Best Practices for Deploying a CCaaS Management Platform

The COVID-19 pandemic was a tipping point that led many companies to adopt a cloud-based contact center platform. But remote management is a common concern with CCaaS. With many agents working from home or in remote locations for the first time, there’s a lack of visibility into what’s happening on the agent side.

Contact center executives have expressed concerns around:

• Migrating a reporting framework at the same time as changing platforms
• Managing operational performance topics like agent efficiency and FCR
• Meeting SOC2, PCI and HIPAA compliance standards before cutting over
• Connecting data to a CRM system, billing or payroll
• Feeding PowerBI from the contact center to the corporate data team
• Changing systems after spending millions on an on-premises speech analytics platform

We’ve created some best practices for deploying a customer experience management platform with your cloud migration. While each company — and their challenges — are different, this checklist provides some guidance for making the move.

Replicate the Look and Feel of Existing Reporting
With a full business intelligence (BI) reporting layer — and an enterprise data lake packed inside a single product — you can replicate any report in a near-pixel-perfect format. Mixed visualizations, colors, chart types, fonts (even custom visualizations) are possible. View reports, drill down into the individual conversation level, and send via subscription in email or FTP in multiple formats.

Tip: Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start with 10-20 critical reports and then add five to 10 new reports each quarter once you go live. The cloud world is different; you will want a new lens.

Report on Business Outcomes like FCR or Improve NPS
With a proper BI level, complex calculations, it’s possible to obtain custom metrics like FCR, custom service levels, and the import and aggregation of Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey data from third-party tools.

Tip: Two things that work well with complex metrics are gamification and quarter focus. For gamification, create a system of five to 10 key metrics for your agents and rank the organization by each. Blend those rankings and create a hybrid ranked profile of performance. As many metrics have tradeoffs (average handle time, sentiment, hold and talk time), this takes the balanced scorecard and puts control in your agents’ hands as they get to see all their KPIs on one scorecard — in context. Quarter focus is an approach in which a management team spends an entire quarter on one theme, such as average handle time or count of adherence. They then programmatically work across the team to improve that metric and create deeper muscle memory. This keeps the team laser-focused and allows for deeper analysis and conversations on how and why to improve each metric. With deeper learning on each metric, even two quarters later, the learning can build across the management team and agent cohort.

Maintain or Achieve PCI, SOC2 or HIPAA Compliance

This is often overlooked in the search for analytics vendors, but many call recordings and conversations have PII —  in healthcare, financial or cardholder data.

Tip: Make sure your vendors are compliant and have plans to stay compliant. The information contained in your analytics solution often contains PII.

Get Data Out, Get Data in or Blend Data
This can be tricky. Many large enterprises have mature data lake initiatives and/or corporate BI platforms. They need to move contact center data to these data lakes. With SuccessKPI tools, customers can move data to these other locations to get data out by using FTP, REST and other methods. Daily or hourly “cron” jobs push grids to Amazon S3 buckets for easy integration with these systems. A simple UI allows customers to quickly add the metrics, create derived metrics and change it, as needed, before export.

To get data in, SuccessKPI has nearly 100 third-party data connectors; it can pull data in with native interfaces to systems, such as Salesforce and ServiceNow. For thornier integrations, the S3 import capability allows for any custom integration. Once in the SuccessKPI data warehouse, you can blend data with other data sets.

Tips: For import, begin with the end in mind. The metrics and end-state dashboards can take as long as the data integration. Start the work on the custom reporting simultaneously with stub data so you can test your assumptions. By working both in parallel, you catch data gaps and assumptions quickly. For data export, stay as close to the existing feeds at go-live. Keeping the “send” side of the equation constant will minimize UAT. You can always change them after migration, but it’s easier to replace if you only change one side of the integration at migration. Also, many cloud platforms have different terminology (e.g., attached data might be called participant data and skills — and routing principles could be different).

To help with translation, identify each table of data to be pushed, create a CSV or XLS version of the data elements, and then build a data map to align naming conventions and definitions during the transition. Make this artifact a part of your project plan and statement of work to help align with the migration team.

Fully Replace Speech and Text Analytics Platforms

SuccessKPI provides an advanced speech and text analytics platform that’s fully built into the experience management framework. Being tightly integrated with cloud contact center metrics saves time and creates significant value. Further, the transcription results outpace legacy on-premises environments. And it offers themes and a Playbook Builder™ in over 25 languages.

Tip: Rebuilding topics can be simple with import-and-export functions. Port over all your keywords and topics for a quick start. A modern artificial intelligence (AI)-based transcription engine doesn’t require training like previous generation tools. Further, machine learning and AI can help you identify topics and entities you might have previously missed. And you can set up playbooks to take advantage of this tool. The UI supports over 10 languages and more than 25 transcription languages — making it ideal for global scale.

Wherever you are in your cloud migration plan, a customer experience analytics platform could be a key piece in your digital transformation. Learn more about SuccessKPI online or reach out to us at partner@successKPI.com.

Watch the on-demand webinar, “Your analytics expressway,” to hear and watch a product demo.

Read more about SuccessKPI BI and analytics + quality management in the AppFoundry marketplace.

This blog was co-authored by Dave Rennyson. Dave “Renny” Rennyson is the CEO of SuccessKPI. He is a passionate SaaS veteran, global executive, a lifelong learner and the co-author of The Art of SaaS. Dave is obsessed with customer success, solving big problems for his customers and building highly usable SaaS products that transform the customer experience.