Management Information in the Contact Centre
How Actionable Data Drives Sales, Improves Employee Satisfaction, and Enhances the Customer Experience
One of the key components we discuss with organisations when defining their contact centre needs is their data: the data the organisation requires, the data the solution can report on, and the tools available to interpret this data.
Contact centres are in the front line of customer interaction, so they are a goldmine for customer information. All of this data can then be used to improve the customer experience, agent welfare, and business operations. Without this management information, the operation of the contact centre is left to intuition and guess work.
The Contact Centre as-a-Service systems that we provide can produce huge volumes of data, but still need the tools to be able to parse and interpret turning, turning it into actionable insights and enabling accurate predictions of what would happen if the metrics changed. For example:
- "If I increased my headcount by 10%, would the increase in salary costs be offset by more sales or lower customer dissatisfaction leading to a lower churn and overall revenue increase?"
- "Are customers more likely to buy on calls in the afternoon? If so, do I need more agents than currently available?"
- "How much available selling time is lost to admin tasks? Would the cost of new applications or automating data entry be offset by greater available selling time?"
The demand for insights like this has really accelerated over the last three years, partly driven by the lower marginal costs of solutions like voice transcription and sentiment analyses, where voice calls are turned into text and then that text evaluated. What was once only affordable for the largest enterprises can now be found in contacts centres of 15 people. Furthermore, with the rise of hybrid working, contact centre managers have moved away from the traditional large floors, where team leaders sat amongst their direct employees and could see exactly what was happening.
Floor walking was a physical activity that provided solid information on the status of the contact centre. In contrast, managing a distributed workforce can limit insights into what is happening. Fortunately, tools have been developed to bridge this gap:
- Workforce Management (WFM). This refers to a tool that manages agent staffing, scheduling, and long-term planning. This will often allow agents to choose their own shifts thereby giving autonomy and flexibility - crucial elements of optimal employee satisfaction.
- Workforce Optimisation (WFO). Sometimes called an employee engagement platform, WFO often includes a WFM tool in addition to offering other tools that optimise employee performance and provide analytics for contact centre managers. In addition, WFO systems typically include several of the following: call analytics, call transcription, quality management, intuitive agent interface, e-learning. The aim of the WFO suite is to ensure every customer interaction is as good as it can be, that every agent has the knowledge required to do their job, and that where this is not the case, the gaps can be addressed.
Every contact centre would agree that better management information would open up the opportunity to build a better, more profitable organisation, but current estimates are that 50 to 66% of contact centres still do not have access to this. To find out more about putting this vital information at your fingertips, and those of your agents, wherever they are operating from, just contact our team to explore your requirements in depth.
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