In the current business climate the role of a call center has changed from being a point of contact to a revenue generator and data collector. A new survey out this week shows that call center reporting is vital to a company’s relevance in the market.

In their “Unlocking Business Intelligence in the Contact Center” research report, The Aberdeen (News - Alert) group and CallCopy determined that the center interactions are crucial to gathering information needed to improve a company’s performance. The study said, “Intelligence can be mined from both unstructured data (such as call recordings, call notes and other ad hoc interactions) and structured data collected via contact center and CRM software.”

The study contained input from over 70 companies and found that 62 percent of top-performing respondents used call center intelligence to improve customer communications with 50 percent of top-performing respondents gathering the information to boost operational business intelligence.

Call recording is a major source of this information, but more tools are needed to uncover the full breath of information that they contain. "Speech analytics provides a deeper variation in the data and better understanding of what is actually driving repeat calls," said Gaurav Patil, research analyst at Aberdeen Group, and author of the study. "How can the contact center agent reduce repeat callers and increase first call resolution? The answers to these questions are well aligned with the deployment of a speech analytics solution."

Software solutions like CRM and IVR will aid data collection, and proper workforce management will make sure that an ample representative base is available when important data presents itself. Regardless the new need for information gathering techniques is likely to keep both agents and call center software developers on their toes for some time to come.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco