Be More Data-driven with Call Center Analytics

Every customer interaction in your call center is essentially a goldmine of data. Unfortunately more often than not companies are not using this data at its full potential. Do you want to improve the experience of your customers going forward? Have you considered all the advantages of call center analytics? Let’s examine the benefits and how you can make the best out of it to improve your customer service and make it nothing less than exceptional.

What is call center analytics?

Call center analytics tracks all performance metrics. Looking at inbound and outbound calls, it tracks both call data and the performance of your agents, including the volume of calls, the handling time, customer satisfaction, any positive keywords used, and how long customers are left on hold. There are specialist analytics tools which fully analyze this data, leading to insights you can action on to improve all-round efficiency and to give a boost to brand loyalty.

What are the pros and cons of call center analytics?

Pros:

1. The operation of your call center can be scaled
2. Consistency improved
3. Action more conversions in your sales team
4. Better internal alignment
5. Metrics made more quantifiable
6. Hassle free thanks to cloud contact center solutions that often offer built-in call center analytics

Cons:

1. Calls can be manipulated by operators to provide positive analytics
2. Metrics are impersonable – some qualities like ‘attitude’ can’t be quantified
3. Call center trends are often not representative of wider company culture and problems
4. Applying call center analytics to all your channels can overwhelm the useful collection of data and be costly. It’s better to identify the most important channels and focus your analytics there.

4 Types of Analysis

There are four common types of call center analytics in terms of collection, analysis, and action. We advise using templates to standardize and simplify the collection of data.

1. Interaction

This data measures both real time and historical interactions between your call center operatives and customers. It will look at response times and hold times, how many calls were abandoned, how many calls resulted in a resolved issue, and the rate of call transfers. “Trends can certainly be established from this data,” says Mitch Patel, a marketing blogger at Paper Fellows and State of writing review, “but it’s also useful to assess the performance of individual agents and how they can be improved.”

2. Speech analytics

This examines and tracks those all-important positive and negative keywords spoken during conversations with customers. Are your operatives hitting all the right notes and encouraging confidence in your service or product? Historically, calls were analyzed by a team having to listen to hours upon hours of conversations, now this process is automated using machine learning and AI.

3. Customer surveys

Another great source of data is the post-call survey. You can automatically send out a satisfaction survey to customers following an interaction with one of your operators, to find out how they felt about their experience. “It’s also a measure of customer engagement itself if they are happy to complete the survey,” says Angela Dewsbury, a business writer at Boom Essays and State of writing.

4. Predictive analytics

This is so useful as it can tell you what will happen next in certain scenarios. The data you collect can be interpreted to forecast how staff can become more efficient in the future, and how to keep looking forward in all aspects of your business. An example would be examining when your call volume is at its highest and then implementing a fuller schedule of operatives at that time.

Conclusion

Call center analytics are an invaluable part of your business and, if used wisely – and sparingly – can both really get to the heart of how your call center is being run. It can future-proof you for business ahead as you become armed with all the most useful facts and figures and can therefore take effective action to improve your customer’s experience.