Call Recording Featured Article

The contact center has all the makings of a perfect source for big data, and contact center outsourcers are beginning to see the potential.

Contact centers generate lots of potentially useful data that far too often flies under the radar. Often unstructured data, the call recordings and notes from agents are ideal for the analytical power of big data. Big data is about making sense of the sea of data most companies swim in, and there is no more wasted data than that which is generated in the contact center.

As I noted in an article last year on the topic, Ovum (News - Alert) analyst Keith Dawson thinks that harnessing contact center data is low-hanging fruit that most contact center outsourcers are not exploiting.

“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,” he said.

There are at least three areas where contact centers typically don’t leverage their data.

First, agent efficiency and effectiveness can be measured from the marriage of call recordings with big data analytics.

The customer experience is one of the most crucial differentiators in business today, and contact center agents are the public face of the company for most customers. It therefore is vital that a company has good insight into how its agents are interacting with customers. Big data can deliver this insight.

Second, the best way to discover what’s working with a product and what’s not is by listening to customer feedback. While surveys and focus groups can help, it is hard to beat the feedback that comes into a company’s contact center on a daily basis.

Yet, this customer feedback loop is largely inaccessible because it is unstructured data. But with big data, contact center outsourcers and the businesses that employ their solutions can harness customer insight to improve products and services.

Customers also can help develop new products and services for a company—if only the company is listening!

While agent notes from a call might go unnoticed and unutilized, with big data the contact center can troll for the suggestions and new ideas that regular come out in customer calls. While impractical to leverage in earlier decades, big data now unlocks these insights.

The marriage of the contact center and big data is a natural.