Perfecting Customer Care with Actionable Call Center Data

A big part of customer service success in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing market landscape is the ability to seize the opportunities provided by the modern contact center. This includes not only the technology platforms on which people now gather but also the possibilities of actionable call center data—a true game changer in the world of customer service.

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What Is Actionable Call Center Data?

Often referred to as advanced analytics, actionable call center data is the means of analyzing the information that moves through your contact center every day. And that amount can be huge, involving everything from phone calls logs to instant chat logs to social media mentions and email click-throughs. And each piece of it is important, offering the means to better interact with your customers and prospects.

It’s also basic, good business: Seizing actionable data means giving yourself the best intelligence to identify any root causes of customer issues, and to achieve a deeper understanding of any processes that could give rise to future problems. This means not only determining what action can be immediately taken to keep things running smoothly today, but also what needs to be done in the big picture to make sure things run even more smoothly tomorrow.

In essence, seizing control of actionable call center data and putting it to the best possible use is a means to ensure your customer service performance is in a state of continuous improvement. The idea is to use readily available knowledge to optimize processes and improve your overall efficiency.

And today, doing so has become easier than ever, particularly if you have the right partner—someone with the know-how to read the trends in your actionable call center data and then make the right decisions in process improvements based on that information.

What You Can Achieve with Actionable Call Center Data…

Among the multiple advantages it brings to customer service efforts, scalability may be the asset that delivers the most efficiency and customer satisfaction. Because communications and interactions tend to spike during certain times of the year, depending on the industry, it’s crucial to put into place any necessary adjustments to accommodate these fluctuations without any adverse effect on your availability or quality of service to customers.

Traditional, on-site call centers can struggle with this aspect of modern communications. But in the age of giant sales seasons with customers certain to engage more at certain times of the year than at others, there’s no longer enough room for not getting it right. A modern call center partner can put your actionable call center data to the best possible use to ensure that you know when to expect spikes or lulls, and plan for them accordingly.

Call center data and analytics also appeal to customers who have favorite reps or agents they prefer to deal with. With a sophisticated contact center, agents can easily transfer calls, chats, or other messages to one another, or flag the conversation for later reference, with minimal hassle for customers. And all this data is tracked and used to ensure that processes are being carried out with the highest likelihood of achieving the best customer satisfaction.

Examples of Bad Actionable Call Center Data

Bad actionable call center data may include outdated key performance indicators (KPIs) that do not accurately reflect current customer demands, lack of accurate tracking or recording of key customer metrics, incomplete customer feedback forms and surveys, and lack of response to customer inquiries. Bad call center data also includes a failure to provide timely and appropriate responses to customer feedback which can leave customers feeling frustrated and ignored. Additionally, bad actionable call center data often does not provide an in-depth look into the customer experience, making it difficult for businesses to make meaningful changes or improve their operations.

Who Can Benefit from Actionable Call Center Data?

Organizations of all sizes can benefit from actionable call center data. Small businesses, startups, and large corporations all use this data to gain deeper insights into the customer experience and improve their operations. It is especially beneficial for customer-oriented businesses, such as banks and retailers, since they are able to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences in order to provide more tailored experiences. Actionable call center data also provides organizations with an understanding of customer pain points and issues in order to address them swiftly and effectively.

… And How You Can Achieve It

Collecting call center data means truly unifying your data. It requires integrating all communications channels into a single network. Then, providing seamless access and implementation for agents and clients alike.

And often, that means calling upon the expertise of an outsourced contact center partner who can not only give you options to meet your every specific need—whether it’s voice or chat, social or email, or whatever best meets the required operational goals—but also have the expertise and resources to unify your channels and make the best possible use of the resulting data.

By unifying all of your communications into a single, comprehensive data stream, an outsourced contact center can give you the power to more fully understand your customers than ever before. It also means the agents who work on your behalf are better equipped to adjust and improve the customer experience.

Simply put, the acquisition and harnessing of call center data may not be a realistic goal for a team of on-site agents focused on the important task of engaging directly with customers and prospects. An expert-level contact center partner, on the other hand, will be fully equipped to manage and track all applicable data, trends, and metrics to make sure you’re making the right decisions regarding customer communications.

How Do You Perfect Actionable Call Center Data?

Perfecting actionable call center data requires ongoing monitoring and analysis. The most important step is to establish an effective system that collects key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer feedback, call duration, resolution rate, customer satisfaction ratings, etc. These KPIs should be tracked on a regular basis in order to identify trends and develop strategies for continual improvement. Additionally, businesses can use analytics tools to analyze their data in more depth and gain deeper insights into the customer experience. Finally, it’s important to have clear processes in place for responding quickly and effectively to customer feedback in order to improve operations and build loyal relationships with customers.

For specialized outsourced contact centers, actionable call center data is one of the key services offered to improve customer service operations and the quality of service. They can also help with other business-critical functions such as proven business intelligence, technological expertise, back-office process outsourcing, and data security.