A Sponsored Article by inContact
Contact centers face many challenges, from difficult agents to unanticipated call volumes to unexpected crises. Although data can be overwhelming and itself can be a challenge, it is one of the most valuable weapons in any contact center arsenal. There are many ways in which data can help any contact center. Not only can it mitigate customer churn, but also improve customer response time and decrease operational costs.
Mitigate Customer Churn
Things can turn on a dime in a contact center, creating unexpected spikes in calls and online chats. This can bog down contact center agents and lead to longer wait times for customers. The result is often increased abandon rates as customers get impatient and decide to not to wait any longer for help.
With access to real-time data, contact centers can implement a proactive approach to these busy times. Data can empower them to allocate calls differently or change how agents respond to customers. Spikes are always going to happen, but with better data access and analysis, contact centers are able to plan, predict and prepare for the spikes rather than simply react when they occur.
Improve Customer Response Time
Real-time data can also speed up customer response times. This can be vital to industries that rely on speed and accuracy, such as the healthcare industry, where any delay could lead to a life-threatening crisis. By making real-time data available, agents and supervisors can respond to changing conditions dynamically.
Workforce Intelligence Empowers Contact Centers
One of the best ways to leverage the vast potential of contact center data is through adopting a Workforce Intelligence (WFI) system. Many contact centers are manually analyzing their data, wasting countless hours and getting lost in the data. These systems, which take automatic action on behalf of a contact center manager or supervisor, are the engine of your contact center automation. With WFI, you can build certain thresholds into the system and then let it take over. This frees up supervisors to focus on what they do best.
For example, you can use WFI to identify agents who have longer call-times than is average. Through having access to that data, you can take proactive steps to help these agents improve their efficiency, such as assigning them an e-learning course, scheduling a meeting with their supervisors to discuss what might be holding them back or lowering their proficiency level.
Rather than relying on quality control to see a pattern, WFI can seamlessly analyze real-time data and identify these patterns on its own, reducing response times. It works dynamically to recognize if there is anything occurring that you want to change. Along with reducing response times, it can simultaneously improve the customer experience, the overall efficiency of the contact center and agent service levels. There are many broad implications to what this can do for the industry.
Workforce Intelligence gives managers information about how employees are doing so they can better understand their agents and the contact center as a whole. This improves overall efficiency and directly impacts the bottom line.
Dynamically Route Customers
Workforce Intelligence can also dynamically route customers to the best agents to respond to their questions. With this data, supervisors can analyze calls or chats a few different ways. They can have the customer fill out a survey about how the interaction went. They can also listen to or read back the interaction itself and analyze what went well and what could be improved. If a customer reaches out again, and the supervisor knows a previous interaction with a specific agent went well, he or she could then route the repeat caller back to the original agent to replicate that positive interaction again.
CRM Integration
With WFI, contact centers can directly link to other data sources, such as their CRM data which enable agents and supervisors to better serve the customer base. For example, if customers are consistently calling about a certain type of issue, you can run reports and see which issues they are reaching out about most frequently. With that information, you can make sure to assign agents specific types of trainings that will arm them with the information they need to better help customers who call in.
Conclusion
Data is paramount to the success of any contact center. Through using tools, like Workforce Intelligence, contact centers can take control of this data and become empowered, proactive respondents, improving both the customer experience and the bottom line.