Transforming Contact Center Performance Data into Valuable Business Intelligence
1 Sep, 2007
By: Tom SullivanContact centers are ripe for valuable business intelligence, thanks to the abundance of data captured or generated by ACD, IVR and CRM systems, among other data-collection vehicles.
Traditionally, different contact center systems retrieve different data sets, which are then transferred to separate silos and accompanied by separate analysis and reporting tools. By collecting this disparate data, analyzing it and getting the results to the right people at the right time, however, an enterprise can make sense of its abundant data — and significantly improve the contact center’s contribution to the overall business.
From Performance Data to Business Intelligence
The right tools must be in place to ensure the information transfer across an enterprise that will enable better business decisions. Contact centers must first provide supervisors with CRM technologies that support agent performance and overall business success. Contact centers must then provide supervisor and agent tools so both groups can view, manage and measure performance against a common set of indicators, as well as collaborate to keep performance aligned with goals.
Tools to help drive overall business objectives include agent activity metrics, automated post-call surveys and quality monitoring technology. With these workforce optimization tools in place, enterprises can set contact center strategy and establish metrics that more effectively align agents’ activities with the company’s business objectives.
By incorporating the output of these tools into a data mart, contact centers can look beyond the individual application silos and basic data indicators and establish true key performance indicators from across systems that might otherwise be overlooked. A purpose-built data mart can collect and assimilate all critical contact center data and can help transform it into valuable performance-management data and business intelligence. The data mart forms the foundation for effective business intelligence by housing critical data from sources throughout an enterprise. Linked to standard ACD and IVR databases, data marts extract data and then transform them into a consistent format, making subsequent analysis quicker and easier.
For example, a data mart that incorporates data from an ACD, workforce optimization system and customer survey results can reveal more interesting key-performance indicators, such as first call resolution, customer satisfaction or revenues per call. Through the use of a data mart, contact centers can understand and optimize contact center performance in the context of larger business objectives.
By eliminating redundancies, standardizing data formats and establishing an interface through easy-to-read dashboards, a data mart provides ready access to actionable key performance data for analysis. Rather than waiting for generic weekly or monthly summaries, for example, users can create customized queries that they care about, based on their role, and extract only desired information for easy understanding.
Furthermore, in addition to informing the user about what has happened in the past, advanced statistical techniques can be applied against these same data marts to identify correlations or patterns that help predict future results and suggest optimizing practices. These techniques can help determine, for example, the optimal mix of quality and talk time as it relates to sales, and other factors that can significantly impact overall business results but are difficult to track with traditional monitoring and reporting. Over time, the same techniques can be applied through real-time analytics to alert supervisors and managers to key indicators before they impact performance.
From Business Intelligence to Business Improvement
The contact center data mart is essential to performance management, as it yields insight into contact center activities that enable key individuals, such as contact center managers, to take necessary action to improve contact center performance. This insight can drive contact center modifications — such as more agent training, modified call flows or increased quality monitoring — to help achieve broader business goals. The data mart can then measure the results of the changes to determine their effectiveness.
Overall, contact centers generate a wealth of internal performance data, but traditional, standardized reports do not provide the insight needed to align contact center activities with business objectives. A data mart, accompanied by tools to enhance the role of the supervisor, provides contact centers with added clarity into performance data and helps managers interpret contact center operations in the context of the enterprise itself — all in support of real business goals.
