Unlocking the Real Power of Contact Centre Analytics

Effective contact centre analytics is vital to delivering efficient, high-quality customer service. However, customer service operations produce vast amounts of data.

This covers everything from metrics on call length to more in-depth quality assessments of individual interactions.

This data is often siloed within individual departments or software systems, adding complexity. Additionally, it can be difficult to understand or visualise by non-specialists, such as business decision-makers.

Carl Townley-Taylor at Enghouse Interactive explains how to unlock the real power of contact centre analytics.

The Need to Lower Reporting Overheads

Contact centres spend significant amounts of time locating and integrating data for reporting. Insights aren’t readily available to make better decisions or proactively adapt to evolving needs and opportunities.

The positive news is that Business intelligence technology can now automate data analysis and streamline the visualisation of insights. The latest solutions provide faster access to relevant data in more compelling ways.

When choosing a contact centre solution, look for one that covers these four core capabilities:

1. Enables Data to be Centralised

To get the full picture of contact centre performance you need to bring together all relevant data in a single place.

As well as agent interactions across all channels, your analytics solution should include other contact centre performance metrics, AI-derived sentiment analysis and information from business systems, like CRM solutions.

In the case of multilingual contact centres, it should be able to cover every language. This approach offers full context and enables you to correlate information. For example, you can see the type of call that leads to the most negative agent scores.

The logical place to unify this data is within your quality management system, as this already contains call/interaction recordings in a single, comprehensive solution.

2. Uses AI to Automate Processes

Traditional quality management solutions simply create a repository of agent/customer interactions.

Supervisors then have to manually review the interactions, assessing quality against pre-set criteria.

This is incredibly time-consuming. It means that supervisors can only cover a fraction of interactions, missing many examples of potential good or bad practices.

By using AI supervisors can automate initial analysis. This checks and marks every interaction, across every media type.

Supervisors then receive flags only for those interactions that require action. They can then conduct their own analysis and provide relevant coaching and training to the agent concerned.

3. Make Data Interactive

When it comes to monitoring contact centre quality, managers often receive static performance reports delivered as PDFs or CSV files on a monthly or even quarterly basis. While this approach gives topline results, it doesn’t provide the full story.

For example, if managers have questions on particular data points or require more detail they have to go back to the data analyst that built the report and wait for their response. This lengthens decision-making cycles and doesn’t make data easy to understand or use.

By using interactive, personalised dashboards instead, contact centres can democratize their data.

Managers simply drill down into specific areas, filter by different criteria and easily combine information as required.

Dashboards visualise data in a more enticing, engaging way. This makes it easier to understand at a glance and therefore to uncover new actionable insights.

There are a wide range of popular business intelligence (BI)/visualisation tools available on the market.

Therefore, make sure your contact centre software integrates with your chosen BI solution and can be personalised to your company branding.

4. Ensure it is Easy to Act on Insights

Contact centre analytics must provide a straightforward way to track performance. Companies need to provide managers with access to clear, understandable reports that highlight where they need to make improvements.

This allows them to take rapid, effective action. Reports therefore need to be self-service and include built-in help to explain exactly what specific figures mean and how the data is calculated.

Essentially, reports need to provide a window into your operations. This means that:

• Senior managers have a better picture of overall contact centre performance in business terms.
• Managers can understand how individual teams and channels are functioning and hone in on specific pain points.
• Supervisors are able to spend their time training and coaching agents, based on analysis of their interactions. They can help agents develop and improve, rather than having to dedicate significant time to listening to calls manually.

Understanding and improving contact centre performance has never been more important. Being able to address issues at an overall, channel, team or agent level is essential to improving customer experience.

That translates into lower customer churn, higher revenues, greater efficiency, and more motivated, trained staff.

However, often contact centre reporting solutions are cumbersome and time-consuming to use. This slows down decision-making and effectiveness.

To overcome this issue and deliver the right analytics, put in place a modern, interactive solution that delivers real insights in an understandable, interactive way.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Enghouse Interactive – View the Original Article

For more information about Enghouse Interactive - visit the Enghouse Interactive Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.