Management and Analytics Underpin Customer Contact Success

Customer Contact Centres around the world rely on the analytics and management tools that form the foundation of performance recognition

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Akixi Business Tree
Data & Analytics

Published: October 8, 2018

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

The modern contact centre has evolved hugely from its initial iterations that were formed decades ago. Increases in the number of communication pathways available and the rise of social media platforms have all contributed to enabling the next generation of customer contact centres. The fundamental principles that applied historically still apply now, the contact centre is the key tool to providing great customer service.

How can contact centre operators ensure that they are operating in the most effective way to ensure they provide a great customer experience? Traditional metrics used to analyse their performance are still relevant today but now with the widened focus of the contact centre more and more tools are required.

Award winning call management and call analytics specialists, Akixi, fully appreciate how important analysis is to the success of the modern customer contact centre. UC Today spoke to their Managing Director, Bart Delgado, who used the perfect analogy to explain the importance of metrics and analysis within the modern contact centre.

“How could you drive to work every day, safely, without the dashboard in your car?”

The same principle applies to the contact centre. How can you be sure your people and systems are providing your customers with the best service possible if you aren’t able to measure, visualise and analyse those systems? Akixi was the first provider to offer enhanced call management and reporting services from the cloud for both VoIP and PBX systems. Now they are enhancing their offering to reflect the development of the next generation of customer contact centres with omnichannel tools to manage all communication pathways.

Bart explains that the traditional reasons for investing in call management and analytics platforms were to alleviate customer services issues. When the primary communication method into the contact centre was a voice call, complaints often stemmed from a delayed response time in terms of answering the initial calls. In today’s customer contact centre that still applies but now it is also applicable to a host of different means of communication.

“When you send an email to a company how quickly do you expect a response? Then how often is that response time better or worse than you expected?”

This principle has applied to voice communication for many years with Akixi able to supply its customers with the metrics and information required to apply grades of service. Many businesses aim to answer all calls within a set time frame, with call operators targeted on successful fulfilment of those goals. If you don’t have the information though, how can those initial targets even be set in the first place, let alone examined and evaluated? This has been a service that Akixi has specialised in throughout its history and soon the same ethos will be transferable to other communication methods, whether that is email, instant messaging or social media.

“We have started to see different service level targets across the different communication methods. Companies will need to be able to understand customer expectations initially to exceed those. Before all that they will need to be able to understand and manage their performance on each channel, just like they have done previously with voice communication.”

Management, reporting and analysis has become such a vital, almost inherent, aspect of voice communication within the contact centre because it yields such valuable results for customers. Bart explains that value such as that can be applied to all of the other communication methods used in today’s modern customer contact centre too.

 

This new evaluation of communication criteria will require organisations to set new targets for themselves and this requires an understanding of the differing levels of customer expectation. Different mediums engender a different expected response. Would you expect your phone call into ACME Gas to be answered a lot more quickly than your email enquiry? For companies to be able to evaluate and then implement goals and targets for this, they first need to understand the current state of play and that is where Akixi can help.

“It’s so important for businesses to understand first their customers’ expectations across the different channels, then how they are performing against those currently. The whole reason for having analytics is that you are trying to increase the efficiency of the way that you are delivering a product or service, but it is not a finite destination. There will always be ways to improve and change, but unless you measure it you will never know.”

So, do you know how your omnichannel contact centre is performing across the spectrum of communication mediums? Is this exceeding your customers’ expectations? If not, then there is only way one way to rectify; measure, manage, analyse and improve. The management and reporting tools and the information they can glean will underpin the successful future of contact centre service provision.

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