The greatest single cost in a contact center is the cost of personnel. As a result it has become important to maximize agent productivity and accountability. This is done through programs commonly referred to as Workforce Management and Quality Monitoring.

Workforce Management allows contact center managers to schedule and monitor agent’s real time to ensure that specific levels of customer service are met, such as the minimum time to answer a call and the time an agent engages with a caller. An adjunct to Workforce management is presence which allows a manager to know the status of each agent throughout the agent’s shift.

Quality Monitoring provides a manager the ability to monitor an agent’s call and provide real time training and feedback to improve agent effectiveness.

Finally, Multimedia Queuing allows an organization to treat all forms of customer contact to be queued and treated equally regardless of the interface. This includes voice calls, IVR transfers, fax, email, chat, and social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Two of the companies for whom I have worked that have strong reputations in implementing contact center technology are Product Support Solutions (PSS) and ethisIQ.