Data, metrics, analytics, insights – if you deal with any aspect of contact center management or operations, you hear these terms all the time. But do you actually know the difference between them?
There is a heavy emphasis on reporting and analytics for obvious reasons. Yet, so often, terms like contact center reporting and analytics seem interchangeable. So, what are the differences between contact center reporting and analytics, and how can Aceyus help?
What is contact center reporting?
Contact center reporting is the first layer of data consumption and analysis. Out–of–the–box contact center reporting initially takes your data and transforms it into digestible information. When you start with raw data, you need to transform it to make it understandable.
Reporting is simply the first process to filter through that data and output it into an organized presentation, such as graphs and tables. You might know its outputs more commonly as metrics. However, those reports may not be telling you the whole story of your contact center.
So, what are contact center analytics then?
Analytics is the layer on top of reporting to transform the information you gained into actual insights. After we’ve taken our raw data and made useful information out of it through reporting, we can now interpret that information to gain actionable items through analytics. Analytics takes a deeper dive of analysis that illuminates trends and tells the true story lying within your data.
Appropriately using analytics can identify trends and anomalies within your contact center that your reporting wouldn’t normally be able to detect. This way, you can set up your analytics to start telling the narrative of your call center’s operations. While analytics and reporting are tied together, analytics is the part of the formula that enables you to make effective change in your contact center.
How should I use analytics in my call center?
Reporting feeds into analytics, so it can’t exist without reporting done first; and you can’t gain action items from reporting without an analytics platform.
In the contact center space, information, or metrics, is organized via your reporting. Prime examples of some common, integral metrics include first contact resolution (FCR), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). After this is organized into metrics categories like the ones mentioned, you can then jump into analytics.
Utilizing analytics will allow you to dissect your metrics to gain insights, which give you the “why” and “how.” Insights you will want to focus on to learn from call center analytics will include:
- Omnichannel analytics: Here, the analytics offers means to determine any channel your customers are using to engage with your call center. From there, you should be able to tailor your strategy and services toward any channel you’re seeing that has peaks above the others.
- Desktop analytics: This insight is often used in real time to catch inefficiencies, improve security and determine pain points for your agents and how to improve the team’s efforts and effectiveness.
- Predictive analytics: These insights feed off the review of your past performance metrics to help you identify the best possible solutions to upcoming trends and challenges. By noticing trends in areas like call volume and handle time, you’ll be able to learn how to properly staff, adjust for holidays or even potential effects from new products.
- Trend analytics: Having data is one thing, but being able to understand it and make valuable change is another. By incorporating trend analytics, you will be able to spot trends in your call center that you would never have been able to find before – allowing you to make proactive changes to your contact center that have immediate impact.
- Anomaly analytics: Discovering problems, and more importantly, fixing them immediately, is critical to efficient business operations. Few departments are impacted as severely as the contact center. Identifying issues within your contact center within minutes, as opposed to weeks or months, could be the difference in a profitable quarter.
How Aceyus Helps Bolster Reporting With Analytics
Having an effective and user-friendly platform to give you real-time metrics and insights is crucial to winning at reporting and analytics. Providing contact centers with innovative and insightful analytics through the Aceyus platform has provided clients with unprecedented access to their data, enabling them to make impactful change almost immediately.
- With a major telecom provider, Aceyus was able to implement our transfer analysis package module that analyzes how customers were being transferred to different departments within an interaction. Upon initiating this module, the telecom organization discovered they were transferring thousands of English calls per day to the Spanish queues, costing them several millions of dollars per year. They were able to realize through transfer analysis that one small scripting error in their IVR is what caused this error, and was then able to be quickly resolved. This issue had been occurring for weeks. Within a day of activating the Aceyus module, they discovered the problem and resolved it.
- When a major U.S. retailer came to Aceyus, they had no idea they were the subjects of return fraud. With analytics provided by Aceyus, this retailer was able to identify that customers were placing online orders for in-store pickup, calling into the contact center after the order was picked up to cancel the order and receive a refund – costing the retailer thousands in lost revenue. They were able to invest in technology for their contact centers after discovering this issue to immediately minimize this lag between the store and contact center.
- Scripting errors are very common issues before new customers turn to Aceyus. When one of the biggest U.S. banks had a single login credential for editing routing scripts, breakages were creating regular headaches with no way to track who made the changes. With Aceyus Director and AAM implemented, this financial institution was able to create intelligent automation of their IVRs. They were also able to not only limit access to necessary team members, but provide audit trails for all changes being made. Aceyus was able to end the instability of their routing rules through these analytics and provide a reliable routing process.
Contact centers are tasked with constantly improving efficiency, customer satisfaction and overall brand loyalty. With data-driven decisions backing your strategy, you can expect to see improvements in all these areas. Utilize the data at hand to build effective reporting and analytics advancements in your call center’s performance.
Need a state-of-the-art tool to help you collect metrics and insights to offer reporting and analytics in real time? Contact Aceyus to learn how products like VUE can get you just what you need for your data.
