Customers seem to hate them—and corporations love them. Like it or not, call centers are a fact of life. Viewed as a necessary evil rather than an opportunity to build relationships, businesses continually seek to slash service costs—which frequently results in more disgruntled customers. So wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to cut costs and increase customer satisfaction at the same time? That’s what Howard Lee thought. Building on several Microsoft® products, and the Microsoft .NET Framework, his concept for HyperQuality, Inc., a Web-based suite of quality assurance programs, is helping companies improve their customer experience—one agent at a time.

Back in 2003 Howard Lee, Chairman and CEO of HyperQuality, was sitting in a Seattle Starbucks with his Chief Operating Officer, Mike Mattsen, when it hit him. Lee, who had managed Disney’s call center for the entertainment giant’s catalog orders, was intimately familiar with the customer service cost vs. quality dilemma. And his experience taught him that great quality costs less than low quality. Better service means fewer contacts per issue and lower total handling times, higher overall customer retention, and increased up sells and cross sells.

But while many systems exist that theoretically improve the customer experience, no one had developed a practical way to actually measure the effectiveness of those systems, or make use of the huge volumes of data being collected. Without accurate metrics, there was no way to know how one coaching method compared to another, how an agent scored against his or her peers, or how one call center faired against another. HyperQuality set out to change that.

The company has developed a Web-based suite of tools and services, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that objectively evaluates the customer care experience and provides concrete feedback on how to improve that experience. HyperQuality evaluates and audits telephone, email and chat communications, and reports the scores with detailed feedback to managers, supervisors and individual agents via an easy-to-use online reporting system. High-level reports enable managers to compare services within a center or across multiple centers. Detailed reports allow supervisors to view scores, attribute by attribute, at the agent level. Individual agents can also view their own results, listen to scored calls, and review feedback to help them improve their performance.

According to Chief Technology Officer Jude Kavalam, “We’re not a software company and we’re not a consultancy. We’re in the customer experience business. HyperQuality is tightly focused on evaluating and improving call center quality. Our customers include some of the largest corporations in the world—such as Covad Communications, Alaska Airlines and Time Warner Cable—over 40 in all. These companies have a global call center presence representing millions of interactions every day. They have a huge stake in managing those contacts as efficiently as possible without sacrificing quality. Our mission is to help them take their customer interactions to the next level.”

According to Kavalam, HyperQuality originally developed a proprietary system based on Java using Jasper reports. “In many cases our reporting performance was terrible,” he laments. “It often took several minutes for reports to appear. Now, we can produce the same report in seconds and in some cases in subseconds.”

Kavalam says starting the company on open source technology provided broad functionality for its initial growth, but as the company evolved, it faced scalability issues. He was convinced that moving to the Microsoft platform would solve these problems.

Says Kavalam, “We’re now in the process of taking all the solutions developed using open source technologies and moving them to the Microsoft platform. We’re taking the MySQL database and moving to Microsoft SQL Server®, and SQL Server Reporting Services. We are moving from Linux on the server end to Windows Server. We are moving from PHP and Java to .NET and Visual C#®. Also, in that process, we are including other technologies into the mix, like Windows Workflow Foundation.”

Microsoft’s .NET Framework and supporting technologies have enabled HyperQuality to build a very flexible, scalable system that gets clients ramped up quickly and then continues to support them as they grow. Kavalam says, “Just the switch to Microsoft’s SQL Server alone has made a huge difference in performance and manageability. HyperQuality is now able to do clusters, fail over, replication, maintenance and performance monitoring—tasks that were a nightmare to set up, configure, and manage on the existing open source solution.”

HyperQuality is currently monitoring approximately 400,000 customer interactions per month. With the SQL database, the company is able to monitor client interactions and provide actionable information back to the client in multiple formats geared for individual agents, all the way up to a high-level executive snapshot. Additionally, the Windows Communications Foundation allows HyperQuality to create a much more robust infrastructure for managing systems. And according to Kavalam, Microsoft’s tools also make it easier for HyperQuality’s programmers to write better code.

“Partnering with Microsoft has allowed us to be bold and more innovative,” Kavalam says. “The Emerging Business Team has supported us with everything from resources to support to technical reviews. Because of them and the .NET Framework, we are doing much more today than we ever could have done on our own.”

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