ABOUT THE VENDOR

Witness Systems is a global provider of business-driven multimedia recording, performance analysis, and e-learning management software. The browser-based eQuality enterprise collaboration architecture is designed to enhance the quality of customer interactions across multiple communications media, such as the telephone, e-mail, and Web, as well as allow companies to capture, communicate, and collaborate on customer interactions throughout the enterprise.

ABOUT THE CUSTOMER

CCH Incorporated, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wolters Kluwer North America, analyzes and reports tax and business law. Founded in the Chicago area in 1913 -- the same year the U.S. federal income tax was created -- the company has served five generations of legal and business professionals and their clients by providing tax and business law information and software. CCH produces approximately 700 print and electronic products for the securities, tax, legal, banking, securities, human resources, health care, and small business markets.

ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY

Witness Systems' eQuality Balance is a patented, business-driven voice and data recording solution that enables companies to capture the voice conversations between their agents and customers, as well as the corresponding computer desktop activities -- such as data entry, screen navigation and use of customer information systems. By capturing both voice

and data, and synchronizing them during replay, a company can evaluate and analyze complete customer interactions in a "real time" manner to ensure consistent, quality service; determine training needs; gauge business process effectiveness; and determine how well agents leverage the technology resources available to them.

The company's eQuality Evaluation solution works to facilitate simultaneous evaluation and scoring of staff performance. Through customized forms, reports and graphs, the solution summarizes and provides immediate performance feedback to contact center management teams, as well as insight into determining learning opportunities and skill gaps on the agent-side, and process and technology refinements on the business-side.

In 1994, CCH had just come out of a reengineering initiative. An important criterion was the ability to evaluate execution -- to capture call conversations and how the desktops were interacting with those conversations. We spoke with Margaret Flink, head of CS operations at CCH, about the project.

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SearchCRM: Why did you choose Witness Systems?
Flink: We knew we wanted something that was systematized and that wasn't going to be a resource burden, and that would be easy to use as a diagnostic and business improvement tool. We investigated many quality monitoring solutions at that time. We started out looking at about five vendors. Some were immediately crossed off the list. Some of the companies that were systematized did not convince us of two things: one was their customer focus, and the second was their ability to deliver product as they were billing it. At the time that we installed Witness, their product was voice capture, but they were able to convince us that they were going to implement the desktop data capture in the timeframe that they said with the functionality that they described. And they did.

SearchCRM: How did the implementation go?
Flink: Keep in mind, 1995 was a different technological era than today and Witness was a very young company. So things were done then very differently, but deployment went fine. At that point in time it required an engineer from Witness to be on site; they had to do a lot of configuration on site. It took much longer than it does today -- I think they were here a week and a half. But when it was in, it did what they said it would do, and they delivered the data piece in early spring of 1996 just as they said. We deployed that in early summer of 1996, and even by that time, the deployment process was changing. It was taking less time and less resources.

Now when we upgrade, unless there's hardware involved, it's just a "here's the CD" or "send the file over the Internet" kind of thing. Or their support center dials into the server and uploads files there. I think our last version upgrade was done, tested, and QAed and trained in four hours.

SearchCRM: What was training like?
Flink: Again, it's changed in those seven years. In 1995, it was very individualized, so as each system went in, the Witness project coordinator was responsible for doing training. At this point in time, the manuals are on a CD that you get at the time of the upgrade, and they have a formal training center.

SearchCRM: Did you experience any internal resistance?
Flink: We took particular care to market the system in advance so people knew it was coming, knew the intent was that it was not Big Brother, it was not a hatchet hanging over their head -- it was a diagnostic tool to be used by management to improve training, identify root cause issues, and identify where we could help employees do their job better. It was received in that spirit, and employees actually took it to the next level. They found their own good things. Every call center has its busy times when you're involved with answering calls and you may say, okay, I need to do this thing for this last call, and I'll do it tonight when I'm done. And you put it off to the side. Well, sometimes those things get lost in the shuffle. The employees said, this [new system] is great, this will stop these things from getting lost.

SearchCRM: What does your system look like right now?
Flink: We're using voice and data capture as well as the online evaluation and reporting. We create a performance evaluation form to evaluate the call. That's right in the Witness system, so you can play back the call, seeing the desktop data capture at the same time, then toggle over to another module and say, this is how they scored on this question of the evaluation. Once you say that, then there's a series of reports that you can do comparing different people and different groups on that same question, comparing the question over time, and that sort of thing.

SearchCRM: And who does the evaluations?
Flink: We're actually in a process of change. Since 1995 we had our team leaders, our front line managers, responsible for evaluating X number of calls per month and coaching on those calls. That worked well, but it had its limitations -- it's putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Now we're 30 days into starting a back office QA department. These are quality assurance specialists who have no vested interest in an individual's or a team's performance other than the objective of quality adherence.

SearchCRM: How does the solution help you better serve your customers?
Flink: It helps both our external customers and our employees. It helps us to understand where we need to train better or differently. It helps us identify root cause issues; for example, we can start hearing if a lot of customers from Florida are calling and saying they haven't gotten their mailing. We can identify the need for better information from other departments. We can identify where particular employees may need to go back to some refresher training.

SearchCRM: When did you see ROI?
Flink: We had ROI by early 1997.

SearchCRM: Do you have any success measures for the project?
Flink: We implemented an automated phone survey. So as our callers called in, we would randomly select some and ask if they would participate in the survey at the end of the call. Our satisfaction rating in 1995 was a whopping 45 percent. We are now just short of 93 percent for the fourth quarter of 2000.

SearchCRM: What advice would you give to other companies thinking of starting a similar project?
Flink: First, be sure to communicate your direction to employees -- get their buy-in. Second, if you have multiple people who will be doing evaluations, make sure you calibrate those individuals so no matter who they evaluate, they're all within a very small percentage of each other.

Linda Formichelli's writing has appeared in Woman's Day, Wired, Writer's Digest, Family Circle, Psychology Today. Contact her at linda-eric@lserv.com, or check out her Web site http://www.twowriters.net

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