Call Center Management Featured Article
The Difference Between Data and Intelligence Lies in Analytics
What’s the difference between data and intelligence? If you check the dictionary definitions, they might seem somewhat similar. In the real world, they’re as different from one another as four thousand pounds of molten steel is from a mid-sized car. Data is required to build intelligence, but data alone is often useless gibberish, unless someone knows how to make sense of it. Poorly interpreted data can lead to wildly incorrect conclusions and actually cause harm. In the contact center, managers are already overworked. Becoming data analysis specialists probably isn’t going to happen. Luckily for contact centers today, many of the solutions they use have the ability to take raw data and turn it into actionable intelligence.
Most contact centers today collect a lot of data about customers, about agents, about networks and software and about products and services. How they use all this data may be the difference between success and failure. Data about customers can lead to the most useful intelligence for the contact center, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo. It can be found in a variety of sources.
“Through call recording, speech analytics and performance management, a contact center can learn a lot about a company’s customers – what they like, what they don’t like, what they want from the company that they’re not getting and what they hope will never change,” he wrote.
Data analytics is very useful for a contact center to understand where they’ve gone wrong in the past. It helps plan for the future, and enables an operation to learn its lessons. But today, data analytics technology is so nimble, it can actually prevent costly mistakes with customers.
“Sometimes, a contact center can go one better – with real time analytics, it can identify a moment within an ongoing customer engagement in which action can be taken immediately to bring about a positive result,” wrote Ciarlo.
Some solutions are already capable of using “moment-driven data” which is generated in real-time by workforce optimization and speech analytics. These solutions can then deliver customized alerts to let agents, supervisors or managers know that an immediate course correction is required to keep the quality of the current customer interaction high. Agents, in particular, must then be trained to recognize these moments and proceed accordingly. This may require some modification of their training. The inherent value in real-time data analysis, however, is so great that some remedial training on the solutions will be worthwhile.
Ciarlo writes that as contact centers become more omnichannel – adding chat, social media and mobile apps, for example -- the challenges of sorting and analyzing data and turning it into useful intelligence will become even bigger. They will generate more data that can yield more insight into customer behavior.
“When contact centers can target customers across devices, and identify moments based on previous predictors to deliver an upsell or special offer with a higher likelihood of success, that is next-generation marketing,” he concluded.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi