Build a Better Workforce with Analytics

Any contact center wishing to boost quality of service should be paying attention to the complaints they receive. These customer beefs are all red flags that should be providing opportunities to improve the quality of service.

While contact centers do field a number of odd or industry-centric complaints, it’s pretty easy to predict about 99 percent of them. The most common complaints about call centers are long hold times, slow turnaround times, having to explain an issue multiple times to different agents, and lack of a satisfactory resolution. Most companies know this. What’s less well known is precisely where and when these roadblocks are happening, and what to do to prevent them.

Most contact centers today use software that have analytics components to them, but many may not be using analytics to their full advantage. Analytics can help companies spot trouble areas that human analysis might miss, according to a recent blog post by Salesforce.

“Armed with the data and intelligence from your service analytics software, you’ll be able to more easily find patterns and make educated business decisions based off real customers behaviors and activity en masse,” wrote the blogger. “Through advanced call center analytics and intelligence software, service your customers with the call center experience they expect. By analyzing all of the available call center customer data, you’ll be able to quickly locate flaws in your process, and improve upon the advantages that your call center is already offering.”

Often, the trouble begins with poor performance management, which is a result of using outdated workforce optimization technology.  Speech analytics, a component of many workforce optimization suites, offers insight into employee performance. Desktop applications featuring analytics can help streamline daily activities, improve agent job performance and boost customer service. Analytics can even help in the workforce management process, particularly in the realm of predictive analytics to estimate call/contact volume and build better schedules.

The goal of workforce management, of course, is to maximize employee productivity at the individual, departmental, and company-wide levels. The solutions can help managers identify employee skills and match them to specific tasks over time so companies can better quantify the amount of labor and types of labor required for completing jobs on a daily or an hourly basis. This, in turn, helps build better schedules.

Contact centers looking to take advantage of analytics in workforce management should look for solutions that offer excellent reporting and dashboard functionality so managers can assess the health of the schedule at a glance as well as individual agent performance. Simply ensuring the schedule is adhered to can head a majority of customer complaints off at the pass.

If you’d like to learn more about predictive analytics, be sure to check out TMC (News - Alert) and Crossfire Media’s newest conference and expo, Communications 20/20, happening July 18-20 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The event will focus on the next wave of technology and innovations that will transcend the importance of person to person contact, disrupting the future of the entire communications industry. Find out more HERE.

Edited by Alicia Young