Deliver great service and drive revenue. Provide personalized, effective interaction regardless of media. Assess what’s working and what’s not. Drive change to make things better.
Contact center managers can’t meet those expectations without data from multiple sources to allow timely cross-application and cross-channel views of performance. And they need tools to enable trend and root cause analysis to drive efficient and effective service.
The IT department may have an enterprise-focused data consolidation and analytics capability. In all likelihood, this application focuses on core business and “outcome” data for customers, sales, retention, accounts, policies, households, etc. That data and the associated reporting capability may be useful, but it won’t satisfy the contact center requirements without some extra effort.
Contact center suites offer data consolidation as part of the performance management component, with pre-built connectors to the majority of the contact center data sources. Ideally, this technology can integrate with the enterprise analytics/business intelligence solution. Both data marts could cross-pollinate without requiring dual integration efforts. The contact center benefits with access to crucial data while minimizing IT effort with pre-integration and advanced analytics reporting important to the contact center.
Once the data is consolidated, it must be accessible by the right person at the right time to coach and motivate required behavior, alert to performance trends that require reaction, or support effective, timely analysis and decision making. Unfortunately, the “canned” reports and dashboards rarely meet all contact center reporting requirements. Make sure you get a tool that supports customization – preferably without requiring advanced degrees in database management and analytics. You don’t want to pay lots of money for powerful tools only to dump data into Excel for manual (time consuming and error prone) manipulation.
Lori Bocklund and I collaborated on an article that provides a lot more detail that can be covered in this short blog. [See Got Insights? Ready for Action?: Consolidated Reporting, Scorecards and Analytics.] But I’d like to leave you with one final thought. Data reveal insights that require action in the center as well as marketing, product development, and other areas of your organization. It’s critical to establish an enterprise process optimization team that focuses on the customer experience to reap the maximum value from analytics tools and resources.