Unlocking the Value of Contact Center Data

Success in today’s business environment is based on several factors. Accurate and up to date business intelligence is one of the most important. Without knowing how your business is performing, you can’t effectively respond to problems, encourage areas of strength, and beat the competition.

All businesses have vast quantities of data that could, in theory, be useful. Unfortunately, a lot of this data is locked away, and very difficult to get to. Voice recordings are a good example of this problem. Voice data is incredibly valuable to an organization, as it includes the authentic voice of the customer, as well as the voice of your contact center employees.

But voice recordings can be difficult to extract intelligence from. Call recording systems can put various barriers in place, such as additional charges for access to your recordings, your data! Additionally, even if you are able to access the audio, you are faced with a dilemma. Either you hire employees who do nothing but listen to your calls (which would be very expensive), or you listen to a small fraction of your calls (which inevitably leaves insights on the table).

Today’s advanced speech analytics solutions can help address the problem. Descriptive analytics, for example, allows a business to determine the issues that currently exist. Are customers happy or unhappy? What are they unhappy about? If agents are challenged to meet customer needs, what specific challenges exist?

Prescriptive analytics goes a step further, and allows a business to determine what actions need to be taken, based on issues that currently exist. If customers are consistently unhappy with the reliability of a product, a speech analytics solution can identify this failing, and thus you can find a path forward for product development.

Predictive analytics goes even further, and allows a business to project future needs from past issues. If product changes in the past have resulted in unhappy customers, then this trend can be identified and anticipated, and methods can be put in place to alleviate the problem.<?

There are numerous benefits to a business in having these speech analytics solutions in place. Improvements to agent monitoring, coaching, and training, are one example. The impact and effectiveness of training methods and practices can be assessed, in near real-time, based on agents’ performance on the phones.

Additionally, there are clear connections to improved customer service. The more insight a business has into the needs of customers and how these needs are (or are not) being met, the better its ability to reduce friction and offer a superior customer experience.

For more on this issue, please see my recent article in DM Magazine, accessible here: https://issuu.com/dmn.ca/docs/dm_june2019_w/19