Operational performance management products will help you with business intelligence about your contact center operations.

But the tool needs to be “comprehensive,” say Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) officials: “This means that it needs to offer both real-time response and long-term historical analysis, and it needs to give you the flexibility to achieve a true enterprise view of your contact center operations.”

A Genesys (News - Alert) white paper featured by Alcatel-Lucent offers five best practices to help:

Stop problems in their tracks to make the most of your resources. If you detect and even anticipate issues long before they escalate, you can use fewer contact center resources while maintaining higher levels of customer satisfaction. An effective operational performance management solution can help you do just that:by combining real-time data with historical analysis, you can gain both the responsiveness and the perspective to allocate your resources as cost-effectively as possible.

Identify which of your agents are customer-facing stars...a nd which of them require a little guidance. Identify your strongest ambassadors -- and coach the agents who need guidance most. With detailed, ad hoc analysis of agents’ interactions with customers, you’re better equipped to discover and nurture your best agents. You’re also in a much better position to identify problem areas for underperforming customer-facing employees.

Proactively solve problems instead of solving the same problem over and over. With effective historical analysis, you can identify trends and respond to them by implementing a more long-term, strategic change. That way, you’re not performing the same action in real time again and again.

When a problem occurs, document what actions were taken —--and how successful they were.

In most companies, too much information is locked up in the minds of individuals. Not only does that make it difficult for many teams to resolve complex problems quickly, but it creates business continuity issues as well -- what happens, for instance, if someone suddenly leaves the company?

Business conditions change. Be prepared to change with them. Many operational performance management solutions remain permanently fixed in place, and will therefore not help your operations adjust to new approaches and changing market conditions.