Call Recording Featured Article

Data is the fuel that drives modern business, and contact centers generate lots of data. From call recordings to customer service notes, contact centers swim in a sea of potentially useful data—if only it can be processed.

This is where big data comes in, one of the enterprise mega trends. Big data is all about taking data from several sources, crunching it together, and generating insight from it.

“Contact centers are ripe for this kind of effort: they sit at the nexus of multiple data streams but have been slow to make effective use of most of them,” noted Ovum (News - Alert) analyst Keith Dawson in a blog post last year. “Decision-makers who want to position their contact centers as strategic and profit-centric (rather than merely operational and cost-centric) should pay close attention to the changes in how their own IT departments are managing other large corporate data sets.”

The contact center typically does not properly leverage the data it has at its disposal, even though its data fits most of the criteria for big data, and the environment represents one of the best uses for big data analytics.

With the proper software, the contact center can be on the front lines when it comes to informing businesses what customers are thinking and where improvements can be gleaned.

One solution that helps pull together contact center information and make it actually useful, for instance, is CSI’s (News - Alert) Virtual Observer solution.

Virtual Observer creates four sets of analytics.

First, it takes desktop data from agent keystrokes, application usage, and screen activity, and it presents an overall view of agent efficiency and productivity. It grabs data from reporting templates such as number of recordings, AHT comparison, evaluator trending and question trending.

Second, it offers up performance analytics based on evaluation results such as agent performance reports, question performance and trending reports.

Third, Virtual Observer generates analytics from call recordings. Using speech analytics, it yields a unique reporting range different from typical scoring reports or handle-time metrics.

As Call Recording World noted in an article earlier this year, “Speech can provide insight into customer and product trends and be used to instantly find calls where specific keyword phrases were used.”

Further, the system offers dashboard analytics brings it all together by offering a personalized view of the analytical data and reports which are meaningful to your particular role. Data may come from different systems such as a call monitoring and scoring report, a speech analytics search result, or an agent adherence report from a workforce management system.

Importantly, the system also can import data streams from external sources such as CRM and call accounting software, as well as exporting its data for other systems.

With such solutions, contact centers can take their mountain of data and draw trends from it that then can inform the business and drive efficiency in the contact center itself.

But having the right software is crucial, because data only becomes information when it can be applied. The right software helps make sense of the data.