The number of data streams that come into the contact centers of many modern organizations can be extensive. Contact management systems, automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice recognition (IVR), quality monitoring, workforce management, CRM, human resources, homegrown software applications, and more all contribute to the digital mess today’s organizations encounter. The reasons for the disarray and disorder tie to all of the factors that go into the operational realities of running a business like keeping up with the competition, aligning strategic goals across functional areas, adjusting to expansions and mergers, or integrating new systems with existing ones. For all of these reasons and others, data becomes somewhat chaotic and complicated to manage.
With all of those variables, it’s apparent why many contact center managers find it challenging to integrate all of their customer data—much of it generated by and stored in various silos—to get at its full advantage. The rewards of wrangling the chaos, however, are well worth it.
[Read the Better Contact Center Reporting whitepaper]
Digital Paydirt
If you’ve spent any time at all watching Gold Rush or Bearing Sea Gold on the Discovery Channel (or even if you haven’t) you may know that paydirt, the ground containing ore in sufficient quantity to be profitably extracted, is what every miner seeks. Paydirt can yield big profits, but not without hard work. The ground containing the gold is first dug from its permafrost surroundings, delivered to a wash plant and tumbled, shaken and washed across a sluice to separate the precious, shiny dust from the waste soil. The data that comes into a business from all of its various sources is comparable to paydirt. Just like mining for ore, extracting the valuable bits from those collective data streams takes diligence and perseverance, but is worth it in terms of gaining insights for understanding customer behavior and building better customer experiences.
The Value in the Data
Organizations benefit significantly from the data acquired during customer interactions, but traditionally this has been difficult to do without an advanced reporting and analytics platform. According to McKinsey, businesses can use customer insights derived from contact center reporting and analytics to:
- Tease out critical patterns. Knowing the habits of your customers like how many times they contact your organization, their purchase habits, and the frequency of email inquiry can be insightful and help create a customer profile. Identifying the patterns and tying them together across the business can create positive outcomes including the creation of more personalized customer experiences, identification of opportunities for cross-selling, insights on staffing your contact center, and learnings about the efficacy of your targeted marketing efforts.
2. Improve agent productivity. Using reporting dashboards and other analytics enables managers to compare performance across agents and gain an understanding of which pricing, discounts, and bundles are working and which are not. Advanced analytics and reporting also create the ability to channel institutional knowledge to where it’s needed most and ensure that customers are reaching the agent that is best able to help them.
3. Identify new solutions and services. Getting a handle on the data streams coming into a company means understanding how customers are interacting with that company. This can present opportunities for developing new self-service experiences, creating online marketplaces tailored to the customer or guide how to scale the contact center to meet customer needs. Additionally, agents can use consolidated data to get a 360-degree view of the customer.
Advanced Reporting for the Modern Contact Center
Whether your data is trapped in silos due to the organizational issues or because growth has resulted in incompatible systems, the right advanced reporting and analytics system will enable you to break down those data silos. By aggregating and integrating your data so that it’s easy to understand and readily available across the organization, you’ll gain insights on customer interactions and escape the worries of manually compiling data and reports. Before you know it, you’ll be providing choice to your customers and mining your organization’s digital paydirt.
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