Why are your Customers Calling?

Why are your Customers Calling?

How Analytics-derived Call Reasons can
Help you Optimize your Call Centers
Performance

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

Executive Summary:
Why do 30% to 80% of your customers call you each year? This is such a fundamental question for service
operation executives and yet most cannot answer it with any detail. This lack of basic information is analogous
to the head of hospital not knowing the types of illnesses the hospital treated. Without knowing the hospitals
illness mix, he/ she would not be able to ensure that its facilities, staffing, and training were aligned to the
needs of its patients. Further, the hospital would be hard pressed to assess its performance since so much of
the relevant metrics depend on the type of illnesses treated. It is no different in a call center. Without detailed
call reasons, customer service executives are missing a basic tool they need to understand and optimize the
centers performance. A detailed understanding of call mix gives their organization the actionable data it
needs to train, coach, set targets, and assess agent performance with laser focus ultimately working to avoid
unnecessary calls.

Most contact center executives get this and want the problem solved they want trusted call reasons.
Recognizing this need, a number of approaches to create call reasons have emerged over the years
ranging from CRM system drop down lists to speech analytics. Unfortunately, after hundreds of thousands
and sometimes millions invested in these programs, most executives still have the same basic lack of
understanding of why customers call. Why do these programs fail? Simply put, these programs fail because
they rely on methods to tag calls with call reasons which are inherently biased or unreliable or both. An ideal
approach would tag 100% of calls and use a systematic approach that did not rely on agent or customer
judgment. Today, this ideal approach exists in the form of analytics derived call reasons.

This white paper compares the methods currently used to categorize contact reasons and contrasts them to
a new approach analytics derived call reasons. It will explore why an analytics derived solution is the best
choice to deliver accurate, reliable and actionable contact reasons. Finally, it will present real-world best-
practices for using contact reasons to optimize the management of a call centers performance to reduce
incoming calls, increase CSAT, and improve the customer experience.

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

Why are your customers calling? A lot is riding on the answer.

Depending on the industry, 30%-80% of customers call a company per year costing companies millions to
hundreds of millions of dollars. Surprisingly, a basic understanding of why these calls occur in the first place
is missing. According to an Enkata survey1 , fewer than 10% of call center managers said they were able to
answer the question why do their customers call? with data that they trust. On the surface, this may seem
like a harmless gap in knowledge but it is in fact a critical missing link in optimizing a centers performance.
To illustrate this point, consider two call centers: Call Center Alpha and Call Center Beta. Call Center Alpha
captures trusted call reasons for 100% of calls whereas Call Center Beta relies on surveys for directional
indications of call reasons. The Alpha center, with its trusted call reasons, leveraged call mix data across the
organization to target improvement opportunities and drive measurable results.. The Beta center, which is
similar to most call centers today, did not have sufficient data to effectively focus on service gap, and therefore
did not see any measurable improvement.

The Organizational Payoff from Trusted Call Reasons

Capabilities from Trusted Call Reasons Alpha Center Beta Center
Can immediately answer if call mix has changed today, X
this week to explain volume variances
Tags and targets "self-serviceable" call types for self- X
service promotion
Tags and targets "upstream failure" call types for X
marketing, product remediation
On boards agents by graduating them from easy to hard X
call reasons to build confidence, increase retention
Considers call mix when assessing agent performance X
(ex. different AHT bands for simple vs. complex calls)
Measures First Call Resolution (FCR) for 100% of calls, X
includes FCR in agent scorecards
Delivers training targeted by call mix; extra training on X
call reasons with worst performance profile
Delivers personalized coaching targeted by call mix; X
coaching focused on call reasons where agent is
struggling vs. peers
Prioritizes Quality Monitoring time on call reasons X
with highest performance variation to target coaching/
training

1
Enkata Annual Performance Management Survey 2008

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

The net result is that Alpha center outperforms Beta center in all categories because its targeted training,
coaching, quality monitoring are more effective. This translates into lower unnecessary call volumes and 5-
10% better performance in service level, handle times, First Call Resolution (FCR), sales per call, and agent
retention. Below are real results from a company that used trusted call reasons at an alpha test site before
rolling out trusted call reasons to their entire organization.

Alpha (Call Reasons) Versus Beta Site Performance

FCR Performance Handle Time Agent Attrition

87% 410 sec 32%

20%

79% 345 sec

Alpha Beta Alpha Beta Alpha Beta

Source: Enkata research

Alternatives to Determine Call Reasons Traditionally Unreliable and Unsuccessful

Most call center executives intuitively understand that they want to manage and prioritize resources based on
a detailed understanding of call mix. And they have acted on this intuition. According to Enkata research, over
70% of call centers have a mechanism in place today to capture call reasons at some level. Unfortunately, the
garbage in, garbage out adage has applied to these investments and only 7% of companies that capture call
reasons trust them enough to use them operationally. The most common objections listed by executives as to
the veracity of their call reasons are listed below:

We only capture call reasons for a small sample of calls, less than 5-10%

Our survey respondents are a biased group, we cannot generalize their responses

Agent tagging is frequently wrong and inconsistent. Generic categories are by far the most popular

Speech analytics finds only obvious examples of calls, it does not tell me how often call types occur

The agents do not believe any method that they cannot verify

Although subjective, these objections capture the substance of why todays methods of assigning call reasons
have failed to take root in organizations and gain widespread trust and adoption. The next section will assess
todays most common approaches and suggest a newcomer alternative that overcomes their shortcomings.

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

Comparison of Traditional Call Reasoning Approaches

Contact centers have been struggling to answer the question, why do customers call?, for years to no avail.
The four most popular methods are:

40%

30% 30%

20%

<5%

Agent Tagging Customer Quality Speech None

Surveys Monitor Analytics
Scoring

Note: These numbers do not add up to 100% because many companies employ more than one method.

Lets look at each of these four methods individually and identify why they have struggled to gain
organizational trust.

Agent Tagging
This approach, often called call dispositioning, is where all agents or a group of agents are asked to manually
assign a call reason to a call from a list of 50-100 call reasons. The cost of tagging a call with a call reason
ranges from 2-15 seconds depending on the technology and process in place for the agent to select the call
reason. Since this process is 100% relying on agent judgment, it is inherently unreliable and dependent on the
following factors to yield trusted data:

Agents understand the nuances of every call reason to accurately assign them

Agents have and take the time to properly tag a call with a call reason

Calls fit logically into one of the categories

In most cases, agents are insufficiently trained on the call reasons and are not provided the handle time
allowance to thoughtfully select call reason, which results in a high concentration of generic, first in the list
call reason designations. This undermines the data. Although widely used in call centers today, this method
is falling out of favor given the high cost and low usability of the data.

Post-call Surveys
Post-call surveys, whether delivered through the IVR or via an email, provide an automated way to capture
customer feedback about their call experience usually within 7 days of the call. The call reason is selected
by the customer as part of the survey. Although this process captures the voice of the customer, and is

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 Why are your Customers Calling?

therefore attractive from a marketing standpoint, it has several challenges when it comes to generating
trusted call reasons to drive operations. They are:

Small sample sizes. 5-10% of calls typically receive a survey response. When you break this down by
call reason the sample sizes are quite low for all but the top 10-20 call reasons. Given these low sample
sizes, surveys are hard /impossible to operationalize at the agent level.

Biased sample. Customers that respond to samples are biased to those with either very good or very bad
experiences. This bias makes them ideal triggers for rewards or coaching but not a trusted source for
call reason data to prioritize coaching, training, quality monitoring at the agent level.

Not linked to a specific call. Surveys are only indirectly able to be linked to a call and therefore the agent
that took the call. If a customer calls 2-3 times during a period or if a call was transferred 2-3 times in
one call, the one survey they answer will not be able to differentiate among the agents and call reasons.
For most centers with a 20-30% transfer rate and a 20-40% repeat call rate, this means that up to half of
their surveys may not be assignable to a particular agent.

Quality Monitoring
This approach, using quality monitoring teams to manually assign a call reason while they are completing
their quality reviews of calls, aims to solve some of the challenges of the agent tagging method related to
poor quality dispositioning. Although quality monitoring based call dispositioning is more accurate than agent
dispositioning, a couple of challenges have undermined this methods data.

Small sample sizes. A small volume of calls are monitored (0.5% is fairly typical). This number is even
small relative to post call surveys. As a result, call reason distributions beyond the top 10 call types
are not statistically valid. Given these very low sample sizes, quality monitoring call reasons are hard/
impossible to operationalize beyond their current use of providing coaching context.

Biased sample. Quality monitoring teams often vary their mix of calls that they listen to by line of
business, queue, agent tenure etc. versus always monitoring a random sample of calls. To the extent
that the quality monitoring teams are working on non-random samples, their call reason results would
not be trusted for call reason statistics even with high monitor counts.

Speech Analytics
Speech analytics solutions sit on top of a call centers call recording package, and analyze a small percentage
(typically 10-30%) of historical calls stored in the recording system. The words and nature of the calls are then
tagged, which can then be searched for keyword reports produced from the search results. This method relies
heavily upon the customer or agent to speak the right words to assign a call reason. There are a number of
challenges to this method:

Low hit rate. Speech analytics engines are trained to recognize keywords and phrases and to assign a call
reason when a specific word or phrase appears. Because there are literally millions of ways to express
the articulation of a customer issue and the agents resolution, speech engines inherently miss, or do not

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

categorize with a call reason, most of the calls they analyze. Therefore, speech engines are not reliable
for statistics since the rate of a call reason appearance will be more correlated to how easy it is to detect
in the conversation vs. how often it occurs.

Small sample sizes. Most companies record 10-30% of calls. Similar to all survey methods, at this low
sample amount, call dispositions are not granular enough to provide detailed, operational direction.

Not verifiable. To gain trust, executives and supervisors alike need to understand why a call was tagged
with a particular call reason versus a black box. Otherwise, when disputes occur with an agent on
a particular metric such as FCR, a supervisor will be unable to resolve issues with facts and will be
forced to back out all disputed calls. This process could quickly unwind the integrity of the performance
management process.

One common theme across each of these methods is an add-on to a pre-existing technology. Agent tagging
is an add-on to a CRM system, survey-based call reasoning is an add-on to CSAT surveys, quality monitoring
call dispositioning is an add-on to the quality monitoring process and speech derived call reasoning is an add-
on to speech detection of emotion and dead time. As a result, each method is saddled with the limitations of
its core technology and approach. None of the aforementioned methods was designed from the ground up to
deliver trusted call reasons and unfortunately for contact center executives, none has succeeded. In the last
few years, a new , bottom-up approach to generating call reasons has been introduced that was developed only
derive trusted call reasons. This method, generically speaking, is Analytics Derived Call Reasons and was
pioneered by Enkata.

Analytics Derived Call Reasons The Right Approach to Deliver Trusted Call Reasons
This method was designed from the ground up to overcome the challenges of traditional call reason methods
by using sophisticated analytics and algorithms to accurately assign call reasons to 100% of calls. The
highlights of this method are listed below:

Assigns a call reason to 100% of calls

Assigns call reasons without any agent intervention

Assigns call reasons at an actionable level of 50-100 call reasons

Assigns call reasons for transfers, call backs correctly

Assigns call reasons in an explicit, verifiable manner

Analytics derived call reasoning works by observing granular agent call handling activities and executed
transactions and then categorizing the common patterns into call reasons. A critical factor is the verifiability of
the call reason data. Each call reason pattern is explicit and available for executives, supervisors, and agents
alike so they can quickly understand why a call reason was assigned to a particular call. Plus, new patterns
would be detected by the system by automatically identifying where there are gaps in the pattern matching
logic so that they system quickly evolves and captures new call types as they occur. This creates trust and
avoids second-guessing of the results.

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

Where does the Analytics Derived Call Reasons Method Get its Data?
Being an analytics approach to call reasoning, the Analytics Derived Call reason method requires trusted data
to produce reliable results. The good news is that data capture is no longer an issue with the advent of desktop
analytics tools, such as the one offered by Enkata, to capture call handling data as the call occurs to support
call reasoning. That being said, lets describe the two most common data capture approaches:

Existing Desktop / Account Activity Logs

This method uses data already being captured by desktop, account systems to derive call reasons. Call
reasons can be broken down into two categories. Transactional (an agent adds, changes, deletes something
to an account) and informational (an agent answers a question). Typically, call volume is roughly 40-60%
transactional in nature depending on the type of call center and industry. For transactional call reasons, the
Analytics Derived Call reason method would require the underlying transaction occurrence, date/timestamp,
and other identifying information data to accurately assign a call reason to the right call and agent. For
informational calls, the Analytics Derived Call reason method would require agent screen activity data, agent
workflow activity, and knowledge management lookup activity among others to assign a call reason.

Enkata has found that 70-80% of companies are capturing sufficient data to pattern 50-80 trusted call reasons
using this data capture approach.

Desktop Analytics Data Capture

This method uses data that an agent desktop applet (Desktop Analytics Logger) would capture directly from an
agents screen during a call. Each relevant screen, field, button that an agent has access to would be captured
and processed by the Analytics Derived Call Reason system. This method is not similar to screen scraping or
screen capture because the actual screen data is being captured and used, not the entire screen. In addition,
100% of call activity for 100% of calls is being logged. For example, in a change address call, an agent would
routinely access an account screen, click on an update address button, type in the new address and then
click submit. The analytics derived call reasoning method would recognize this pattern of screens and
executed transactions and assign the call to the Change Address call reason. This same basic approach
works for complex multi-transaction call patterns as well. For example if a customer asked to change their
address and order a new phone, both call reasons would be assigned or a higher level call reason, such as
Location Move Order if this pattern was common.

Ultimately, each pattern would then be assessed against the patterns that have been assigned to each call
reason to deduce a call reason for 100% of calls.

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

Summary Assessment of Call Reasoning Methods

Agent Tagging Post-Call Quality Speech Analytics

Surveys Monitoring Analytics Derived Call
Reasoning
Assigns to 100% of
l l
calls
Assigns without agent
l l l l
intervention
Actionable level of 50-
l
100 call reasons
Accurate for transfers,
l
call backs

Verifiable results l

Legend - No l - Yes

The clear solution for determining reliable, accurate, and actionable call reasons is an analytic derived contact
reasoning solution built from the ground up for this purpose. Enkata is the first and only company to offer
this revolutionary contact reasoning technology.

Call Reasons Pave the Way to Optimize Your Contact Center Performance
Call reasons are a powerful tool to help companies understand why customers call to ensure each contact
is being handled by the right channel in the right manner. The knowledge you gain from an analytic derived
contact reasoning solution can help you transform your organization through more effective self-service,
reduced unnecessary calls, higher FCR and more productive supervisors and agents.

Analytics Derived Call Reasons in Action Case Study

Challenge:

A large financial services company wanted to improve the results they were seeing from their coaching and
training initiatives to improve FCR and reduce Average Handle Time (AHT).

Starting Point:

The centers offered general coaching and training programs focused mostly on metrics and products and not
call reasons. Handle times and FCR were stagnant for the last 12 months.

Enkata | White Paper  2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com

 Why are your Customers Calling?

Solution:

This organization engaged with Enkata to implement Enkatas Automated Contact Reasoning Solution to
create trusted call reasons for 100% of calls at an actionable level of detail. 76 call reasons were derived and
used to identify and prioritize agent coaching opportunities for AHT and FCR. In addition, training content was
launched for the top 5 high volume, worst performing call reasons on AHT, Customer Satisfaction and FCR to
upgrade the companys general handling of these problematic calls.

Results:

An immediate improvement in coaching and training effectiveness that translated into:

AHT reduction of 6% within 6 months

FCR improvement of 25% within 6 months

By targeting agent coaching by call reason, we were able to better focus our coaching sessions and gain
more traction with our reps. The results speak for themselves. leading financial services VP

About Enkata
Enkata helps contact centers maximize the value of every customer interaction, deliver better service,
control costs, and generate revenue. For customer operations transitioning into strategic profit centers, our
performance management software leads the market. Enkatas unique on-demand delivery model allows
for faster implementation and results. Our analytics-driven applications combine best practice metrics,
personalized dashboards, next action direction and integrated workflow that improve the balanced
achievement of sales, customer experience and cost objectives every minute, every day.

Enkata | White Paper 10 2009 Enkata All rights reserved. | www.enkata.com