Turning Raw Data into Actionable Intelligence for the Contact Center

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

If you run a contact center, you'll know it takes a lot of effort to get all the processes just right. Too many agents and you're wasting money. Too few agents, and you're burning out your workforce and alienating your customers. If your ACD isn't set just right, you risk overusing some agent pools while others site idle, costing you money. If your IVR is too shallow, you risk wasting live agents' time collecting details that could have been automated. If it's too deep and complicated, you risk angering your customers who, after all, have a limit to how long they want to talk to a computer voice.

Getting it all right, or optimizing your contact center's performance, means turning meaningful

information into actionable data items – or business intelligence – for the contact center. This, in turn, results in a reduction of operating costs, revenue increases and higher levels of service to the customer.

No, it's not easy. Unless you're a genius with a lot of free time on your hands, chances are good you'll need professional help with it. But the pay-off is huge.

A new white paper from Spectrum (News - Alert) Corporation called “Technology, Analytics and the Successful Contact Center” (http://www.specorp.com/files/cc_solutions/SpectrumWhitePaper_p.pdf) outlines helpful processes for making the most of the most important components in a contact center's operations, including the workforce management solution, the help desk, the ACD, the IVR, the predictive dialer, the e-mail management program, the CRM and sales force automation solutions, and the ODBC database management systems. Sure, you've people on staff to oversee all these components, but do they have time to sit together all day long, feeding each other information and collating that information into actionable intelligence?

Didn't think so.

All of these processes produce data: and lots of it. But unless it's organized in a way that shows the contact center the most critical data in the most understandable way in the right place at the right time, it's just noise. Many of today's solutions, such as Spectrum's Ultra-Lini, neXorce and VectraView systems, are designed to draw critical real-time data from nearly all aspects of contact center operations, and aggregate and display that intelligence in a way that makes it useful – even critical – to contact centers.

If you're not performing analytics on the data generated by your contact center, chances are, you're wasting one of the company's most valuable resources: usable intelligence that will help the company improve the bottom line. Read more at http://www.specorp.com/files/cc_solutions/SpectrumWhitePaper_p.pdf.

(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/call-center-reporting/articles/136621-turning-raw-data-into-actionable-intelligence-the-contact.htm)