Common wisdom holds that data-driven transformation is a team sport. This is especially true of a contact center, the epitome of an objective-oriented team. Agents and supervisors alike must work together to not only hit their numbers; but they must embrace the role of data-powered insights in their day-to-day activities.
And they need financial and philosophical buy-in from their decision makers on high.
That’s in an ideal world. For many contact center teams, the collective will to build a data-driven culture isn’t necessarily the problem. Nor is the availability of the requisite raw material: just a single customer interaction creates countless data points. An average contact center might field hundreds, even thousands, of such interactions a day.
The problem is unlocking the insights embedded in the data. It’s a big one: of the new technologies flooding the contact center landscape each day, data analytics is expected to gain the most value in the next two years.
How do we turn all the available real-time and historical data into readable form—something that contact center leadership can actually put to use?
3 common barriers to delivering actionable insights
In “How to get the most out of call center reporting”, we lay out a serviceable blueprint for contact center reporting and analytics. In practice, we find that more than a handful of teams run into snags, which tend to arise as the result of:
1. Disparate data sources
Beneath the various applications and dashboards in use at a given time—in the contact center and elsewhere—lies a complex network of data sources, systems, and processes. Without a means for presenting relevant contact center and call data, leaders have little to work with. Too often, data is widely available, but underutilized—we grab it but don’t do enough with it.
2. Lack of adequate visualization
A cursory glance at common sources of call center data speaks to the sheer volume of data at hand. On a daily basis, every phone interaction gets recorded, capturing audio, call transcripts, timestamps, and caller information. Then there are the text chat transcripts, social media messages, email exchanges, and survey responses.
Beyond interaction data, you have customer information—CRM data, purchase history, demographics, and past support interactions, for example—and agent performance metrics, such as call duration, resolution time, customer satisfaction ratings, and agent notes.
Finally, you have operational data, such as system logs, network performance metrics, and quality assurance data. All of which contributes to a massive data pool. How do you visualize all of this data in a readable form that leaders can filter and customize?
3. Action gap
The lack of a comprehensive performance overview leaves many contact centers in a cycle of repetitive decision-making, one perpetuated by the same old reporting. The good news is that there are options for addressing this action gap. In The Customer Data You Crave? Your Contact Center Already Has It, Salesforce advocates for a single view of customer data.
Working with an insurance provider that wanted to reduce cost to serve, they found that unifying customer data improved self-service. After building an intelligence bot capable of integrating with a unified customer data pool, Salesforce found that 74% of the insurance provider’s customers were able to help themselves.
What to look for in a reporting solution
To close the action gap, a reporting solution must meet two fundamental criteria:
Seamless reporting on all enterprise data
A no-brainer in theory, until you actually audit available data sources. Look for a solution that allows frontline workers, supervisors, and decision makers to select, segment, and see data in a way that suits their needs.
Conditional access
The ability to customize and grant certain roles and users access to certain views, from one place, can support security and data privacy, compliance, relevance, and visibility.
b+s Contact Center Business Intelligence (CCBI) for Webex
b+s CCBI for Webex is a unified platform that consolidates data and insights. By providing comprehensive reporting across data sources, CCBI presents data in a way that decision-makers can actually use.
Through enhanced dashboards and predictive trend analysis, your team is empowered to run the contact center efficiently and effectively reduce operational costs. You can:
Transform your data landscape
With comprehensive integration from key sources, use organizational groupings for easy control of access rights and an intuitive calendar for simple data management.
Maximize performance with essential KPIs
Track and improve agent efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall operational effectiveness, guiding your path to excellence.
Behind the scenes
b+s CCBI for Webex is Software as a Service (SaaS) published into your Power BI workspace. It brings your data to life in the Microsoft cloud without requiring extensive server modifications. Set your update schedules with ease, ensuring your data is always current and accessible.
The problem isn’t the data, It’s what you do with it
There’s what the data is telling you, and then there is shifting strategy based on that information. The latter is characteristic of a truly data-driven organization, one that not only invests in doing more with the data at hand but trusting those insights to inform decision-making.
Finding the means to do so can pay tremendous dividends in the contact center. A study from Forrester found that, just by empowering agents to solve problems on their own, home and auto insurers stood to realize approximately $1 billion in incremental revenue. For airlines, that number was closer to $830 million.
Is innovative contact center reporting like CCBI the silver bullet for unlocking these gains? Not in and of itself. But considerable gains in efficiency, productivity, and customer experience are not uncommon among b + s customers. More often than not, they’re the norm. Because it’s amazing what happens when contact centers commit to getting more out of their data.
