Managing an effective call center is a challenging task.Â
The needs of your customers are constantly changing, and you need to be ready. That means putting the right number of people in the right place at the right time with the right training to help your customers at any moment. Â
How do you accomplish this while balancing the customer’s experience with the cost of delivering timely resolution? The answer is analytics.
In this blog, we’ll cover how to align your analytics strategy with the right tools to reduce the friction between your data and your decisions.
The Critical Role of Analytics in Call Centers
When making choices about which solutions to adopt to support your call center’s analytics processes, those choices should align with how well those platforms can support the capabilities that are critical to your success. So what capabilities really matter for call center analytics?
- Agility: Life in call centers moves fast, and you need to keep up. Drivers change and priorities shift, so depending on stock reports will limit your capability to respond. You need to develop and iterate dashboards and solutions quickly.
- Clarity: If data is one of your most valuable assets, how do you extract that value? Even the most thorough analysis has little value unless it can be communicated clearly. Effective communication through data visualization builds trust in directives and decisions based on that data and is critical to a healthy analytics culture.
- Consistency: Speaking of trust, if your data isn’t ready and accurate when you need it, uncertainty and friction will undermine the value of the analytics solutions you create. If your partners can’t trust the quality of your data, they’ll learn not to rely on it.
- Scalability: Call centers present many challenges for successful data integration due to the quantity, cadence, and freshness of data needed. The ability of your integration solution to scale seamlessly with your data storage, compute, and consumption needs is the foundation of your analytics capability.
Since these capabilities directly affect your ability to extract value from your data and put it into action, it is important to choose tools that maximize your impact. As most call centers are constantly under pressure to deliver better results with fewer resources, there are cost savings and customer retention in the balance of these choices.
What Are the Top Cell Center Analytics Solutions
Our recommended analytics platform for call centers is Tableau due to its features that support the capabilities that are most important for success in this function. Tableau allows your team to produce insightful dashboards with a low barrier to entry, and iterate rapidly as the needs of your organization shift.Â
Tableau can also connect to virtually all data sources with the ability to integrate new inputs with low development effort.
Call center staffing and success models can be very complex with looping dependencies and dynamic interactions between KPIs. Tableau’s best-in-class data visualization options allow you to use the right tool for the job and create high-quality dashboards that cut to the heart of what is actionable and aid in clear quantitative communication.
One of the strengths of Tableau is its options for interactivity which can allow a single dashboard to serve the purpose of multiple reports and aid in exploratory analysis of deep data sets like the ones generated by call centers. This means less time is needed to develop and maintain your solutions.
We also recommend the Snowflake Data Cloud as an ideal solution for integrating data across multiple platforms for use in developing analytics solutions. This is due to its ability to scale seamlessly to meet the data needs of any size call center, and create consistent pipelines for data ingestion so you know you can trust your data when you need it.Â
We’ll discuss this in more depth in an upcoming blog post, showing how best to leverage Snowflake for your call center.
Closing
It’s impossible to stumble into call center success. Creating processes that lead to consistent, positive outcomes takes decisive leadership based on a clear and effective analytics strategy. You won’t get far without your data working for you with ease of access and rapid time to value. Your customers won’t stay and wait for you, so make a plan and act!
Speaking of action, phData has helped guide several leading businesses to call center analytics nirvana by building informative dashboards, integrating siloed data, and much more. If you have questions or are interested in learning more, don’t hesitate to reach out!Â
FAQs
As most call centers are cost centers that don’t necessarily generate revenue, this is a common struggle. Analytics is both the start and the end of this path, as you should work to demonstrate the ROI of investing in a better analytics stack and upskilling your team to make effective use of these tools. The value proposition of this kind of effort is more than worth the investment, as service failure in call centers can recursively lead to greater costs and further failure states. On the other hand, when analytics opens up the opportunity to create better planning and execution processes that lead to service stability, there are cost savings from overtime, cross-utilization, productivity, lower attrition, and lower customer churn. Want help with this? Talk to us at phData.
While creating a spreadsheet model to solve a new problem seems like a quick win, it often actually slows you down. Every new linked spreadsheet is now part of a process that will not easily scale or change as you will need it to in the future. The chance to automate your data pipelines to integrate critical data sources and process inputs into a platform like Snowflake is one you can’t afford to skip. This will let you move faster and more easily adapt to change. Once all your data is centralized, organized, and trusted, it will be ready to shine the light you need on your call center.
