Turning Your Contact Centre From a Cost to Profit Centre

Frank Sherlock of CallMiner discusses the two things that you need to do to change the image of your contact centre, encouraging you to use interaction analytics in the process.

If you want to turn your contact centre into a profit centre, it’s important to ensure that you always:

• Identify the correct KPIs and continuously evaluate them to ensure the right things are measured
• Continuously measure the ROI against the most important business and contact centre KPIs, to ensure value is delivered back to the contact centre and the business.

Here are four tips on how to ensure interaction analytics delivers value back to the contact centre and the entire business:

1. Understand the Key Decision Makers and Influencers – and the Business Outcomes Most Valued

As in any project, there will be many decision-makers and influencers involved in the implementation of an interaction analytics programme.

CXOs, Contact Centre and IT Management will all have their own requirements when it comes to realising the benefits of using analytics in the contact centre. There may be other departments involved too.

As described here, the intelligence gathered in the contact centre can benefit a variety of business functions within an organisation. It is therefore important to identify at the outset the key decision-makers and influencers.

Then, you can concentrate on identifying what business outcomes/KPIs are highest on their agenda.

Their KPIs may include:

• Building customer loyalty by delivering an excellent customer experience
• Increasing customer lifetime value by improving retention and cutting churn
• Increasing profits by improving operational efficiency
• Collecting debts/ making sales more effectively
• Reducing costs by identifying and eliminating unnecessary inbound call reasons

With so many KPIs to focus on, it’s important to get clarity on which are most valued by the senior leadership team. Without this vital input, you might put effort into creating a business case that simply won’t be approved.

Don’t forget to check continuously whether the business heads have changed the KPIs and adapt what you measure accordingly.

2. Link Business Issues With Solutions Areas to Prove Your Business Case

Because using analytics enables you to evaluate 100% of your customer interactions, you suddenly have access to a wealth of valuable information that previously had been hidden in a mountain of unstructured data.

If you don’t align the interaction analytics solution to the most valued business objectives it can be easy to be overwhelmed by the range of insight that is available. Therefore, it is important to avoid what we call ‘boiling the ocean’.

For example, if your contact centre is sales focused, one of the most valued outcomes is improving revenue, and you can prove how interaction analytics can help you deliver more revenue by reducing after-call work, thus enabling agents to make more calls.

Interaction analytics data can also help you justify the investment required to improve self-service technologies. It can do this by showing that the weaknesses of the existing system cause customers to arrive angry or frustrated – leading to increased churn, loss of revenue and negative word of mouth.

Because the proof you provide is based on 100% of your contact centre interactions, you can be sure that it cannot be challenged – unlike when you build it from a small random sample of data from your customer interactions.

3. Focus on the Highest Impact Solution Areas to Achieve the Best Performance

Just as it’s important to select the right KPIs, it is imperative to select the solution areas that will deliver the best results.

For example, one of CallMiner’s customers improved agent performance for one of their clients and saved $37,100 from a single trend analysis on repeat calls.

Because their customer care centre is the first live interaction a customer has with their client’s brand, they recognised that to achieve the best performance, and best results, they needed to eliminate any issues that could negatively impact the customer experience.

4. Continuously Measure the ROI to Prove the Value for Each Solution Area

Frank Sherlock

Many companies implement interaction analytics solutions… and then forget to measure the results! There is no point spending time identifying which KPIs matter the most to your business and then failing to provide the proof that achieving them helps your business improve its results.

In Tip #3 it was discussed how focusing on one solution area delivered significant tangible value. Once you’ve proven to the organisation the ROI in one area, it’s possible to do the same for all the high-impact solution areas. And it’s vital you keep proving the ROI on a continuous basis. It’s highly likely that the cumulative impact of your improvements will be transformational.