How to use AI-powered contact center analytics to improve performance

Contact centers produce large amounts of data every day.

Each phone call, each minute an agent spends on the clock—that’s data that can be used to track and measure certain business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

These measurements allow you to understand how the business is performing and how close you are to reaching the goals.

But if you aren’t properly analyzing and reporting on this data, you won’t be able to effectively understand where your company stands so that you can make informed decisions moving forward. Contact center analytics and reporting can help you pinpoint problem areas, correct issues, and maximize performance.

Benefits of contact center analytics.

Contact center analytics are essentially a health check for your organization. They offer a comprehensive understanding of your business’s performance, empowering you to make informed decisions that drive growth and efficiency. 

Without these data-driven insights, your business might face staffing issues, unchecked customer problems (such as complaints that remain unresolved due to a lack of proper tracking or attention) and overall business inefficiency. 

The benefits of contact center analytics go beyond providing visibility into business operations. Here are some additional advantages they offer:

Enhance contact center agents’ productivity.

A contact center reporting tool can gather information about agent activities. You can track things like average wait time, handled calls, resolution times, and even how many calls were not answered during business hours. With this knowledge, you can identify the root causes of problems and coach contact center agents to be productive and successful.

Provide better customer satisfaction.

Contact center reports measure customer satisfaction and customer sentiment through surveys and interactions. Customer feedback allows you to better understand your customers and gives you insights into how to improve the customer experience.

Save costs.

It may seem like the costs associated with contact center software outweigh the cash savings, but that can’t be farther from the truth. Identifying trends and inefficiencies with contact center reporting and other software can help you optimize operations to reduce costs throughout the organization.

How to analyze and report on contact center operations.

Contact center analytics and reporting will positively impact any organization if they are read and executed correctly. Although usually considered the same, they are in fact different things. Reports allow you to read the strategy and help to understand key indicators, but for that, you need to make sure that you have the best reporting tools. Analytics give meaning to report information, allowing you to make long-term business planning or tackle different business-as-usual scenarios.

Going back to the welcoming scenario, you need to find out performance issues in the contact center according to the results shown in the dashboard. You need to ask yourself, and your operational people, a series of questions to start mapping the situation:

• Is my team understaffed or are my agents underperforming?
• What is the call arrival pattern? What is the distribution of the call volumes?
• Am I staffing the different intervals with the correct number of people?
• Is this real-time or are we facing a historical behavioral trend?
• Are these unique callers or do I have a backlog?
• What are the quality results of the team’s performance?
• Do we have a streamlined process and flow in the IVR or during the call?
• Can our agents perform their job to the best of their capabilities?
• What type of engagement do we have with our stakeholders, or staff, or customers?
• What is the business competitive strategy?
• What are our customers saying about our customer service?
• Are we tracking the pain points and top contact drivers?

Determining important contact center metrics.

In terms of reporting, there are a few data sets that provide more information about the situation. For example, reports on agent activity and agent status identify top performers and outliers and help to design coaching strategies that could elevate and calibrate the overall performance and productivity of the team.

KPIs such as average handle time (AHT), after-call work (ACW), and average hold time enable you to start digging into the processes and available resources of your team. For instance, is there a need to provide a better knowledge base or more intuitive training materials? Is the team missing interactive or automated steps to use during and after the call time? Would more simplified flows help you improve metrics?

A cloud contact center solution, powered by AI technology, supports agents with customer inquiries, decreases hold time, and improves customer satisfaction. Think about going from 7 seconds AHT with around 3 seconds of hold time, to a 5 seconds call where customers are always greeted by an agent. No more contact center waiting music!

Likewise, when comparing the top and lower performers for call time, you can also find out if there is a silo culture impacting the quality of your service. The lack of engagement and communication has a great impact on any customer service structure.

Now, what about the IVR? There were a few questions related to the interaction before reaching an agent. In this sense, the abandonment rate can be highly impacted by a complex IVR message, leading to customers hanging up the call. Although we believe callbacks and voice mails are a good option, sometimes they end up being the opposite, as they generate more call volume. More clarity and flexibility can improve customer experience and influence customer satisfaction.

AI contact center analytics tools to track metrics.

Interaction analytics.

Interaction analytics uses AI to automatically transcribe agent-customer conversations and extract valuable insights to identify areas of improvement. This information can streamline processes, enhance training materials, and improve overall customer experience.