Fuelling the enterprise with customer intelligence

Richard Ray, Head of Business Consulting with leading contact centre software specialist Witness Systems, explains the key to successfully integrating the enterprise with the contact centre.

For most organisations, their most valuable business intelligence still comes from customer interactions – usually through the contact centre. When used correctly, this collective data should provide a critical insight into the effectiveness of sales and service strategies, as well as marketing campaigns. Yet all too often, this essential business intelligence remains locked and hidden away in separate customer databases and business process systems such as operational or billing applications. So how do you gather the essential customer intelligence needed to improve agent skills and service levels?

Step 1: establish a core customer interaction recording foundation

First, identify the reasons for capturing customer interactions. Every technology implementation has to have clear, specific goals. Before you’re ready to rollout your customer interaction recording technology, decide what the focus needs to be in order to benefit your business. Today, focusing on quality of service alone often does not deliver the business value expected. Are you capturing interactions for compliance purposes, process improvement, up-selling and cross-selling at the point of service, or for root-cause analysis? Address these questions first and you’ll better define how your measurement system should operate

Next, ensure recording objectives map to contact centre/corporate business drivers. Your project rollout team should include employees of different levels, functions and skills – this will help make the set-up and training more effective. A pre-installation workshop will help this team ensure that your corporate, contact centre and customer sales/service representative (CSR) objectives are all linked into the project – meaning the intelligence you gather through agent evaluations and process analysis clearly supports your organisation’s overall business goals. This cross-functional team can help prioritise the competencies that are part of the CSR evaluation process, as well as identify key measurement criteria for process improvement and revenue generating initiatives.

It’s important to capture voice and data. Many companies only get half the overall service performance picture because they only record the voice transactions between agents and customers. By capturing both the voice and data – or screen sequences – taking place at the agent desktop, management can gain valuable insight into how effectively agents manoeuvre through CRM systems, handle screen navigation and respond to customer needs, which helps identify training needs. Forward-thinking organisations will also try to identify areas for process and technology improvements by analysing how agents are using contact centre technology and determining if the technology is performing as expected or designed.

Finally, determine how customer intelligence will be used. The recording of customer contacts in itself does not benefit your contact centre; rather, it’s what you do with the information that counts. This is where you have to use analytics. Do you need the recordings to assess CSR skills and identify training needs, or to look at first-hand customer feedback? Capture the information you need to assess an agent’s effectiveness in your target areas of improvement, and use it to improve their skills and your processes as needed. Then go through the same exercise from the customers’ point of view. Analytics can provide a comprehensive view of the customer and allow agents to quickly understand the customer’s situation, anticipate needs and effectively resolve issues. The result is a more tailored customer service and faster issue-resolution—delivering the level of customer service that inspires strong loyalty.

Step 2: correlate direct revenue-supporting activities with organisational customer service and intelligence gathering functions

First, establish ‘business rules’. Identify the interactions that are most critical to your revenue, business and customer-focused goals, and set up user-defined rules to capture these contacts. This will provide you with all the information needed to make considered business decisions. Storing recorded contacts with advanced information about the transaction, like the reason for the call or the product(s) sold, will provide quicker access and deeper root-cause analysis capabilities. This makes it easier for managers at all levels to get clearer visibility of contact centre performance.

Next, identify best practices. It is key to establish criteria for good and bad interactions across all business areas. In most inbound contact centres, agents are not ‘natural’ sales people; usually, only a small percentage have sales experience and are comfortable up-selling and cross-selling. Identifying, recording and analysing best practice sales processes, agents can learn, emulate and improve their skills. For example, a major telecommunications company dramatically increased sales by capturing contacts and archiving those that demonstrated best practices for up-selling. Its ability to use customer interaction recordings in a CSR training capacity helped reinforce sales/revenue generation behaviours. Cross sales per agent per month increased from 40 in the first month of training to 57 in the third month of training – a 43 percent increase. Why? Agents felt more comfortable selling through a best practice approach that was successful for their colleagues.

The next step is to demonstrate impact on the business’ bottom line. Historically, call centres have been perceived as ‘cost’ centres, but using customer interaction recording technology, enables them to directly impact revenue, as well as build brand loyalty through top-notch service. These solutions spotlight how contact centre personnel champion the customer and company cause, and why they are integral to the business as the strategic hub for customer intelligence.

Finally, the practices that have been successful in the contact centre can also be used in other customer-focused areas of the business. By using recording technology, other departments that indirectly touch the customer can capture and review samples of business processes and perform root-cause analysis to determine clear action steps for improving effectiveness. As in the contact centre, the rest of the enterprise can learn how their processes impact customers, as well as how they can help contribute to positive customer experiences.