In a call center, few things are as mission-critical as having adequate information. Being able to understand how each individual, team, product, and channel is performing together at any given point in time helps with agile decision-making and building positive customer experiences. The best way to get the information you need? Call center analytics.
If you work as a contact center manager, you probably have experienced the following scenario: You have several agents out on their scheduled lunches when your website experiences an issue and there is a sudden influx of calls. Your agents that are still logged on are managing the influx to the best of their abilities but you are watching calls getting abandoned and wait times climb. It is stressful for everybody involved and you know this situation could quickly escalate and have serious down-the-line consequences.
In recent years, the customer service industry has been upended with pandemic-related challenges. In particular, call centers and their teams have had to quickly adapt to new work environments, technological barriers, high call volumes, and increased customer escalations, just to name a few. And as organizations continue to navigate and adjust to the expectations of their customers and employees, certain call center customer experience trends have come to light.
When you are communicating in person, we have much more than words on our side to help us get our point across. Body language, facial expressions, hand movement and gestures, and of course, our tone of voice help us deliver our message the way we intend it to be understood. So much of human communication is non-verbal and helps our brains figure out the context and meaning of messages. When we communicate over the phone and no longer have those nonverbal cues on our side, suddenly our word choice and our tone of voice become increasingly significant.
If you have ever read any of our other blogs (which we highly recommend) you might notice that we use the terms call center and contact center interchangeably. We do this because we provide software that can benefit both call centers and contact centers but there is actually a difference in business application.
Anyone familiar with call center management knows that keeping a close watch on metrics is a must when running efficient operations. There are dozens of call center Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be tracked but ultimately, it comes down to measuring what is most important to your team and business goals.
Call center managers supporting their team members is more important than ever before. With the great return to the office lagging for many businesses across the country, it’s safe to say that remote work is here to stay, at least for the time being.
When you think of common analytics tools, what first springs to mind? Perhaps, Google Analytics? Good guess. It is a super popular tool. In fact, 29 million sites on the internet use Google Analytics. But, Google Analytics is not an analytics tool but actually a reporting tool. Now you may be thinking…. Is there a difference between reporting and analytics? The answer is YES!
We have all been there. You finally get a few minutes to make the call you have been putting off all week. You dial in and get put on hold. After waiting for what feels like an eternity you give up and hang up the phone, abandoning your call. A company’s call center abandonment rate is one of the most important key metrics to monitor and also one of the simplest to improve with the right modifications to your procedures.
Does your current contact center analytics platform make your customer data completely accessible to you and your team? Does it also offer you the control and flexibility to slice and dice that data, diving deeper into your customer engagement reports?