Contact center analytics for enhanced agent interaction and customer experience

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An agent analyzing the contact center analytics report

Organizations turn to contact center solutions to manage their customer interactions, including sales and customer service. With so many customers to interact with, companies must do a balancing act between providing care and managing costs.

That is where contact center analytics solution comes in. It provides insight into how your contact center operates and a clearer view into your customer’s stories and journeys as they navigate their way into contacting your company. It allows you to take measures that can improve customer experiences with the bottom line in mind.

Contact center analytics gives you insight into how your agents interact with customers.

Call center analytics mainly focuses on data gathered from voice calls.

What is the difference between a call center and a contact center?

Before you dive into analytics, let's define the difference between a contact center and a call center because it can affect the type of data and reporting your company will need.

Ultimately, the main difference between a contact center and a call center lies in their names. Call center operations mainly interact with customers through voice calls. It's been the traditional way of communication between customers and businesses.

Customer contact centers, on the other hand, go beyond voice calls. Thanks to the internet, social media, and smartphones, customers no longer rely on phone calls to interact with organizations. To keep up, organizations use contact centers to interact with customers on their digital channels of choice, including emails, social media, and live chat. In fact, a lot of modern contact center agents are trained not only to interact with customers via calls but through multiple channels, making them more multifaceted than your regular call center agent.

What is call center analytics?

Call center software analytics are all about measuring and managing call center agents' effectiveness in handling customer calls (outbound or inbound). It's a constellation of tools that can help you with capacity planning -- making sure the number of agents working at one time matches the call volume during those hours -- without sacrificing call quality and customer satisfaction.

What are KPIs in a call center?

Call center KPIs are measurable values that the company can look at to evaluate how well the call center meets its set goals and whether the agents meet the customer's needs whenever they interact with them via voice calls.

Some of the most common call center KPIs include:

Average handling time (AHT) – This refers to the average handle time per customer by measuring the length of time between the moment the agent picks up the call until the call is disconnected.
Average time in queue – This KPI measures how long customers wait in the queue before being connected to an agent.
Call hold time – Customers are annoyed whenever they are placed on hold. This metric measures how long an agent puts their callers on hold.
First call resolution (FCR) – This measures the contact resolution rate of customer issues that were resolved and did not need a repeat call.
Call abandonment rates – These measure the number of callers who hang up the phone before being connected to an agent for inbound campaigns. For outbound campaigns, this takes into account the number of dialed phone numbers whose owner hung up the phone before talking to an agent.
Escalation rate – This measures the number of times a call to an agent was escalated to a contact center leader like a supervisor or manager.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) - This is a metric that aims to improve customer satisfaction by gauging how happy a customer is with the service they received during their conversation with the agent. This is usually determined through customer satisfaction surveys.

How do you analyze data in a call center?

Call centers use the different data they have to identify the pain points and areas of improvement that can help them maximize agent productivity. Some examples include:

Improving call quality – A lot of the call center KPIs are used to analyze call quality scores. You want to see the connection, average call handling time, average time in queue, and even the moments when customers are on hold to customer satisfaction.
Reviewing agent performance – Aside from call quality management, you can also use these metrics for agent performance management to see if they meet the company's standards.
Understanding your demographics – Knowing where most of your callers live, their age bracket, and other demographic information can help your organization figure out better workforce scheduling, branding and marketing campaigns, and sales strategies.
Identifying customer emotions – Knowing your customers' sentiment, in general, gives your idea a glimpse of how customers receive your product or service. You can use that information to craft the right scripts and messaging for your agents.

A manager is checking the data and analytics of his contact center

What is contact center analytics?

Contact center analytics expands on what call center analytics can do. While the call center is still the preferred way to contact your company, more and more customers are trying different channels like social media, email, and live chat.

In that context, contact center analytics is a collection of tools that your organization can employ through different digital channels. You can use data analytics to improve your contact center operations’ efficiency and productivity with the goal of providing the best customer care possible.

What are KPIs in a contact center?

Aside from the KPIs measured in call center data analytics, contact center analytics can measure other metrics that show how your organization interacts with customers and, generally, how happy your customers are from these interactions. That includes:

Total number of customer interactions – Going beyond the number of calls, this KPI measures the number of interactions on each digital channel, including social media, email, and chat.
Customer complaint volume – What are the most common types of complaints you are receiving per channel.
Visitor intent – When your customers interact with your organization, what do they need? This metric aims to identify the root cause of most customer issues.
Customer effort score – This KPI measures the amount of effort customers put into reaching your company just so they can get their concerns addressed. Keeping an eye on this can also reveal why customers prefer companies with other channels like chat and social media.

How do you analyze data in a contact center?

Not only does contact center analytics solutions give you a view of how your company is viewing from the customer's perspective, but from your agents as well. It offers a more holistic and more in-depth view of how your company is faring that you would not notice at first glance.

Some of the applications of contact center analytics are:

Improve customer experience – Organizations use analytics to see how happy your customers are with the service you are providing via your contact center. It allows you to identify areas of improvement in agent performance, employee engagement, hiring, and workflows and processes. This can help you increase customer retention while decreasing customer churn.
Improve workforce engagement – Analytics will show you that a more engaged workforce correlates to better customer experiences. Use analytics to get your agents more invested in their jobs, like gamification, which adds gaming elements to processes and workflows.
Compute the customer's lifetime value – Analytics can help you predict the reasonable profit that you can get from a specific customer attributed to the whole customer relationship with them in the future.

What are the different approaches to contact center analytics?

Using text and speech analytics to discover trends and patterns

An effective contact center analytics solution allows your organization to combine two or more approaches to let you see how it can give you more insight into how your contact center operates.

In particular, RingCentral supports a wide range of advanced analytics tools you can implement togive your business some in-depth information that can help you in strategic decision-making.

With its flexible solution, you can approach analytics in different ways, including:

Speech analytics

Speech analytics approach is all about analyzing past voice call recordings to collect information. The process involves identifying the words used by both the customer and the call center agent. From this information, your organization can focus on improving your customer interactions during calls.

Text analytics

Text analytics is a pretty similar approach to speech analytics. The main difference, however, is that it analyzes conversations between agents and customers in text format. It includes exchanges from email, social media, and chat.

Desktop analytics

It takes a comprehensive look at what happens on the desktop of the agent. Desktop analytics provides insight on workflow and process inefficiencies that become roadblocks to agents. It can also show security issues that you’ll need to address for compliance. And generally, to see if the system in place is working or not.

Self-service analytics

Forward-thinking companies know that to alleviate pressure on their agents, they have to invest in self-service technologies. It's usually deployed via chatbots in chats or via the interactive voice response (IVR) feature on inbound calls. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is also making big strides in the self-service space. Self-service analytics analyzes how effective these technologies are in both serving the customers and reducing contact center interactions.

Predictive analytics

This approach considers your historical data and analytics. It then reviews past performance to predict what will likely happen in the future. By using predictive analytics, your organization can anticipate upcoming problems, mark those in an events calendar, and come up with a solution. A good example is when your historical data shows that the company receives higher than average call volume during the holidays. By knowing this upcoming scenario, you can schedule more agents to report on certain days or weeks.

Omnichannel analytics

Also referred to as interaction analytics, this approach is all about aggregating the data from all digital channels your business supports. Through a strong data strategy, you can identify how your customers interact with you and what are their preferred interaction channels. From there, you can pinpoint opportunities where you can improve customer journeys to provide better customer experiences.

What are the advantages of using contact center analytics software?

Your contact center is made up of many moving parts, and it's hard to make sense of it all. That is where analytics comes in.

It gives you a better sense of what’s going on with your company so that you can take the right measures to address them.

However, not all contact center solutions are created equal. Aside from letting you apply different analytics approaches, RingCentral provides your organization with various advantages that would make gathering and presenting business intelligence simpler and more manageable.\

These advantages include:

This pre-built contact center report template shows unavailable time breakdown by agent.

Pre-defined report templates

Get the ability to build and distribute custom report templates tailored to your organization's needs. The wizard-based "point and click" interface makes the whole process simple and more manageable. Monitoring the ongoing performance of your contact center has never been easier.

A customized dashboard for contact center quality management supervisors

Customizable dashboards

RingCentral contact center solution includes widget-based dashboards, where you can build customized views for different members of your organization. With these, contact center management can quickly see the contact center's overall performance and service levels, quality assurance staff and supervisors can easily check their team's performance, while agents can know how much load they can expect.

At-a-glance business insights from 3rd party data sources

RingCentral recognizes that modern contact centers require an open ecosystem where they can integrate with external solutions like customer relationship management (CRM) software. These 3rd party vendors are also sources of customer data, and you want to take advantage of that. Fortunately, RingCentral allows you to combine data and analytics from your contact center system with data from integrated solutions like Salesforce, Netsuite, and more. It gives you more actionable insights into how your agents interact with customers and its impact on your business.

Use analytics to maximize your contact center agents’ skills

Optimized workforce management

RingCentral cloud contact center analytics is a part of a bigger workforce optimization (WFO) suite that integrates analytics and business intelligence with other aspects of the contact center like workforce management. It allows organizations to use analytics to maximize their agents by putting them on schedules that fully utilize their skills.

Contact center custom dashboard numbers are updated with up-to-the-minute information

Real-time contact center data analytics

Get access to up-to-the-minute data through your customizable dashboards. It allows your team to address issues in your contact center as it happens.

Real-time data in dashboards include:

Queue information
Interaction data
Real-time operations

Are you ready to uncover patterns in your customer engagements and workforce performance and discover up-to-the-minute real-time metrics and KPIs on a customizable dashboard that can help you achieve more customer success stories? Contact us for a free demo.