Today, May 27th, the contact centre organization contactcentres.be will host the annual Caviars awards, celebrating the best contact centers in various categories. One of the awards is ‘Best use of technology’, a category that we hold very dear, since the use of analytics in contact centers can make a huge difference. It definitely deserves every award it gets. According to us, anyway.
When analytics become a game changer for contact centers
Whenever a customer or prospect gets in touch with a contact center, it is good to have analytics technology available that can advise the contact center agent on the next best step. This advice can be based on a quick analysis of the customer/prospect interaction history and other available information on this person. Which offer will stand the best chance of being accepted? Should you try to cross-sell other products? Analytics can help make better decisions on the spot. More specifically, the SAS Real-Time Decision Manager can execute decision flows in real time to feed contact center systems. It combines rule based capabilities with predictive analytics.
Analytics can also play a decisive role in outbound call scenarios. Especially when the contact centers are scarcely staffed - which they usually are - it is very important to make the right decisions on whom to target: do you aim for the customers with the highest revenue potential? Or for the customers who are most likely to buy? Analytics can help contact centers identify the best targets.
Moreover analytics can be used to improve the general efficiency of the contact center. The aggregated data can provide insight in general trends - e.g. the average call response time - but also on agent-specific data and trends, such as their average call handling time and their evolution over time.
Numbers and words
The information doesn’t have to be limited to structured data, by the way. Nowadays, you can easily find a decent and affordable text and/or speech analysis tool which enables you to analyze all written or spoken customer feedback. You can for example analyze all complaints to investigate which are the recurring topics and which sentiments can be detected around these topics. Visualization tools, such as word clouds, can help you to identify which are the most urgent problems to tackle and which issues seem to be well under control.
These are just a few of the possibilities of analytics in a contact center that can lead to useful and sometimes surprising insights. It wouldn’t surprise me if the winner of the technology Caviar award turns out to be an analytics customer.