The Contact Center Leapfrogging Ahead

By: Ruchika Rattan, Business Manager – Optimization/Cloud Solutions, South Asia, Aspect Software

Contact centers have increasingly become the ‘point of convergence’ for all channels of communication with end consumers; thanks to ever-rising consumer expectations of ‘contextual communication’ & heritage of organizations with some heavy technological investments in ‘Voice’ channel. Interestingly, the Voice legacy brings along, a huge potential of unlocking intelligence vis-a-vis consumer behavior, workforce skill-sets, process improvement, marketing effectiveness, CSAT and so many other unexplored business areas. And if we extend the same potential to all the other interaction channels including email, text, chat, social etc. the holistic impact on customer experience via your contact centers can surprise you.

Well, the process of converting unstructured data, locked in the audio of recorded calls & text of chat, emails, sms & social media, into structured data that can be explored and scrutinized for some form of business intelligence, is referred to as Customer Interaction Analytics.

After having used interaction analytics for a couple of months, organizations are typically able to set up best practices across enterprise to ensure they are able to use the tool-set more effectively and speedily to draw desired business outcomes. Allow me to apprise you of few technical and operational best practices that could set your organization up for better outcomes from beginning:

Set up an Interaction Analytics’ ‘Center of Excellence’ & Employ skilled and dedicated employees: It’s worth giving a thought to set-up a center of excellence for Interaction Analytics since it will ensure the right amount of focus and thus outcomes for your business. Skill-set of your Analytics’ leads will play a vital role in ensuring success of interaction analytics for your organization. Employ analysts who are essentially back-end architects but possess front-end skills as well – i.e., they are thorough while building complex queries, yet at ease communicating with stakeholders and showcasing business outcomes. The greater the business analysts’ specialization, greater will be the business value generated for organization.

Evaluate Cross-Skilling Across Quality Management: Interaction Analytics has been a very miniscule part of Quality Management for long in form of word spotting at times or CTI metadata tagging in its very rudimentary form; this was all in an attempt to make Quality management process more analytical, intelligent and outcome oriented. To everyone’s delight, today we do have Analytics and Quality management, converging seamlessly to form a term - “Intelligent Quality Management”.  So, it’s surely worthwhile to look at cross-skilling your Quality team members with Analytics’ skill-set and gear them up to drive a new era of intelligent quality management.

Look beyond ‘transcription’ as an outcome of Interaction Analytics:  I see lot of organizations looking for just plain transcription as an outcome of analytics; this may be driven by compliance or other internal organizational asks but surely a short sighted approach towards analytical tool-set. Recommend leaders to look at Interaction Analytics as one of the baseline technologies (just like a PBX became the baseline technology for enhancing telephony experience in an enterprise) for enhancing customer experience, with contact centers potentially driving this from the front seat. In terms of ROI, it can pay back quickly enough in various forms as follows:

Improve interaction quality with silence detection, long call analysis, sentiment analysis, etc.

Improve customer retention by understanding churn behavior, driving factors for

Improve Sales and Marketing effectiveness by measuring customer behavior

Improve experts’ (you might know them as “CC Agents”) performance with substantive feedback backed by live recordings and inherent analytics, furthered by targeted coaching

Automating Quality Scorecards

Improve CSAT with process improvements, quality improvements and simultaneously ramping up employee skill-sets as well

Start with preliminary goals that are extremely precise and clear; Maintain consistency thereafter: Don’t attempt to do too much at once. Operationally, Begin with a premium business goal, draw out requirements and essay the custom score build process. Remain flexible with your schedules and plan the phases of the project - build primary search, insert homonyms, synonyms, and aliases, authorize outcomes against the baseline. Organize folders and naming conventions so analysts can swiftly pause or revise scores. Duplicating efforts may be avoided by comprehending shared language pro-actively.

Convey information in understandable formats to User community: Extrapolate key points into a simple outline with a choice to drill down as required. Make cheat-sheets with simple steps and screenshots for users that serve as guides on how to conduct an audit. It’s essential to give power to users to be self-sufficient in navigating by providing them with simple, easy to use tools and guidelines.

Reveal, Propose, Pilot, Track & Get Better each day: Interaction analytics scores and data from the contact center such as closing ratios, customer satisfaction, retention stats, cost per call, and handle time etc. must be aggregated. Consolidate reports depicting cumulative weekly comparisons of how trends in speech analytics persuade various KPIs. Business Intelligence can Reveal anomalies; So, Propose adjustments, Pilot and most importantly Track. The key is for organizations to be patient with business outcomes and for experts to be diligent and persistent in delivering the right business outcomes.

When used effectively, Interaction Analytics is more than just a tool to enhance the performance of the contact center. It ensures that the contact center is able to lead important initiatives like business process improvement, increasing CSAT, improving quality, increasing marketing effectiveness, identifying product gaps and more, from the forefront.

This gets us to a point – While contact centers continue to evolve operationally and technologically at their own pace, to perform usual business of handling customer interactions from all channels, tools like ‘Interaction Analytics’ ensure they are leapfrogging ahead to deliver business outcomes for enterprises like never before.