When you think of your company’s assets, you probably think of fixed assets and infrastructure, plus your knowledge workers. Your customers are certainly an asset, however hard to quantify they are. Most people never would have considered their contact center an asset in years past. It was really more of a cost center: a necessarily evil that chewed through a lot of operating costs in order to provide a basic, minimum level of service in order to keep customers. The information gathered from call center operations was of little value.

“Companies had become dependent on ancedotal evidence that wasn’t backed up with good data,” wrote Nexidia’s (News - Alert) Jon Erzine in a recent blog post. “Relying on agents to categorize call data during or right after a call was never affordable or reliable. Survey data came in, but was of limited use if it couldn’t be connected to the behaviors or events that drove the customer’s experience.”

Given the changing nature of the contact center, this is no longer the case. Customer expectations and the actions of competitors have forced most companies to turn their call centers into intelligence mining centers. Since the call center is the place where companies and their customers interact the most, it’s a place where mining for intelligence and insight into customer behavior makes the most sense.

Not only is the amount of data contact centers gather today much greater, but they have better tools at their disposal to make use of it thanks to interaction analytics, says Erzine. Analytics have provided companies with the ability to uncover the reasons why customers make contact and the behaviors and events that happen during that contact. This way, they can gather more intelligence into how they should improve operations to better anticipate and meet customer needs.

“Customers connect to a company through the contact center when they have any sort of issue to address, whether it be to shop for a lower price, to ask a question about a product feature they don’t understand, or to express frustration when a service isn’t meeting their expectations,” writes Erzine. “Now, all of the elements from these interactions can be tracked and translated into empirical, quantifiable data. Companies can then use this data to make strategic business decisions that can improve nearly every department touched by a customer — ultimately improving that customer’s overall experience and brand perception.”

After launching such a problem, companies can uncover all sorts of insights, including the knowledge that they’ve been tracking the wrong metrics. They can implement smarter self-service solutions to help customers help themselves, they can find new and more effective ways to market and they can boost customer satisfaction higher than it ever has been. But before they do so, they need to look deep and take the guesswork out of their contact center’s transformation.