Contact Centre Analytics: The Challenges, Evolutions and Benefits

Sam O’Brien of RingCentral discusses all things contact centre analytics.

Customer engagement is one of the cornerstones of success in business. In the modern consumer environment, it’s never been easier for savvy shoppers to take their custom elsewhere if they feel they’ve had a negative experience. If your business doesn’t offer convenience and seamlessness, consumers are happy to go where they feel more valued.

Of course, a crucial point of contact for many customers will be your contact centre. Perhaps a potential new customer has a query they want to make before they commit themselves to make a purchase or sign up for a service.

Alternatively, it could be that an existing customer has had a bad experience and feels you’ve fallen short of the standards they expect. Either way, your staff have to be prepared for the good and the bad alike.

Contact centre training, of course, is hugely important. Your call centre operatives will need to have a good idea of what they can expect, and how to handle those tricky or even ill-tempered calls. But it’s also a matter of having sufficient contact centre resources and ensuring that staff has the kind of support they need to do the job well.

That’s not all, though. It’s important to note that modern customers have a variety of ways of contacting companies when they’re in need of support. It’s not just about voice calls any more.

They may also use chatbots and live chat facilities, social media, mobile apps, and more. Customer expectations in this regard are changing all the time and it’s up to you to ensure that your business keeps up with them.

Because customers can contact companies in so many different ways, modern contact centres have a vast array of data at their disposal. It’s one thing to have all this data to hand, however, but it’s quite another making effective use of it. This is why contact centre analytics is so important.

In this guide, we’ll go into more detail about what contact centre analytics actually is, why it matters, and how you can go about making the most efficient use of the data you have.

There are potentially hugely useful insights buried in that data, and analytics can help you unlock them. Read on to find out more.

What Is Contact Centre Analytics?

The precise definition of contact centre analytics can vary. In short, the term is used to cover a range of tools and processes used by firms to improve and streamline customer service by analysing data.

The objective of contact centre analytics is to keep the operation firing on all cylinders across a variety of support channels, ensuring that customers get the support they need with the minimum of inconvenience or delay.

Contact centre analytics, therefore, supplies the capacity to monitor, understand, and tweak the standards of service provision you offer.

It makes it easier to gain a thorough understanding of what you’re doing currently, helping you to understand what you’re doing well and what you need to improve.

Obviously, when you’re trying to run a busy call centre, there are many challenges. One of the key ones is that it’s only humanly possible to process a relatively limited amount of information at any one time.

Most of the time, it’s only the really worrying incidents and major problems that come to the attention of senior management. The more mundane (or even positive) types of customer experience tend to be overlooked by comparison.

Contact centre analytics allows you to redress the balance and delve deeper into your operations across the board. There’s been a lot of hype about the potential of big data analytics, and the same principles apply here.

Contact centre analytics makes it possible to implement improvements based on a rock-solid base of evidence and detail.

How Contact Centre Analytics Can Benefit Your Business

The main point of contact centre analytics is that it provides a comprehensive and finely detailed view of how your contact centre is performing. This draws issues to your attention that might otherwise be overlooked. It allows you to be more proactive rather than reactive.

You can address any problems or shortcomings that might emerge before a customer is forced to raise them with your company following a negative experience.

Omnichannel analytics gives you complete visibility of the customer journey, from start to finish. This allows you to perform quality scoring across all customer interactions and the related metadata from each stage. Contacts that contain certain terms or characteristics can be quickly searched for and monitored, and trends can be measured over time.

Another big benefit of contact centre analytics is that trending words and phrases which crop up in customer interactions can be automatically identified. This makes it easier to pick up on leading trends before they develop into major issues for more customers.

Among the other advantages of analytics are that it can be used to automate a range of quality-management processes. These include call monitoring and scoring, which would otherwise have been carried out manually. This saves manpower and allows members of your team to redirect their energies to where they’re more needed.

Feedback can be automated, and personalized scorecards provided to contact centre managers and team leaders, as well as the members of staff concerned. Staff can be scored against an agreed set of quality indicators, and managers can then use this data to determine the future training needs of employees.

This all helps to provide customers with a better service – the bottom line.

What Contact Centre Analytics Can Do for Customers

The benefits of contact centre analytics to customers are manifold. As always in these situations, it’s important to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You’ve probably experienced poor service yourself as a consumer, so you’ll know that it can be a source of immense frustration.

Being kept on hold for hours on end, being passed around like a parcel between different teams and departments, poor turnaround times. These are just some of the everyday frustrations that customers experience when trying to deal with contact centres.

But contact centre analytics can be used to bring about quite dramatic improvements in the standard of customer service.

Robust analytics provides lots of detail and hard data about how your contact centre is performing. As such, it can help you analyse whether you have sufficient staffing levels to deal with queries in a timely manner (thereby eliminating bottlenecks).

What’s more, it enables you to identify your staff’s training needs with greater precision and to drive compliance improvements.

Whether you’re an online retailer or you’re selling infographic software to businesses, these are the bread-and-butter necessities of customer service. Any business which fails to address them adequately does so at its own peril.

Conclusion: Challenges of Contact Centre Analytics

So we’ve established, surely beyond doubt, that contact centre analytics – when used in the right way – can be the catalyst for many positive changes. But it should not be seen as a way to limit human interaction.

Customers still value the opportunity to converse with real people, and in any case, analytics software can’t always pick up on the nuances of human discussion and emotions. Human intelligence is therefore still essential.

In addition, you also need to make sure that your analytics software provides a clear and comprehensive picture of customer interactions, with a single point of access to data. Without this, it’s easy to overlook certain aspects (not least as individual customers very often use multiple contact points).

Finally, your analytics software must analyse the complete breadth of consumer interactions. All too often, businesses only analyse a small fraction of these.

You must ensure that the consumer journey as a whole is captured; this is how you can identify emerging trends (an indicator of potential problems) and other issues that need to be resolved.

Sam O’Brien

Hopefully, this guide has given you a good overview of what contact centre analytics is and what it could do for your business.

Just as you can tap into the power of inventory visibility to improve your order management, you can also harness the detailed visibility offered by contact centre analytics. Your customers will ultimately be the ones who benefit.

Author: Robyn Coppell