaign planner.

• Provide the center scheduler with access to the campaign management planning tool to provide real-time access to campaign plans and associated information.

• Explore the direct integration between your campaign management software and workforce management tool to begin automating the forecasting and scheduling of agents based on future campaigns.

• Conduct appropriate alignment and forecasting to justify hiring additional resources (higher costs), which will be offset by higher revenue.

• Explore a specialized contact center agent group (or outsourcer) that is solely or partially geared toward handling peak loads and calls that require a marketing, as opposed to service, mentality.

Performance and Metrics Alignment

Traditional agent performance metrics tend to focus on efficiency goals and fail to cater to sales and marketing requirements, where goals tend to be increasing leads, lead quality, sales revenue, retention, cross-selling and up-selling. Changing from these traditional contact center goals will be a step-by-step process that builds on small wins to establish justification.

Action Items

• Model the connection between call center metrics (for example, time of calls and number of agents) with campaign metrics (for example, number of responses, offers accepted, closed sales or qualified leads to sales).

• Begin a pilot program to prove a positive return on investment between potentially higher service costs (for example, longer call length) and increased revenue from successful campaign execution.

• Offer incentives to agents and provide access to their targets via personal dashboards that are available in a workforce optimization solution.

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© 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

• Deploy a speech analytics tool to assess campaign awareness. Often, customers will refer to campaigns during an inbound call that are unrelated to their inquiries. Recorded customer interactions can be mined for campaign-related conversations and statistical information that can be reported back to marketing for future channel/content guidance.

Campaign Awareness and Skill Alignment

Lack of awareness among contact center agents about new campaigns can significantly affect their effectiveness. Agents need to be aware of impending campaigns so they can take an informed stance when customers call in. This may require additional agent training. Ideally, their desktop will provide access to a list of customer-specific, qualified campaigns/offers, and integration with campaign management applications can offer scripting or pop-up screens using embedded analytics for offer optimization (setting priorities for campaigns), which provide agents with information they can use.

Action Items

• Initiate verbal communication between call center supervisors and your campaign planner. Supervisors can e-mail and instant message their agents with news of the campaign, and hang posters on the wall to drive awareness.

• Align formal agent training plans with campaign/product launches. An integrated workforce optimization solution can help manage these training alignment initiatives.

• Modify agent evaluation forms within a quality management application to reflect campaign activity (for example, whether the agent was aware of the campaign and if he or she generated a lead from a response).

• Update e-service applications, such as knowledge management and e-mail response management systems, to incorporate marketing campaigns to aid interactions (for example, problem resolution and requests for information on campaigns).

Tactical Guidelines The contact center can be a critical influencer of marketing campaign effectiveness. Strategic and tactical alignment to the contact center and the marketing department must be made.

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© 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

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