Every customer interaction, agent training and lost customer creates more data for a call center. Each one of these events is a learning experience, and often influences future policies and changes. But as a contact center grows, it gets harder to keep track of all these important events, and the valuable insights are often lost. Even though this data is still being collected, it is not creating value without contact center data strategies to extract these insights. Here are a few ways your contact center can utilize data to enhance business processes and the customer journey simultaneously.
Interaction Forecasting
No contact center has a continuous, steady interaction volume. Just the nature of a contact center means that there are spikes and drops in volume for every channel, and the patterns for each different channel are often distinct. Whether you are looking at smaller hourly changes, or larger differences based on holidays, they all have different staffing requirements to maintain great customer service.
Applying a predictive analytics tool to your past interaction volume data can help forecast future volume. This allows more appropriate staffing based on predicted traffic, keeping both employees and customer happy. Not only can this reduce hold times and busy phone lines, but it can also prevent over-staffing on slower days, which will enable lower operating costs. An analytics tool can help a contact center run smoothly regardless of traffic and enables management to be prepared for any unusual interaction volumes.
Speech Analytics
Everyone has heard the words “your call may be recorded for quality assurance” while on hold. Reviewing agents’ interactions is an important part of maintaining and enhancing excellent customer experience. While in the past, this was often done manually, today, there are speech analytics tools that can monitor interactions in real time. These solutions monitor the tone, cadence and message of both the agent as well as the customer, and can alert the agent to any changes that could improve the interaction. This can enable an agent to retain a customer or just provide exceptional customer service during the first call. Instead of waiting for employee reviews or training to learn about any opportunities, now agents receive this information in real time, and can adjust their interactions immediately.
Channel Statistics
An omnichannel approach is important to enhancing customer service. Many customers prefer to have a variety of ways to contact the business, and it’s important to understand how to best connect with these customers. By using an analytics tool to view omnichannel usage statistics, you can see how your customers prefer to connect with your business. This can give you valuable information, especially if you combine it with customer demographic information to get a more comprehensive view. Achieving this view into channel statistics can also illustrate different channel metrics, such as cost per interaction, average interaction time, and the popularity of each channel. All this information will inform decisions, enabling you to focus your efforts on the right channels.
By giving business data context, data analytics solutions can greatly enhance the operations of a contact center. By using this data, you can not only improve the customer experience, but also make better, data-driven business decisions, potentially increasing productivity and reducing operating costs. Use your data to your advantage. Enhance your contact center with analytics and data strategies to streamline your business and improve customer experience.
