Contact Center Performance Management CCPM- is a fairly new e-business function devoted to giving management greater visibility into the myriad activities that take place at a contact center. CCPM is only coming into its own, says Donna Fluss, Principal of DMG Consulting, because of the underlying technological complexity. There are over fifty systems in the contact center, she says, and multiple systems within categories. Those include telecommunications hardware, speech analytics, customer relationship management CRM-, e-mail response management, and interactive voice systems. All of those systems combine to tell valuable stories about the performance of your contact center, but existing e-business software can t tease out these stories. Contact centers have 100s of Key Performance Indicators KPIs-, they ve a very quantitative department. Companies like Oracle and SAP have corporate performance management applications embedded, but these aren t geared for the contact center environment. This is also true of business intelligence BI- software such as that available for Hyperion, Cognos, SAS, and other specialty vendors. Only native CCPM vendors like AIM Technology, Merced Systems, NICe, Verint, VPI and Witness Systems-, Fluss argues, can give you an optimal look at the performance of your contact center. These companies have applications that integrate to contact center systems right out of the box. Other business applications vendors haven t done that work. CCPM software gives you the ability to track not just classic contact center KPIs, such as average time to resolution, but also the ability to measure newer functions. For example, many call centers now offer up- and cross-selling functions, with agents trained to pitch many different products and services. CCPM can let you know how your agents are performing in this critical realm. Source: line56.coma>