How Contact Centers Can Turn Big Data into Big Returns

The term big data gets thrown around a lot in the business world, and for good reason. The basic mission of all businesses is to attract and keep customers. If a product is great, many customers will stick around even despite poor service, but this creates lukewarm customer relationships, whose value is often fixed. However, if a company is loyal to its customers caring about their values and delivering exceptional service customers will be loyal back, often buying new products and promoting the brand to others.

Improve Channel Efficiency

73% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a brand can do to deliver high-quality service. Therefore, contact centers should consistently use reporting and dashboards to monitor their call wait times and their IVR systems for signs of trouble. There’s a wealth of insights that can be harvested from IVR systems and then be used to drive efficiency:

• Reason for Calling: Many customers want an IVR that can help you get to the right agent by offering as few choices as possible. Monitoring customer progress through the menu tree, transfer rates, and first call resolutions can uncover problem areas in the IVR, so contact centers can make well-informed changes that make the options less convoluted.
• Opt-out: Brands can know how many people have opted out of IVR service, offering valuable insight on customer expectations and preferences. This can also help contact centers recognize faulty prompts or a problematic UX.
• Transfers: The transfer rate helps diagnose one of the most frustrating customer experiences. Its a symptom of faulty call routing or IVR logic.
• Drop rates: This number can signify poor voice recognition, incomplete or incorrect customer data, or faulty IVR logic that prevent customers from reaching their desired destination, resulting in them hanging up.
• Preferences: If your caller does not ever choose the Spanish option, after a certain number of times offering it, you could consider skipping the time spent for that prompt. If the caller ALWAYS checks their balance, why not start the conversation there and then prompt them. All of these preferences could then be managed by the customer online.

Harnessing the power of IVR data can help answer a variety of important questions about its UX, including what percentage of callers were inaccurately identified, how many customers were routed to the wrong queue, and which types of calls were successfully handled by the IVR without the customer having to speak to an agent. These insights inform changes that should be made to improve handle times and First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates.

Understand the Customer Journey

Businesses have so much unstructured data floating around their various channels, and its all the information necessary to make critical changes to business processes it just needs to be harnessed. Omni-channel reporting is a crucial element to the contact center technology stack for this reason it creates a seamless and unified data environment where customer journey patterns and insights can emerge. Not only collecting this data, but using it, and following it wherever it leads can steer optimal customer journey mapping and customer experience enhancements.

A recent SAS study found that less than a quarter of companies are able to integrate customer insights in real-time, so any business with this capability will have huge advantages over competitors:

• Real-time Screen Pops: Customer information delivered to agents in real-time allows agents to create personalized interactions that are very efficient and effective driving loyalty because customers feel valued and satisfied with the service experience.
• Better Defense: Customer service operations are smoother, less susceptible to fluctuations in traffic flow, channel crashes, and anomalies. Contact centers can view these things and their effects in real-time, so they can quickly adjust operations to maintain service levels.
• Better Offense: Real-time insight into customer preferences and trending topics help businesses predict new customer demands and pivot their current product and service offerings to meet them.

More Automation in Agent Hiring

No matter the size of the contact center, finding and retaining qualified agents is an ongoing challenge, costing businesses time and resources. It costs HR staff an estimated two hours to locate and recruit a single employee. Many contact centers require hundreds of agents and experience high turnover, so those two hours can grow to months worth of work. That’s why many centers are starting to put applicants through an automated application process that includes having candidates record their voice and answering simulated calls. The center can leverage analytics to predict which candidates should get an interview, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they’d fit within the team.

This automation not only gives those in HR more insight for every potential hire, but it can also cut hundreds of hours from the hiring process, decreasing its toll on operating costs and stimulating productivity. Research from DMG Consulting estimates that the number of call center seats will grow by as much as 24% by 2020, so businesses should begin investigating how to mitigate these hiring and training costs.

Using Data for Defense

A report last year revealed that call center fraud had spiked 113%, with credit card issues becoming the number one target for fraudulent attempts. The easiest path for criminals is to pretend to be a customer calling into the contact center, then requesting access to account details, payment history, etc. With minimal knowledge gained from an online search or public records, fraudsters can often sound convincing enough to get access. And David Dewey, Director of PinDrop Labs points out:

With the advent of VoIP, users have access to the caller ID field and can set it to whatever they want. This allows fraudsters, some with minimal technical skills, to be able to spoof their calls. In the case of Skype or Google Voice, the same Caller ID is applied to tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers with the recipient having no idea who they are speaking to.

As scary as it sounds, there are solutions available that can leverage data into extra protections for sensitive information. Many contact centers are investing in systems that recognize not only historical data but also the real-time data of a customer’s contact preferences, including the geographical region of where the call is coming from, the type of connection (landline or VoIP), even the caller’s voice characteristics. If a customer’s location is different, or if their voice doesn’t align with previously recorded voice patterns, the system will flag the call as suspicious and alert the agent and supervisor of a possible fraud attempt. With so many major brands having security breaches, it will be essential for large businesses to use their data for defense.

Partnering with Aceyus, a leader in contact center solutions, can help your business manage the challenges of the road ahead with innovative tools that empower your agents and help turn big data into big returns.