By Mandy Pattenden, Marketing Communications Director
As the old adage goes, you can't manage what you don't measure, and building out intuitive dashboards that convey actionable information is the first step in that process.
At the end of the day, without capturing data, you can't undertake objective reporting that will deliver a near real-time understanding of what is actually happening in your contact center.
It will also be difficult to apply advanced analytics to the data you collect to understand how the performance of the contact center impacts the customer experience - or to identify opportunities where the contact center can proactively boost its service-to-sales conversion rates.
It's for this reason that forward-thinking contact centers are integrating their reporting and analytics solutions to gain deeper insights that will feed a continuous improvement loop.
Making it visual
Most contact centers need fast, efficient, and intuitive reporting, packed with KPIs and intuitive data visualizations that will make it easy for everyone to view, absorb, understand and use the vital data that's displayed.
By ditching reliance on endless spreadsheets, everyone in the organization can benefit and make sense of data:
- Agents can benchmark their performance, view their progress towards their goals, and directly correlate their actions to outcomes
- Supervisors and managers are able to make day-to-day decisions based on data, pinpoint improvement areas and identify opportunities for future transformation
- Business leaders can spot customer trends and issues, correlate contact center activities to customer value creation and detect shifting customer behaviors quickly so they can stay one step ahead of market evolutions
Today's contact centers need to deliver visibility into two key areas:
- Operational performance; and
- Customer experience/satisfaction/behaviors
Building the dashboards that users will need begins with first defining a number of KPIs and defining how data is orchestrated to calculate these KPIs. After which it is a case of deciding how KPIs will be presented to end users. In other words, how it is visualized.
An evolving world of metrics
In the past, contact centers have prioritized tracking a number of tightly defined operational KPIs and metrics, including:
- Average Call Handling Time
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- Agent adherence to schedule/Agent status
- Service Level - the percentage of calls answered within a target time threshold
- Agent Occupancy
- Abandoned Call Percentage
- Call Arrival Patterns (inbound statistics across various time periods/times of the year) that make it easy to undertake workforce planning
The aim of the game being to identify opportunities to reduce average call handling times, optimize operational processes, increase agent competence, accommodate external influences like seasonality, and enable operational agility.
However, many forward-thinking contact centers are now moving beyond these metrics to focus more on softer measurements. Utilizing these data points to identify and address issues that lead to customer frustration or churn.
With CX moving center stage, capturing data that delivers a better understanding of customer satisfaction is now a top priority for the delivery of an exceptional experience. Assessing processes through the lens of the customer means that contact centers are now collating metrics that are highly focused on the quality of their customers' interactions:
- How many times a customer is transferred
- How easily/quickly they were able to achieve their objective (get an answer/transact)
- Satisfaction with a product/service
- Call sentiment analysis - how well a customer felt they were served by an agent
Utilizing these insights, the call center is able to better understand customer problems, eliminate unnecessary steps, standardize agent resolution guides, and proactively start to identify and mitigate other issues that get in the way of delivering great customer service.
Unleashing actionable insights and intelligence fast
Utilizing advanced analytics to drive significant customer-service improvements that deliver higher satisfaction scores, and improved financial performance, depends upon generating actional insights that can be instantly delivered to users.
The problem is that a lack of data integration makes it difficult for contact centers to aggregate their data into a single source of truth.
Solutions like Semafone Intelligence+ seamlessly delivers access to meaningful real-time data analytics that provide insights into a host of call metrics and payment interactions as they occur across the contact center.
Featuring easy-to-read dashboards that deliver an uncomplicated overview of the information you need to optimize your processes, scheduling and performance targets, you're able to evaluate a variety of metrics including understanding how taking payments impacts average call handling times, the most effective times to undertake outbound campaigns targeting payments or purchases, and deep insights into payment platform performance.
As contact centers strive to meet customers' fast evolving expectations and empower front-line agents to drive customer satisfaction on every single interaction, access to actional information at a glance will help organizations deliver a more positive brand experience.
Dashboards enable users to monitor multiple metrics at once and gain the informational awareness and insights that shed light on what's happening now, why something happened - and what's likely to happen in the future.
