You've invested in the best leadership, technologies, and human capital sourcing and development partners available to formulate and perfect the secret sauce that makes your enterprise exceptional and successful. Now you can gain even more value from these investments by consistently communicating your message and measuring the performance across your organization via contact center performance management.
CCPM enables you to thoughtfully and pragmatically advance your organization’s goals and the lessons learned throughout your career to extend and compound this differentiation and record of accomplishment, explains Greg Salvato, CEO of TouchPoint One. Employing a CCPM platform, he says, is far more effective than using manual processes and multiple spreadsheets to do the job.
“Individuals in contact center management are smart folks and understand effective strategies to get the most out of their people and processes,” Salvato adds. “But there’s a general lack of awareness that modern platforms now exist to enable them to integrate people, processes and technology, and to advance contact center key performance indicators more efficiently.”
Acuity is the CCPM platform offered by TouchPoint One, a pioneer that is defining this new product category. Because the Acuity solution is provided via the software-as-a-service business model, companies like yours can quickly launch CCPM initiatives and fund them on a per month basis – and without costly integration and other upfront costs.
For executives, Acuity provides a single command and control portal from which to assess, analyze, and act on all of the data and business logic on which their contact centers rely. They can tap and customize financial, operations, and program dashboards, which can be viewed on any device, to see the profitability drivers for each program and profitability measured against targets on a daily basis at every level of the program.
For supervisors, Acuity enables easy identification of the contact center’s best and worst performing agents based on all relevant KPIs, and the ability to provide agents with the metrics on which their performance and compensation are measured. The CCPM platform also can be used to deliver agent coaching, alerting, customer survey, communications tools, and quality monitoring.
Acuity Performance Management from TouchPoint One also empowers and engages contact center agents by keeping them in the loop regarding expectations. Agents can use the interface to view performance criteria, so there is no guessing as to goals and success criteria. Messaging features of the platform, meanwhile, provide a direct link to alerts, coaching, quizzing, and other forms of communication, including game mechanics to assist and motivate agents.
Finance, human resources and legal, sales and marketing, and systems departments can
also benefit from CCPM platforms, which can allow for more consistent and specific job reviews, enhanced market differentiation and perception due to better customer service, and lower IT costs, to mention just a few deliverables.
“By aggregating and leveraging data from CRM, CMS, phone switch, WFO and other disparate systems, CCPM extends the ROI of each by serving as the foundation of a cohesive performance ecosystem,” says Salvato. “The positive financial impact achievable can be both profound and transformational. Even modest improvement in adherence, attendance, attrition, supervisor span of control, and/or utilization can deliver a return 10 times that of a CCPM investment through associated increases in top and/or bottom line growth.”
Convergent Outsourcing, a large U.S.-based BPO, is among the companies benefitting from CCPM. The company employed Acuity to improve KPIs related to such things as attrition, customer satisfaction scores, dollars collected, and first call resolution required by a client.
“Implementing our performance management processes through Acuity − accessible to our entire staff via the web on any PC, smartphone or tablet – transformed us to a level of effectiveness and scalability that was beyond our initial expectations,” Convergent President Casey Kostecka says.
Although CCPM is a relatively new category, more and more organizations are embracing its goodness. An estimated 11.7 percent of organizations were using CCPM applications as of 2012. That reached 13.8 percent in April, according to DMG Consulting, and it’s projected to grow 14 percent through 2016.
“The contact center is vital not only to maximizing business investments, but also to achieve top line potential,” Salvato says. “The stakes are exceptionally high for organizations that ignore the astoundingly common disconnect within the contact center, where the customer experience is most completely and prominently impacted, and between other enterprise operations.”
If your company is not already part of the CCPM revolution, he adds, make 2015 the year you unleash your team's full potential – by letting go of old technology and inefficient implementation of people, strategy and process, and making a SaaS (News 
- Alert)-based contact center performance management solution your top budget priority.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
