The strength and profitability of your call center lie heavily within how you use the data. How do you analyze what's there to make your operation the best possible? The quality of your call center communications provider has a lot to do with the analytics that you receive. If the system isn't up to the task, you'll fail due to inadequate data findings. According to a Salesforce report, 80 percent of customers think customer experience should be better, considering all the data companies collect.
What is the Difference between Call Centers and Contact Centers?
Often used interchangeably, there is a significant difference between call centers and contact centers. Call centers rely on a single channel to connect with clients – phone calls. In contrast, contact centers use multiple channels to communicate with clients, such as chat, emails, calls, social media, surveys, and more. A call center could turn into a contact center or vice versa by adding or subtracting communication channels, but that is less important than clearing up the common misconception.
Types of Call Center Analytics
Before we get into how to improve through analytics, we need to determine the common types of analytics. You can't try to improve your call center analytics without getting down to the base of what it is.
- Voice Analytics: A tool that focuses on the voice spoken on a call. It looks for various stresses in the tone and rhythm of the voice and can prompt an agent to change with the customer in the moment. You can see the client's in-depth, unspoken feelings with real-time and after-the-call reports.
- Speech Analytics: On the other hand, speech analytics uses AI and machine learning (ML) to focus on phrases, keywords, or anything you would specifically like to target, making the interaction searchable.
- Predictive Analytics: Uses historical information to find patterns and helps predict future trends. This is useful for staffing needs, common customer concerns, and finding specific behavioral patterns.
- Interaction Analysis: Generally, customer-agent interactions can help with internal and external training. You can determine if there are gaps in the knowledge base or specific training needs. This also helps with load balancing for your agents. If they have designated clients, you can see how often they interact and even out client loads based on interaction volume.
- Customer Sentiment: You can dive into the interaction data, customer surveys, NPS scores, and other avenues to understand how the client feels to assist them better. Customers know when an organization cares, and by paying close attention to the sentiment, you can get ahead of disgruntled customers.
The Importance of Call Center Analytics
It's vitally important to forego feelings or choose your direction on a gut feeling and find as much available data as possible to improve your call center's health. Your biggest failure is not adequately analyzing unhappy customers who leave your service and your agents quitting due to directionless operations. No call center or business will survive without customers and agents working with them.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Using a call center analytics solution from Simplicity VoIP gives you access to a treasure trove of pre-built reports and dashboards to easily digest and distribute the information you need at any given time. Your managers and supervisors have the power to manage calls and agents in real-time, flexing agents to the areas of the business that need the most help. You'll be unstoppable when you can use instant, actionable insights to make in-the-moment pivots for new priorities or to match client needs. Then, use the exact data for long-term analysis to make sweeping, positive changes; that's the power of call center analytics.
Improved Customer Experience
A level of improvement in customer service is when you shift from constantly reacting to customers to relieving pain points before they become dire. Customer interaction and sentiment analysis are a gold mine for unsurfaced concerns. They can help you train agents, supervisors, and managers to identify at-risk clients before they realize it themselves. The time investment will pay off with happier clients who stay with you longer. Semrush says word-of-mouth is even more effective than paid ads, resulting in five times more sales.
Better Workforce Management
The secret weapon of call center analytics is interaction analysis. Predicting the likely hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly trending high and low client interaction times will be crucial for workforce management. The more skilled your organization gets at customer interactions and historical agent turnover, the more you will put in a better position to stay fully staffed, creating more satisfied customers.
Enhanced Performance and Efficiency
When looking for performance and efficiency boosts, chances are they aren't easy to find. Sorry to say it, but the low-hanging fruit of improvement was likely plucked a long time ago, so be prepared to swim in the sea of data before finding the most actionable areas to attack. Don't rely entirely on data, though; blasphemy, I know, but stick with this. Not every agent is the same, and neither are customers. You will learn a lot through data, but add interviewing agents into your fact-finding because chances are they have some golden nuggets of information you can act on that'll save you time and money.
Cost Savings
You will find immediate savings by honing your customer service skills to reduce customer churn. A report from Bain & Company found that acquiring customers is six to seven times more expensive than retaining current ones. The better you are at effectively assisting your clients, the faster you will get, which can save on the per-transaction interaction costs.
Believe it or not, you might save costs by firing some customers. The cost to service these clients and the toll it takes on your staff most likely outweigh the monetary benefits they provide. This isn't a practice you want to employ often, but one you need to have available.
Don't Leave Your Call Center Success to Chance; Use Simplicity VoIP to Drive Change
You don't have to reinvent the wheel to use call center analytics to improve the strength of your business. Understand what you want to accomplish, dedicate ample time laying the groundwork, and start steadily implementing improvements. Over time, customer sentiment improves, and the overall organization's contentment starts to tick upwards.
With Simplicity VoIP, we take your business (and the technology that runs it) very seriously. We want you to succeed, so please contact us. Let's discuss the options to further your success.
