In every contact center operation there is a mantra uttered that seasoned professionals love to recite. My good friend Matthew W. will love reading this. If you want contact center enlightenment, simply repeat this mantra: reporting, reporting, reporting.
While reporting is a standard requirement in every contact center, today there is a greater need for more data and reporting. It’s not always about call volume, handle time or service level. Today, with more and more contact centers using the database to drive the contact center experience at multiple levels, I often look at the extended opportunity of the relationship between data and reporting.
If you’ve read our blog, you know that I spend quite a bit of time discussing data and how to use data creatively in the contact center. Typically we use an IVR or application process that will extract key information about a caller and leverage that data to make on-the-fly decisions for call routing, prioritization, dynamic treatment and more. But, there is so much more to be done with the data collected along the path to a customer service representative.
If we use the data to massage the call, is there another way we might use the data to gain more insight into our operation? Well you know my answer is of course, YES.
Understand Your Customer, Understand Your Operations
The top trend in the contact center is customer satisfaction. Industry experts cite customer satisfaction as the leading reason clients will decide whether or not to continue doing business with you. But aside from the well-known industry metrics, what other opportunities for data and reporting exist?
Here is a common scenario. In a help desk scenario, most every help desk will open a ticket as a means of documenting and tracking the resolution of a technical issue. Once the call is made, a ticket is assigned and then the assigned technician will work through the issue until a resolution is found and completed. Once resolved the ticket is closed.
Now, if you were a progressive contact center, when the customer calls after the first call, it would be a great idea to use the customer’s caller ID to locate the ticket and flag the call with this information. Here is where things become valuable. If your IVR is pulling such information, we know it is obtaining this information from a database. In this example, the ticket ID is attached to the call. Since this information is associated with the call, why not extend reporting back to the ticket ID?
What I recommend is attaching this information to the call and cradle-to-grave reporting, or along with any historical call data. The advantage here is that I change how I might like to report call activity within a contact center solution. Most everyone knows if you want to locate a call, you will use the caller ID of the customer to locate calls. However, customers never call you from the same number twice. Every customer likely has an office number, a cell phone number or home number from which to call you. If you don’t have all of that information at hand, how else might we search our systems for the relevant activity? Why not use the information we attached through the IVR or application process?
If you are taking the time to look up the ticket ID, now you have another way to envision reporting. In a time where customer satisfaction is key, every available piece of data should be used to paint a clear picture and vision of the customer experience. But this same data has equal insight into the business and offers operational teams to uncover hidden gems of opportunity for improving their business.
Instead of simply looking for the call volume, obtain insight into the average time to resolution or the average number of calls required to resolve an issue. This is key information that can bring awareness to the operation at deeper levels. This is not a new concept, especially those that regularly use Business Intelligence (BI) applications.
In our example, we are discussing help desk tickets, but there are as many opportunities and examples as there are customers. If you’re an insurance provider, you might look to track activity by claim ID. If you’re in health care, you might look to track activity by patient ID. If you’re in marketing, you might look to track activity by source ID, and so much more.
Analyze Your Customer Habits & Patterns Through Data
Data within the contact center offers you so many ways to analyze your customer habits and patterns. The more advanced contact center will use metrics such as: propensity to buy, propensity to skip, propensity to pay, as metrics that are monitored to continually assess their customers’ value and more importantly, gain control over the business. Likewise some of this same data might be used to continually define and redefine the contact center operation. Through thoughtful analytics and a bit of creativity, data can offer you tremendous advantages within your contact center. After all, you need not look further than Google to really understand the value of data.
As a Value Added Reseller (VAR) here at Inflow Communications, we not only provide technology to enhance your contact center, we also work with our customers to provide valuable insight into using technology in practical ways using good old-fashioned common sense. Every nuance of the operation is explored, and together, we also use our 20+ years of contact center experience to help our customers excel and advance their contact center operations.
Want to learn more? Follow the link below to register for our online Contact Center Educational Series:
Contact Center Data for Dynamic Results
March 29th, 10:00 – 11:00 PST
Make sure to keep up with our on-going educational series in our blogs and keep tabs on our events. – be sure to look out for our next topic: The Art of Reporting.
About Inflow
Founded in 1997, Inflow is one of the nation’s top Unified Communications and Contact Center consultants in today’s market. Pioneers in cloud unified communications and cloud contact center success, Inflow is the first company to provide contact center consulting and training focused solely on helping you elevate your customer experience.
With over 200,000 endpoints supported under Inflow’s innovative success programs around the world, Inflow built its brand and reputation around providing unrivaled customer support. Inflow is in Mitel/ShoreTel’s top 2% in global customer satisfaction, and quickly acquiring a top spot with RingCentral, Genesys PureCloud and NICE inContact.
By partnering with Inflow, you can expect the highest level of strategic consultation, execution, and optimization available in the industry.
