Workforce Management Featured Article
Ensure Your Contact Center is Leveraging Real-Time Data with Analytics Capabilities
Contact centers have always been clearinghouses for data, even in the days before there were technologies to harness it. Customers speak to contact center agents more often than any other company employee, and often volunteer loads of information, most of which is unnoted by the agent and therefore unused by the company. In the course of an average call, a customer might reveal his preferences, wishes, frustrations, previous experiences and expectations of the future. Most of the time, agents are under time constraint and motivated to do only what they’re paid for: complete the transaction. As a result, a lot of intelligence volunteered by customers is wasted.
Increasingly, however, contact centers are realizing the value of the data they generate, and turning to technologies that can help put it to better use. Improved workforce management solutions, can help examine work patterns, and coupled with scheduling solutions, can make better use of agents’ time, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Downtime is one area where this [information] gap is especially noticeable,” wrote Ciarlo. “When agents experience downtime, it should be leveraged to enhance productivity by making good use of that time.”
Another technology companies may wish to bring to the contact center to make better use of intelligence is speech analytics.
“Here is a system telling you important information about a customer while he or she is still on the phone – can you react to that information in time? If not, all this technology is buying is a lost opportunity,” wrote Ciarlo.
Both workforce management and speech analytics, when leveraged properly, can yield real-time data that managers can use to make on-the-spot decisions to improve operations today. This is contrast to the data they would receive in years past, which was days, weeks or even months old. Contact centers could see where they went wrong last month, but it didn’t help them improve operations in the moment. Increasingly, today’s data-driven contact centers can aggregate data so quickly that it can push alerts to agents, supervisors and managers in real time and let them know where the contact center is having problems in the moment, so changes can be made on-the-fly to improve operations now.
To help you make use of the real-time potential of the data flowing into the contact center, examine the capabilities of your existing solutions. Workforce management is a great place to start, since it can make such an enormous difference in the quality of your operations.
“Does your contact center have intraday automation that triggers real-time workforce adjustments during a shift?” asks Ciarlo. “Can you change staffing levels when there’s a decrease in demand, freeing agents to begin a training session?”
If the answer is “no,” you’re not getting the most out of your solution, and you’re literally wasting the value of the data your organization could be collecting. Data analytics today have revolutionized contact center operations, but only for the companies with capabilities to leverage this intelligence.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
