Contact centres have come a long way from the days of operational improvement being down to guesswork.
In as little as the last 5 or 6 years, the capabilities of technologies available to call centre managers and other decision-makers have exploded.
When we talk about the concept of visibility in the world of contact centre solutions, agent performance and customer experience are the two main sides to the coin.
And with the right platforms and processes in place, both of these areas can be completely recorded and measured from end to end, with teams able to drill down to the most minute, granular details.
With this wealth of rich operational data at one’s fingertips, contact centres can then look to improve efficiency, optimise the allocation of internal resources, improve and refine their customer journey, and ensure their inbound customers and prospects get the best outcomes possible, by becoming more agile and reactive.
Here are a few hard and fast tips on solutions worth looking into to achieve greater visibility of your contact centre operations, and the approaches you can take in order to convert those detailed data insights into tangible performance improvements, and therefore, returns.
Agent performance and speech analytics
One of the biggest historical stumbling blocks for contact centres has been the inability to track and measure agent performance with 100% accuracy in order to make improvements.
The traditional methods used – ie, those that existed before the advent of speech analytics – represented either a catastrophic drain on resources, or relied almost entirely on the enthusiasm of customers to diligently fill out a feedback form.
In a study conducted by Contact Babel in 2017, 80% of contact centre managers reported limited time to analyse and action their call data as their biggest hurdle to performance improvements.
Draw actionable insight from every call
Speech analytics automatically captures unstructured data from 100% of interactions across all channels (calls, emails, chat transcriptions, social media) and turns it into structured data.
This gives you an accurate snapshot of how your agents are performing and any problem areas which need to be addressed – whether it’s an individual member of your staff who doesn’t deal well with agitated callers, or a collective difficulty solving queries of a certain kind. Trending phrases are automatically identified and flagged, so if you find customers are calling in their droves to complain about a particular product or element of your service, you can plan, strategise and allocate your internal resources accordingly in order to fix the problem.
Keeping up with compliance
The capabilities allowed by speech analytics can also prove hugely beneficial when it comes to keeping on top of compliance.
Automatically monitoring, analysing and scoring every single point of contact and interaction provides a level of certainty and clarity that simply cannot be achieved through random periodical compliance checks.
Speech analytics solutions can also help to flag errors with regards to omission and commission, and also enable you to quickly and easily double-check that those simple but vital tasks (such as ID and verification) are being completed by your team.
Plus, being able to prove compliance by accessing complete audit trails will serve to reduce the potential for fines or legal issues associated with non-compliance.
Essentially, with speech analytics, every single conversation can be examined and investigated with a solid depth of analysis, giving you the visibility you need to improve service quality, identify training needs, increase operational efficiency and ensure you remain steady on the tightrope of compliance.
Refining the customer experience through omni-channel solutions
While the capabilities of speech analytics mentioned above certainly play their own part in identifying and addressing issues within the customer journey, contact centres looking to achieve greater visibility of their processes should also consider using omni-channel solutions.
If we imagine the customer journey as someone strolling down a high street making the decision to enter a particular shop, omni-channel solutions provide the intel on what attracted them to your shop window, which entrance they used to get in, and could use this information to anticipate which aisle they’re likely to head to first, so you can have someone there to greet them.
Being at the right place at the right time
According to research we conducted on 1,000 UK customers, customers and prospects like to contact (or be contacted by) businesses via different channels depending on different specific needs.
If you want to deliver the best customer service possible, you need visibility of all the relevant customer behavioural data and how it correlates to the touchpoints in your customer journey. With omnichannel solutions, you can interpret a wealth of data and see that Customer Type A prefers to have queries of a particular nature solved by web chat services.
Armed with this information, you can ensure customers are served in the way they like to be served based on their historical preferences, and focus your resources on the channels certain customers favour to ensure the right agent to fix their issue is assigned to them via the right channel, at the right time.
Increased visibility of customer activity empowers your agents to be incredibly reactive, and provide as simple and satisfying a customer experience as possible.
At-a-glance real-time visibility with system dashboards
Whether inbound, outbound, or blended, omni-channel solutions allow you to monitor multiple aspects of your contact centre operations with real-time dashboards.
These give you a holistic view of your operations, agents and customers all at once in an easy-to-interpret interface.
A survey by UBM found (and I’m sure many reading this would agree) that, for customers in the UK, customers having to repeat themselves - whether it’s their name or the reason for their enquiry – is considered the worst customer service bugbear, and the second biggest is a lack of joined-up service.
Customers shouldn’t have to repeat their name or explain the reason for their call.
The visibility provided by an omni-channel dashboard can empower your team to seamlessly pick up or proactively respond to customer enquiries, supplying all the contextual information on them and their scenario in real time, meaning they can handle the interaction with no detriment to the quality of customer experience.
And if the above wasn’t enough to convince you that omni-channel can supercharge your visibility, the best solutions also offer remote device capabilities with their software, meaning you can access this same holistic view of your operations, agents and customers at a glance on the device of your choice.
Want to read this blog later? Feel free to download our eBook below.
