Contact centers are a very production-oriented industry. The biggest challenges are agent staffing, service levels and customer satisfaction. In order to meet these metrics, efficient decision making from the top is important. How do leaders make decisions to achieve the best results? The answer is in business intelligence.
What is BI?
Business intelligence (BI) refers to a wide body of methods and processes to collect, store and analyze data from business operations, with the end goal of optimizing performance.
Things BI provide:
Current and historical data for the business
Market trends
Growth potential
Customer needs and behaviors
Industry-wide benchmark comparisons
Business intelligence is done in many ways and includes data mining, statistical analysis, descriptive analytics, performance metrics and benchmarking, reporting, and querying. It’s a very broad area and chances are, your contact center is already doing a form of business intelligence. There are specific platforms out there that are built with BI in mind, offering much better insights and gathering them much more quickly than traditional methods.
Cutting-edge BI platforms do automated analysis and gathering of data for your contact center as well as provide customizable dashboards and visualization tools that make it easy to gather insights.
BI Tracks Agent Performance
BI tracks the agent’s performance which gives leadership insight on the best times agents perform. This helps workforce managers schedule tasks at peak hours. It also allows managers to identify areas where agents are prone to errors, leading to the proper formulation of coaching plans.
Contact centers are also very keen on agent turnover, attrition, and BI tracks that drive agent attrition, which can help formulate action items for recruitment, engagement, and other workplace improvements.
It Reduces Wait Time
Handling time is one of the most significant KPIs in any contact center, and there are two keys to handle time: proper staffing and proper agent training. With BI data prediction, staffing demands can be forecasted accurately to ensure the best utilization of agents to cover peak times of the day. These data-driven demand predictions help a contact center become proactive when it comes to staffing rather than reacting when call volume spikes.
Discovering the trends in agent performance as noted previously also has one huge benefit: it reduces agent average handling time (AHT). BI pinpoints the areas for improvement for each agent and this helps train them better to improve handling time. Lowering agent handle time is one of the most effective ways to deal with staffing and customer wait times.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
When analyzing customer call and interaction data, BI can study things like:
caller tone
keywords in chat and messages
explore behavioral trends
This allows the creation of customer profiles which offer insights on who the customers are. It also gives insights on why a customer is happy with your products and services, or conversely why they aren’t happy.
This kind of customer empathy lets you know what you should keep doing and what you should improve, both for the products and for agent performance. By pinpointing what things need changing and implementing them, customer satisfaction will improve naturally.
If your contact center isn’t using a platform with business intelligence in mind, this might be the right time to start looking for one. Schedule a demo with our team and learn more about how Contaqt can make BI easily accessible for your contact center.