3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

While we have more data than ever today, this isn’t always a good thing. Too much data improperly interpreted, or too much irrelevant data, can lead to confusion, inefficiency and incorrect conclusions. (Check out this survey that found that 72 percent of people who dislike licorice understand HTML, compared with 58 percent of people in general.)

Contact centers today have deep sources of data from their workforce management solutions, their quality monitoring, their telephony systems, their networks, their websites and even their customer surveys. Long-winded data tracking campaigns may or may not be yielding the right information, and contact centers may or may not be using the data correctly. Without the right data, executives could be making decisions based on wrong information.

According to a recent blog post by Tenacity’s Ron Davis, call center leaders know many stats about their centers, but they rarely have done any serious numerical analysis of the products they buy, or their internal initiatives, like new training programs and Taco Tuesday.

“Here are companies spending millions of dollars on data and they aren’t even analyzing whether stuff they buy improves their business or bottom line,” wrote Davis. “And when I probe, it seems like they don’t want to. They are especially defensive about ‘internal initiatives’ – the stuff dreamed up by management and HR. Put yourself in their shoes – would you want your idea measured? The answer always seems to be ‘no.’”

While statistics won’t peer into the future with magical precision, data turned into statistics turned into actionable intelligence correctly can help eliminate unnecessary software purchases or prevent internal initiatives that waste time and money and go nowhere. Often, the best statistics to collect are those directly related to conversations (either via telephone or text) between agents and customers.

Call recording solutions today feature analytics that can spot keywords, detect tone or overlapping conversations and spot trends in a critical mass of customer calls. (Increasing instances of the mention of competitor names, for example.) Third-party remote call monitoring can also help get an accurate picture of customer sentiment and agent performance by providing companies with the data, trends and actionable items they need to make crucial business decisions regarding their customer engagement and people development strategies. The goal is to cut right to the roadblocks that are keeping customer satisfaction down and costs or employee turnover up so they can be eliminated, rather than leaving companies to guess what the problem is.

Davis recommends that companies serious about using statistics to improve operations put someone in charge who truly understands how to cope with data and ensure that the contact center isn’t chasing shadows.

“You should get someone with a data science background, or at least a senior finance person, to provide guidance on some of the slightly more complicated matters, say on statistical significance, or conducting a propensity match,” he said. “If they can’t do so, find someone who can. What a wonder it would be, if math drove decisions in our industry.”