In an age where data is the most valuable tool any business can access, understanding how to use the information your organisation collects each day is vital.
It’s now easier than ever to find out everything you need to know about the people who interact with your company each day. Taking advantage of that fact could lead to incredible opportunities for companies. For instance, McKinsey says that businesses using analytics can reduce average call handling time by 40% and boost conversion rates by up to 50%.
The question is, how does your company use analytics to improve the contact centre experience?
Discovering the Role of Contact Centre Analytics
In the modern contact centre, analytics can provide insights into more than just voice conversations. These tools can collect insights on everything from web-based interactions to video chat and more – provided you have the right software.
In the past, call analytics tools focussed heavily on metrics such as call time length and how quickly customers got a resolution to their problems. However, there are now many more metrics to consider in the evolving conversation, including:
- Customer effort: How much work a customer has to do to get a solution to their problem.
- Average handling time: How long it takes to get from reporting an issue or enquiry to reaching a successful resolution. This is affected by first contact resolution.
- First contact resolution: How many customers get their problems solved the first time they communicate with your business.
- Service displacement rate: How frequently you can solve issues using self-service or automation.
- Holds, transfers, and call-backs: How many times do you need to send your customer to a different person to solve their issue?
- Escalations and complaints: How much negative feedback do you get from your customers?
- Hold and wait time: How long does your customer have to wait to get the information or the resolution they need?
- Sentiment analysis: What does your customer feel when talking to you about specific topics?
Sometimes, the contact centre analytics environment will also look beyond metrics gathered about a customer to include factors like agent productivity and performance. Tracking this activity in your contact centre is an excellent way to determine where the bottlenecks in your conversations are, what the sources of frustration for your customers might be, and where the primary sources of inefficiency lie.
With the help of artificial intelligence, companies can take their analytics efforts even further by incorporating qualitative metrics such as sentiment analysis, or predictive analysis to determine what a customer might do next in their buying journey. This helps businesses understand the psychological and emotional experience of the customer as an individual and build up a picture of patterns that can inform strategic and operational decisions. The information can make it easier to provide a personalised experience throughout the customer journey, giving the businesses a competitive edge in its service delivery.
Monitoring Analytics to Improve Business Performance
Gathering crucial analytical information in the workplace gives today’s businesses an opportunity to overcome a range of problems, from performance issues with agents to inabilities to give clients the kind of exceptional service they deserve.
Many customers frequently complain about being left on hold for too long, being passed around agents to find the information they need, or not getting answers to their questions fast enough. By reviewing common problems that clients face in the contact centre environment, businesses can ensure they’re putting the right systems in place to drive successful discussions forward between their brand and their clients.
For various reasons, from relying on outsourced support to running outdated software, too many companies have to wait for contact centre performance reports. The duration can be hours, days or even weeks. Given modern customer expectations, and the pressure on businesses to be agile, not having access to real-time reporting can mean the difference between building customer loyalty and losing customers to a competitor. Modern contact centre software includes real-time reports that allows contact centre managers to monitor and respond to agent performance and interaction analysis feedback, allowing them to address minor issues before they turn into major problems.
When you’re constantly measuring the success of your contact centre, you have a unique opportunity to see what’s happening at every stage of the consumer journey. This means you can not only deliver the kind of fantastic experiences your audience expects, but you can also help your agents by giving them more support when they need it, from empowering them with information to providing the staffing support they need to cope with periods of high call volume, such as Christmas time.
In the age of reduced customer loyalty, where expectations are high and margins are tight, understanding your contact centre performance and being able to act on that information helps give your business the competitive edge to survive and thrive in an always-on marketplace.
Originally published Feb 27, 2020, updated Jan 16, 2023
