In a previous post, we talked about how a multichannel contact center – one that enables customers to seamlessly communicate with organizations through phone, email, chat, text and other channels – is becoming a business necessity. Customers are demanding this flexibility and convenience, and organizations can use solutions such as ShoreTel Connect Contact Center to resolve issues quickly, improve agent productivity, and boost overall contact center performance.
However, simply implementing a multichannel contact center with all the bells and whistles won’t automatically optimize the customer experience or contact center operations. In order to strike the right balance, you need reliable data analytics to understand what’s really happening and make the necessary adjustments. Otherwise, it’s just a guessing game.
Contact center analytics is employed across all communications channels to help an organization deliver the best possible customer experience and maximize operational efficiency. Contact center analytics makes it possible to evaluate performance at the interaction level, the customer level, the channel level and the agent level. From a broader perspective, contact center analytics provides visibility into the entire customer lifecycle across all channels. Organizations can then identify common issues and address them at the source.
Contact center analytics automatically captures unstructured data (audio, email, chat, text, social media, etc.) and associated metadata from customer interactions. This data is converted into a consistent structured data format for analysis and scoring, which can be configured according to predefined criteria in a variety of categories.
For example, contact center analytics can tell you what certain words and phrases in customer interactions say about the quality of the experience and the agent’s performance. Organizations can then evaluate individual interactions or agents, eliminate redundancies to accelerate issue resolution, and deliver automated feedback to agents and managers.
The tools used in today’s contact center analytics solutions are quite advanced. Natural language processing uses algorithms to interpret long strings of spoken words and automatically determine how calls should be routed. Speech analytics not only understands what customers say, but how they say it. It can automatically direct an agent based on keywords and phrases while analyzing tone, vocabulary, sentiment and even pauses in speech to assess everything from emotion to satisfaction to the customer’s approximate age. These tools are often combined with predictive analytics to determine the best way to handle certain interactions to maximize customer satisfaction and agent performance.
Contact center analytics delivers benefits that support the two primary goals of every contact center – optimal customer experience and operational efficiency. Unnecessary transfers, delays and repeating of information are minimized to improve service quality. Automated scoring for a large number of metrics helps organizations proactively address problems and improve training and coaching efforts. Because every single interaction is monitored and scored, contact center analytics can help you quickly respond to compliance audits with reliable data. Agents can also support sales efforts by identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Verteks offers Brightmetrics, a business intelligence analytics tool that enables you to gain valuable insights from ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center. Using data feeds from multiple sources, advanced analytics tools and real-time dashboards, Brightmetrics provides a window into the customer experience and contact center operations as they happen. Let us show you how Brightmetrics can help you satisfy customers and improve the performance of your agents and contact center.
