The Road To Analytics For Customer Engagement

Brian Humenansky, Calabrio

The systematic computational analysis of data or statistics”— that’s how the Oxford Dictionary defines analytics. Analyzing data has a variety of uses, from detecting and preventing fraud to finding patterns in consumer buying behavior. What the folks at Oxford don’t tell you is that analytics is really about understanding people—understanding why people do what they do, and using that information to try and predict what they’re going to do in the future. To do this, we need to look at big data.

Big data is like a puzzle: there’s a lot of great information, but if you don’t have every piece you need, then you can’t complete the picture. Seeing the big picture is important when you are relying on the data to make informed business decisions—like trying to make sense of customer interactions in the contact center to improve customer engagement.

Desktop and Speech Analytics

The first stop on the road to analytics for customer engagement is desktop analytics. If you’re not looking at the agent’s desktop activities, you might be missing information that provides additional context: what’s happening on the agent’s screen while they are interacting with a customer? Is the on-screen behavior consistent with what’s being said? Is the information relevant to the customer interaction?

Desktop analytics solutions allow businesses to really see and understand the complete picture of what’s going on in the contact center in an integrated way. These tools permit supervisors to capture key strokes and screen activity from individual agents, letting them know exactly what’s happening on the agents’ desktops—what the agent is seeing, what windows are open, what’s being typed, and the like.

Pairing this with the context of verbal conversations, businesses are granted unprecedented visibility into what is happening with individual agents so that best-practice work habits and the effective use of software applications can easily be reinforced and replicated across the rest of the team. Speech analytics can provide this context—that’s the second stop on the road to analytics for customer engagement.

Speech analytics solutions allow businesses to analyze recorded calls and gather data about verbal customer interactions. These tools give supervisors insight into the topic(s) being discussed and even allow you to search for key phrases so you know if the agent remembered to say, “Thank you for your business,” or something similar.

While call recording is common, the adoption rate of speech analytics tools has been slow. However, according to MicroMarket Monitor, the speech analytics market in North America is expected to grow by more than 20% CAGR in the next five years—and for good reason. Leveraging speech in addition to desktop analytics allows businesses to make well-informed corporate decisions and grow the business.

FIGURE 1 : Imagine a pyramid…

Imagine a pyramid (see Figure 1). At the top there are thousands of calls that contain basic customer information like name, location, calling number and called number. In the middle, you apply speech analytics to those calls in order to find hundreds of thousands data points hidden within that may be of interest to you. At the bottom, you apply desktop analytics and analyze agent activity, from every keystroke and open application to—most importantly—how that activity dovetails into speech analytics and the actual call itself.

Now, turn your pyramid upside down (see Figure 2). With a focus on desktop analytics, you’re drilling through millions of customer interaction points to know what the agent is doing and how that affects the customer interactions and quality of customer service. With desktop analytics you can find the answers to basic questions: What are the most used applications in the contact center? What are the most visited websites? Are they genuinely listening to the customer and addressing their concerns in the best way?

FIGURE 2 : Now turn your pyramid upside down

More importantly, you can learn about the customer journey and experience, and then draw out actionable insights. In today’s digital landscape, companies must provide a personalized experience that creates an authentic, immediate connection with the customer—that’s what customer engagement is all about. To do this, you need better data and tools to access it.

Finding a Solution

Look for a solution with a seamless user experience between speech and desktop analytics—preferably one that uses the same infrastructure, dashboards and back-end technology. If the desktop and speech analytics tools use the same search and indexing solutions, then regardless of whether the data is captured in an activity file or an audio file, users can find it, regardless of the medium.

Having access to all of this data helps businesses better understand the customers experience and inform the corporate strategy to drive business growth. When analysis and insight can be used in other portions of the business, such as sales and marketing, that’s when contact center solutions become an enterprise-wide big data asset. For example, being able to better identify and deal with at-risk customers or discovering issues with products early on—finding patterns in customer data can tell give us actionable insights to make every customer interaction equal growth.

– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, http://www.contactcenterpipeline.com

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