Every day, contact centers collect large amounts of data from telephony equipment, CRM systems, call-recording, screen-recording and storage applications. This siloed data makes it difficult to see the whole picture of the customer relationship. As these interactions cross multiple channels, companies lack a single view of the customer due to separation of call center data.

As companies seek to make sense of complex customer interactions they recognize the limits of their legacy data capture systems, and are turning to business intelligence tools to manage Big Data.

A recent blog post by Ovum Analyst Keith Dawson explains that contact centers sit at the center of multiple data streams, but have been slow to make effective use of them. Most of these facilities don’t do much to analyze their data on a large scale, even though the environment represents one of the best available cases for Big Data analytics.

Decision-makers who want to make their contact centers strategic and profitable should use business intelligence tools managing large corporate data sets.

Dawson defines Big Data as computational problems that are large and varied enough to demand new approaches to traditional SQL technology. Customer service organizations that record all of their calls can gather hundreds of thousands of hours of audio per month. Most traditional call recording vendors have built applications that store this data and agent screen information, creating more complexity.

The contact center market has seen several applications that aggregate and analyze data from different sources. Contact centers have traditionally had two uses for analytics: to improve agent performance and to understand customer behavior. Traditional vendors have not taken the Big Data-style approach, according to Dawson. Instead, they have focused on questions of agent performance, which are more limited in scope than those of customer behavior.

More recently, contact centers have begun looking at vendors that are exploring the customer experience side of the problem using databases designed according to the principles of Big Data. Contact centers have a larger breadth of data subject to more scrutiny through tools similar to IT-friendly business intelligence systems and call center performance-optimization systems. As businesses ask more complex questions about customer interactions, contact centers respond by turning to analytics tools that mimic business intelligence applications.

Contact center analytics tools are available including offerings from the original telephony vendors based on storing and retrieving basic information from call recordings and workforce management systems. There is also a new generation of tools that act like Big Data produced by companies that are specialists in extracting important information from large sets of data.

Dawson advises that contact centers begin looking at their data as a meaningful resource. Contact centers should collaborate with their IT organizations and invest in business intelligence tools that break down the barriers to informational silos. Their IT colleagues are likely to be looking at enterprise-level data, searching for the big picture that the contact center’s data can provide.

Companies such as Zeacom offer contact center software and solutions that feature business intelligence. With the Zeacom (News - Alert) platform’s ability to support Big Data, contact center professionals have the tools they need to manage customer interactions, the information to analyze and deliver on performance expectations, and the tools to access data in real-time. Recently, the company announced Snapshot, an application that displays up-to-the-minute contact center data and exception reporting to managers on the move.

In an environment where every step is measured and can impact the customer interaction, Zeacom’s call center software can help contact centers view the big picture of the customer relationship.