How Data-driven Contact Center Analytics Can Drive Growth and Save You Money

The term contact center analytics gets thrown around quite a bit these days. But make no mistake. This isn’t just another marketing buzzword, or a device used by vendors to charge you more for a service you may or may not need.

Far from it: This is an operational strategy that’s become an essential component for success for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

What is Contact Center Analytics?

Contact center analytics is defined as the process of collecting and analyzing customer data from contact centers to improve overall customer satisfaction. Through this process, businesses can uncover insights into customer behavior, identify areas for improvement, and make better decisions when it comes to customer service. Contact center analytics uses various sources of customer intelligence, such as call recordings, customer surveys, and social media posts, to gain a clear understanding of the customer journey. With contact center analytics, companies can assess their current performance levels and take actionable steps toward creating more effective customer service solutions.

What are the Benefits of Contact Center Analytics?

The benefits of contact center analytics include:

→ Improved customer service

→ Personalization

→ Increased efficiency

→ Better decision-making

By gaining a clear understanding of customer behavior using contact center analytics, businesses are better equipped to respond quickly and effectively to customer needs. This allows them to provide more personalized experiences that build trust and loyalty with customers. Additionally, contact center analytics can help companies reduce the cost of customer service by streamlining processes and optimizing staffing levels. Contact center analytics can also be used to identify and forecast trends, and develop strategies that maximize ROI to improve results continually.

Thanks to the rapid evolution of technology we’ve seen in the last decade, the ability now exists to monitor the minutiae of your day-to-day correspondence with customers and prospects and then put that data to the best possible use to maximize sales and customer loyalty.

Instead of yet another add-on service you don’t need, data-driven contact center analytics are essential for today’s business seeking to:

• Drive growth by enhancing the opportunities to upsell.
• Improve efficiency by optimizing customer communications strategies.
• Achieve a better ROI from your communications spend.

Contact Center Analytics: From the Simple…

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in the idea of leveraging advanced analytics to improve business outcomes. Chances are good that even if you’re not currently using analytics in your data center, you’re doing it somewhere else in your business.

All the same, the application of advanced analytical techniques to your customer communications strategy poses a unique operational value. By mapping out the models of behavior of the people who interact with your business, you give yourself the opportunity to:

• Improve customer engagement so each interaction achieves the best possible results in terms of upselling or achieving customer loyalty.
• Better manage the performance of your agents so they’re using their time in the best way possible, while also avoiding redundant tasks.
• Gain deeper insights into the customer journey to help you evolve your strategy to better align with how people really interact with you.

In practice, the ways in which contact center analytics can be applied ranges from the simple to the sophisticated (with the most effective strategies making use of both). At the most basic level, analytics can map out exactly how your contact center is performing in terms of important stats, such as dropped calls and first-call resolution rates—both of which are essential to optimize to build a successful communications strategy.

Moving into more complex areas, contact center analytics can map out the high and points in consumer activity, which helps you anticipate surges and plan for them accordingly. It can also provide key insights into when customer activity is most likely to manifest as calls, or website inquiries, or social media interaction, or any other of today’s many communications channels. (Read more about all those channels here.)

This isn’t just helpful information; it’s practically essential. Gaining these insights, and then preparing accordingly, has specific operational advantages: It empowers you to better manage the schedule of your agents. It also gives you a clearer idea of what technological tools you need to invest in, or what skills and savvy you need to develop, to make sure you’re giving customers and prospects the best possible experience on any given channel.

…to the Sophisticated (and Beyond)

On the advanced side of the coin, data-drive contact center analytics can help you pinpoint deeper issues within your contact center strategy and then implement the appropriate actions for course correction.

Advanced data monitoring can tell you, for instance, when most of your dropped calls occur, or whether they’re associated with certain personnel or with a specific type of messaging that you use. In other words, you’ll receive real insight on what’s working and what isn’t, in a way that lets you take the action you need to improve.

How does the seemingly simple act of data gathering and analysis really deliver this level of value? By leveraging advanced technology, you can almost instantly convert unstructured data (the hundreds of phone calls agents receive each hour; the thousands of minutes of chat conversations) into structured data (numbers and graphs that can be measured against other interactions or wider goals).

The result is a holistic overview of every possible communications channel, including:

• Speech analytics to monitor calls in real time.
• Text analytics to track all customer interactions via email, SMS, social media and other text-based communications.
• Self-care analytics to measure interactions that occur via automated services, such as chatbots or web forms.
• Desktop analytics to monitor agent activity via the technology they use, thereby gauging not only individual performance but also the success of the operational systems and technology you use.
• Cross-channel analytics to measure how successfully you’re shifting from one channel to another.
• Satisfaction analytics to measure how satisfied customers are with their interactions with you.

How to Get Started with Contact Center Analytics?

So, is your organization prepared to put data-driven contact center analytics in place? Before you answer, consider that many businesses may think they have analytics in place. In reality, what they really do is examine just a small fraction of their customer interactions, and most likely do so manually and randomly, such as infrequent compliance checks that lack a full analytical approach.

With data-driven contact center analytics, you can transition from a random, small-scale and ultimately ineffective system into a comprehensive, highly useful process to improve your operational strategies. You’ll get access to 100% of your customer communications, opening a door into a whole new world of insights.

This can translate directly into revenue and growth. It not only enables you to correct any operational efficiencies in your existing contact center operations, but also empowers you to develop a better communications plan that’s more in tune with what your customers really want, and what they’re most likely to respond.

And, unless you have access to your own network of tech experts, the best (and most cost-effective) way to get started is to partner with a proven contact center solutions expert with a demonstrated track record. A company that can deliver world-class analytical solutions that have actually achieved real value for a wide variety of businesses.

Ready to Get Started?

At Working Solutions, we offer tools and technologies to put in place the best possible analytical strategies. We also have more than two decades of experience perfecting the methodologies needed to use them to their fullest potential. Plus, we offer access to the latest suite of technological tools, updated and upgraded to ensure that we (and you) not only meet but exceed industry standards.

So, whether you want to set up an analytics system for your contact center that can easily be used by your agents and managers, or have us run the entire process to provide you action-oriented reports, we’ve got an advanced analytical solution that suits your needs.