“Making Your Call Center Relevant” Series Part 5
5 – Winning! The Payback.
In the 2002 movie, The Minority Report, Steven Spielberg shows us what mass personalization advertising will look like in the year 2054. John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) walks through the concourse of a building where cameras perform a retinal scan of all passersby. In real time, the “intelligence” behind the cameras is supposedly matching the scan with John’s profile, accessing and sifting through archives of Big Data and based upon this store of intelligence, advertisements customized to John are presented on screens – it even somehow seems to understand that John is stressed and presents an advertisement suggesting a vacation is in order.
Well, it’s not 2054 and of course this is Hollywood [besides, this portrayal seems to me to be more mass confusion than mass personalization]. Notwithstanding this, it’s not difficult to imagine the mass personalization and predictive nature in which companies will engage and interact with consumers, perhaps not in the brazen manner depicted in the movie. If you spend any time on the Internet, then you’ll know that in fact this is happening today.
In the call center, it’s Interaction Analytics that is processing and understanding large volumes of data (aka Big Data) and in turn, providing the intelligence upon which to take action.
So where is the payback? Well this is the exciting part because Interaction Analytics is not just about optimizing agents, which in itself can justify the costs of deploying the technology, but it can also help drive revenues.
If you remember in a previous installment of this series, Gartner Group found that companies typically spend ten percent of their revenues on marketing. What’s startling is that VisionEdge Marketing reports that 84% of marketers cannot report and measure the contribution of their programs to their business. Marketing organizations can elevate this spend by having the volumes of your call center’s customer interactions mined for actionable market intelligence contained therein. This invaluable information will help your Marketing organization anticipate market trends, gain insight into the reasons for campaign successes or failures, the competitive climate and of course understand customer needs and wants so that they can then better drive Customer Effort and Net Promoter metrics thereby creating long-lasting customer loyalty and ultimately bolstering Customer Lifetime Value.
As with what typically elicits budget dollars in call centers and as touched upon above, Interaction Analytics also offers significant operational efficiencies resulting from reduced handle times, reduced transfers/escalations, increased first call/contact resolution and call avoidance. For instance, by analyzing recordings a wireless company can identify that the root cause for a recent spike in hold times, call transfers and escalations was the result of a gap in training on a specific promotion for a roaming package. A retailer uncovers that the root cause for a surge in the call center is the result of confusing information about a promotion appearing on their web page. An insurance company can identify that the reason a sales promotion combining home and car coverage for seniors is not meeting expected sales targets is because a competitor is offering a better promotion. In each case, Interaction Analytics is providing actionable intelligence.
In addition to the above, Interaction Analytics can also automate quality management and compliance functions. For years, companies have employed quality monitoring tools to identify agent development opportunities and/or non-adhering interactions. Unfortunately, the ability to uncover those opportunities were limited due to the small sample of calls analysts were able to review. To address this limitation, some Interactions Analytics vendors have recently introduced automated scoring, facilitating a more statistically valid representation of the quality of or non-complying service being delivered and consequently identifying training opportunities that would have otherwise not been found.
As I mentioned in a previous installment, at an annual growth rate of over 20%, Interaction Analytics is no longer about differentiating your company – Interaction Analytics will be ubiquitous and those not already planning to implement Interaction Analytics within the next couple of budget cycles are planning to become irrelevant.
In closing, this series was written to provide some insight into how Interaction Analytics will play an important role in the call centers of successful companies; hopefully you found it useful. I look forward to any feedback and the opportunity to continue the discussion. Of course, if you have any questions or want to discuss your call center’s Interaction Analytics plans, you can call me directly at +1 (905) 595-5304; email me at nickf@xentrax1.wpengine.com; or message me directly via twitter at @NickFlaminio.