Why Customer Analytics Are Key to Unlocking Customer Experience in the Call Center

In today’s highly competitive products and services marketplace, the customer’s experience with your business has never been more important. Knowing a customer’s name and understanding why he or she has contacted you in the first place can help to earn trust and loyalty through an unmatched customer experience. This can mean the difference between customers spending money with you or with your competitors.

The role of the contact center

The contact center plays a critical role in the delivery of an exceptional customer experience. Though just one of many touchpoints along the customer journey, the conversations between agents and the customer that occur in the contact center uniquely position it to provide insight into the minds of customers like no other inbound marketing channel can. By listening carefully to wants and needs, the contact center can not only gain a better understanding of customer behaviors, it can also identify areas for improvement, both within the contact center and other areas as such as product development, marketing and operations, to name a few.

Unlocking customer experience begins with collecting customer interaction data

Unlocking customer experience

The first step to unlocking customer experience is collecting customer interaction data. Many contact centers already employ some degree of call recording for the purposes of quality assurance or compliance, but 100% call capture—as well as capturing emails, chats and social media conversations—is paramount to truly understand the customer. Once your contact center is recording every customer-agent interaction, analytics can then be applied to uncover important patterns, trends and red flags. The longer your contact center uses analytics, the more accurate insights become.

Gain timely insights about interactions

To deliver a great customer experience, your contact center has to be aware of interaction trends in a timely manner. In a matter of days, or even hours, information can become outdated and, if your contact center is manually tracking customer data in spreadsheets, information can quickly become irrelevant. With customer analytics, your team can catch problems—and adjust accordingly—in minutes, giving your business an edge over competitors.

Address problems before they get worse

Contact centers can use customer analytics to start recognizing patterns in interactions such as length, word choice or repeat dials. For example, if the phrase “let me speak to a manager” consistently results in a negative customer experience, contact center leaders can begin taking preemptive action by training their agents with tactics to help them turn these interactions into a positive experience.

They can also detect issues and bring unexpected insights to the attention of other business leaders. For example, if suddenly customers start calling in about the protective seal on a product being broken before they open it, a contact center equipped with analytics can catch this trend and communicate it to the manufacturing department to resolve the issue before it results in further complaints.

Making your contact center the center of customer experience

With so much untapped customer data coming into the contact center every day, it is up to you to decide how you will use it to get closer to customers. Applying a powerful customer analytics tool is the best way to keep your contact center at the center of customer experience.

Article Download

Download this article [PDF], Why Customer Analytics Are Key to Unlocking Customer Experience

Tom Goodmanson, Calabrio

Tom Goodmanson is President and CEO of Calabrio. He has more than 20 years of experience leading fast-growing dynamic software and technology companies. Since assuming the CEO position in 2009, Tom is credited with reinventing the company and its culture around a strategy to expand value and reach through new, innovative products, and remarkable customer experiences. Addressing the market need for simpler solutions to complex customer interaction challenges, Tom’s vision to redefine the standard for software ease-of-use has been instrumental in making Calabrio one of the fastest growing companies in the industry.