Contact center data can provide powerful insights into your business operations, helping you identify leads and increase and improve your service levels. Don’t be among the 61% of businesses who fail to adequately capture and make sense of this data. Here’s what to know about gathering and analyzing contact center data – and using it to drive organizational improvement.
What is Contact Center Data?
Contact center data is the information that your contact center solution gathers about inbound and outbound calls. The extent of the data that your system gathers will depend on the solution you have in place but can include:
- Caller location and demographics – for tailoring marketing outreach
- Low and peak call times – for identifying staffing needs
- Source of contact – for evaluating marketing spend and outreach
- Call Disposition- for analyzing customer satisfaction
- Average wait times – for identifying staffing needs/self-service needs
- Customer satisfaction – for identifying business and interpersonal training needs
- Call routing paths – for identifying infrastructure improvements
- Abandonment rate – for analyzing routing or staff knowledge issues
- Call handle time – for identifying infrastructure gaps or staffing issues
- Agent turnover – for identifying staff satisfaction
The above information can help you identify which marketing channels send leads your way, who is calling and why, where routing and scripts could be improved, and whether additional training is needed for your staff. Knowing this will help you with everything from making day-to-day decisions about running your contact center to staffing, IT infrastructure, and even top-level marketing and business development. Critically, you’ll be able to break down silos between your contact center team and your sales, marketing, and product development departments.
Leveraging Contact Center Data
Once you’ve gathered your contact center data, you’ll need to identify themes and decide how to act. Here are some examples of how to leverage contact center data to improve your efficiency, efficacy, and sales outcomes.
- Improve the customer experience. Use quantitative inbound call data, customer follow-up surveys, and AI-supported speech analytics to see how the customer experience aligns with customer expectations. Used together, they’ll help you identify knowledge gaps, more efficient routing options, opportunities for call personalization, increased staffing needs, or even self-service options.
- Improve the agent experience. The data above can also be used to help identify areas where agents could benefit from more support or training. If wait times are long, increasing your headcount may be a solution. If agents are slow at solving a customer’s problem, the solution could be a tech upgrade, training in a specific area, or a roving manager with decision-making authority.
- Reduce inbound calls. Analyzing multi-channel data and call outcomes will let you identify why people are calling – and develop ways to minimize non-essential inbound calls. An FAQ page can provide easy answers to common questions, while a self-serve menu for simple tasks such as activating an account can reduce an agent’s call load, allowing them to focus on sales or VIP customers. AI-led non-call-based communication options can reduce your personnel load while giving phone-shy customers another outreach option.
Remember that data isn’t static and that trends and themes will change over time. Keep gathering, monitoring, and analyzing data to ensure that you continue to make high-impact decisions for your contact center – and the departments it connects with.
Talk to ACD About Making the Most of Your Data
At ACD, we offer full-service, cloud-based contact center solutions for organizations of all sizes. Whether you’re shifting to a software-as-a-service model and want to hit the ground running or want to make the most from your existing contact center data, we can help. Talk to us about elevating your contact center – and your business – through the smart use of data.
