No matter the size of your business, it is likely that you will operate some form of contact centre; whether it is 200 seats or 5 employees, inbound customer service or outbound telesales or a blended mixture of both. Either way, contact centres of all guises can benefit from the business intelligence provided by detailed, understandable call analytics and reporting.
The way in which customers choose to interact with businesses has changed significantly and nowhere is this more visible than in the contact centre world. Customers demand quicker, more immediate responses. They expect the highest standards of customer service and they want to enjoy the experience. To keep up, businesses must switch from a reactive to a proactive approach to customer service, meaning access to real-time performance analytics is now key to ensuring the best possible customer experience and customer service.
Identify Optimisation Opportunities
In the past, identifying areas of improvement was somewhat hit and miss, in that problems only really became visible once escalated. Nowadays, modern phone systems, such as pascom’s, already track all the data; it’s just a question of analysing and displaying that data in a meaningful and understandable format and that is where call analytics come in to play.
The result is simple; by analysing historical call analytics data, business owners and managers can identify inefficient processes, such as redundant tasks or bottlenecks in your call distribution affecting the effectiveness of your Call Deflection strategies (routing of calls to correct department / team etc) and optimise them accordingly. In turn, call handle times and average hold times can all be reduced whilst increasing your business’ first call resolution rate, thus improving overall employee performance and efficiency, reducing the amount of time customers are on the phone and therefore increasing their satisfaction levels – all of which will have a positive impact on your bottom line.
Predictive Analytics and Trend Forecasting
Analysing historical call data is not only an excellent way to highlight optimisation opportunities but also can be used as basis for predicting future trends. Predictive analytics essentially is the name given to the process of analysing past trends to map future resources. By analysing historical call volumes, call penetration rates and call success rates by team, campaign, department or product and comparing these against times and dates, it is possible to highlight trends that will support your future resource mapping decisions, whether they be in terms of human resources, seasonal impacts on your business or simply planning when to start a particular telephony or marketing campaign.
Call analytics, such as those delivered by pascom analytics, enable business to switch from being reactive to proactive problem solvers. No matter how streamlined your business processes are, it is inevitable that sooner or later problems will occur and there’s not a lot you can do about it. However, how you deal with it will make or break your customer service. With real-time performance analytics, spikes in call volumes to particular departments or teams could signal that a problem is evolving. Armed with this knowledge, your team can immediately start proactively supporting customers.
Thanks to real-time performance monitoring and live statistical Wallboards, your team will be able to spot the trend emerging, immediately start investigating and quickly find and implement a resolution hopefully before your customers even realise that there is a problem. If the issue is on-going or needs longer to resolve then, while not ideal, by using your analytics data there are many things you can do to ensure your customers don’t get disillusioned.
First and foremost, remember your customers are people too and they don’t like being fobbed off or being kept in the dark. So add custom prompts to your queues that can be switched on to inform customers that you are aware of the issue and your team are already on the case. Inform your team of the issue; provide them as much information as possible so they are equipped to answer customer questions. Supervisors can bring more team members on board to keep handle times at acceptable levels and so on. By using call analytics and taking these steps, you can go a long way to ensuring that your customers stay happy with your service offering even if things are not currently going exactly according to plan.
Offer Self-Service Options
While having the ability to speak to a real person is a must have for any business, providing the customer with the option of self-service can greatly lighten your team’s workload and free them up to tackle more productive tasks. In fact, many customers are actually finding that utilising self-service options is often quicker, more efficient and less error prone. So why not use analytics to highlight and understand the resource utilisation of events that could be automated or completed via self-service and then incentive your customers towards using those self-service options instead.
Why should a customer call your business and speak to a staff member in order to change their address for example? Essentially such an action is a repetitive task that requires a time commitment from both your customer and the employee they speak to and, thanks to the human element, the process is prone to errors.
Let’s take a more detailed look at a simple task such as changing an address; firstly the customer has to take the time to call your business, go through certain options, determine which option best defines their requirements and then wait in a queue for the call to be answered. Next comes data protection, then finally talking to a real person who takes note of the new address, but chances are they’ve missed heard the house number or misspelt the street name. In the end, the customer has spent a considerable amount of time for what is essentially a simple task, the team member’s time while not wasted was not overly productive either and neither the customer nor the employee is particularly happy.
On the other hand, if you used analytics to measure which options require frequent repetitive short calls, you will have likely uncovered processes that could be automated or completed via self service options, thus alleviating workloads and increasing employee and customer satisfaction by sparing your prolonged periods of time on the phone.
Empower Employees and Enhance The Customer Experience
One of the modern buzzwords of modern business and the contact centres of today is Customer Experience or simply CX. Most companies use call analytics with the overall objective of boosting customer service and generating a positive experience in the process. This is all well and good, but a certain essential element has been overlooked - the need to offer a more personal, caller orientated yet efficient service.
As Sir Richard Branson said “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients”. In other words, to really offer a top-notch service and experience, you need to motivate, engage and empower your employees – let’s face it, we all want to do the best we can, it’s in our nature. However, if you leave your employees out of the chain, it’s like making them work with one hand tied behind their back. So empower your team with the knowledge garnered from your call analytics and other sources of business intelligence and your employees will reward you.
Word to the wise here though, empowering employees with information is one thing, doing it in a way that makes it easy to understand and easily accessible is another. By selecting a platform, such as pascom’s, it is possible to extract additional intelligence from each call, display it on contact centre wallboards, route it to an appropriate employee or team member and then present this information to the employee via our desktop app before they even get on the phone. Thus enabling your team to firstly greet callers in a more personal manner. Secondly, by providing your employees with extensive customer knowledge, what their needs are plus an overview of previous customer interactions with your company, you are empowering them to deliver excellent service.
Final Word
The above benefits are by no means the only benefits of call and contact centre analytics, but to sum up, by utilising an analytics tool, such as the pascom analytics, you will gain an insight into not only how effectively your business processes are performing, but you will also gain valuable information regarding how your customer interactions with your business are evolving.
For more information about pascom, our pascom phone systems and our pascom analytics tools, give our team a call on +49 991 29691 201 or get started within minutes using our free hosted business VoIP phone system edition.