Are you Ignoring Customer Call Data?

Customer_Call_Data

In the words of Rick Tate, the author of Leadership and the Customer Revolution, “Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral.” One of the best ways to do this is by leveraging customer call data. It is through the collation and analysis of data that the company comes closer to understanding the needs of its customer and is able to meet them effectively.

It is time that call centers optimize their operations by paying attention to Big Data, says a report by Ovum. Given that competition has intensified manifold with the introduction of new digital channels, “mining a greater volume and variety of data and doing so in real time, is becoming a powerful competitive advantage for telecos,” said the head of Ovum’s Teleco Operations.

Is yours an ‘Enlightened’ Call center?

Traditionally a call was assessed through metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT) or the average time taken by an agent on each call, including talk time, hold time and wrap-up time. However, this metric is neither indicative of the ultimate resolution, nor of the efficacy with which the agent was able to respond to the customer’s need.
In order to fill the gaps in metrics strategy, other indicators that were reflective of customer relationship such as average product per customer, revenue per customer and customer satisfaction began to gain prominence. Therefore, in order to take a proactive stance, a contact center could no longer operate in isolation from the rest of the enterprise.  Hence, the need was felt to leverage data from the marketing, product management and engineering departments in order to arrive at Customer Intelligence information or CI.

New Customer Call Metrics

Customer Intelligence is the effort to understand not only why the customer is calling, but also who he is and what he might be interested in. Therefore it is the information collected from both internal and external sources in order to better understand what the customer’s overall motivations are. It taps into social media and other sources to collect what may be categorized into one of the three categories: personal demographics, geographic demographics and attitudinal data. This nuanced understanding of the customer is then used in marketing strategies such as “cross-selling” and “relationship building”.
In order to further the same objectives, call tracking software are also deriving essential metrics on the basis of the pay per call business model. In case of outbound campaigns, utilizing such a software can help to deploy performance-based advertising as it will be able to assess which ad campaigns are driving referral calls to the business. Moreover, this helps to unify the data derived from digital marketing as it helps to identify the exact keywords that are driving calls and which calls are converting to sales.
Therefore, as a contact center, if you are not utilizing CI and call tracking, you are not utilizing the full potential of the devices at your disposal.
Read More: 5 Innovations that will Define Contact Center Technology in 2016