Top 6 Contact Center Analytics to Improve the Customer Experience

Contact center analytics are vital to improving the retail customer experience. As data flows in, customer experience leaders are flooded with information that can be hard to understand.

For businesses to move forward, there are six essential contact center analytics they must efficiently collect, understand, and use to improve operations and the customer experience.

1. Speech Analytics

Call transcripts provide tremendous insights into customer interactions. While typically used to identify call drivers, speech analytics can also reveal information useful to product marketing teams.

For example, a major athletic brand introduced a new shoe that had a defect discovered through speech analytics on customer calls. The company issued a recall, corrected the issue, and sent replacements. Without this measure, the issue would undoubtedly have been revealed at some point at a much higher cost to the brand.

2. Text

Live chat sessions and email interactions can offer “aha” moments about your customers’ experience. Time stamps tell managers or quality assurance teams the length of each communication, how quickly agents found a solution, if at all, or if the customer eventually called the contact center.

Quality is somewhat subjective, so industry-specific scoring measures are a good idea. You should use an individual’s scores as a snapshot of how they’re performing at any given time. Comparing current and previous marks will identify consistently high performers as well as highlight anyone who might need more support.

You should note this caveat: If representatives are inundated with customers and there’s a downward trend in the quality of their communication, that could indicate the need for more personnel. This is a reflection of the management team not forecasting properly and staffing appropriately.

3. Desktop Process Analytics (DPA)

Programs that monitor agent activity are often used to manage accounts and monitor productivity. DPA tracks receipt and response time and error rates. It also records how much time it takes employees to complete tasks, measuring whether the individual understands processes and if they’re logged into work systems during their recorded work hours.

The increase in work-from-home positions often means some agents rarely, if ever, work with their teams in the same room. Effective, efficient and timely responses directly impact customer satisfaction and your bottom line, so knowing when and how your people are working makes good sense.

4. Website Navigation

How often have you been on a website and your inability to complete your transaction prompted a call to customer service? Failure points on the web are one of the most popular reasons shoppers pick up the phone to connect with an associate.

Tracking software and heat maps — behavior analytics — tell you where your visitors scroll, click and spend time. They also reveal where breakdowns occur so your development team can fix issues, and customers can conduct their business online without needing assistance.

5. Traditional Contact Center Metrics

There’s no moving beyond old-school methodology for measuring CSR efficiency. Some standards are tried-and-true:

• service levels by interval;
• average handle time;
• calls handled;
• average speed to answer; and
• call driver analysis.

Traditional metrics can help disclose chronic service issues, such as dropped calls for a cellular provider. In a scenario like this, the root of the problem was separate from the contact center. Once the responsible vertical was identified, the situation was rectified.

6. Post-Contact Survey

As your call with a contact center associate concludes, you’ve probably been asked to stay on the line to complete a short, automated survey. You typically answer three to five questions about the individual agent and sometimes the company itself. Responses are recorded on a scale of one to five.

Both sets of questions identify high-performing and lower-performing employees so you gain a deeper understanding of what separates them. Is it attributes such as building rapport or efficiency? When you dissect the differences, you uncover strengths you want every representative to emulate, inefficiencies that require correction, and training opportunities.

Final Thoughts

Contact center analytics further enhance the customer experience by helping leaders predict future call volume. Tracking calls to specific marketing campaigns, seasonality, specific days of the month, particular times of day, and more reveals patterns to better forecast how many calls are expected and to staff appropriately without potential cost overruns.

One of the most important things a business can do is utilize contact center metrics to create action plans that drive results and improve the customer experience. Only by digging into the data can you design a CX program that delivers on your brand promise time and time again.

Tim Carrigan, consulting vice president at Andrew Reise Consulting, helps clients develop and deliver on their customer experience strategies.