How Analytics Will Earn Contact Centers a Seat at the C-Suite Table

Big data analytics is about to explode, marking a watershed moment for contact centers. There has never been a greater need for data-driven insights as businesses prioritize revenue growth amid rapidly shifting customer expectations, severe staffing shortages, and rising contact volume.

Here are a few fast facts about the big data explosion:

• Between 2010 and 2020, data interactions increased by almost 5,000% (Forbes).
• Global data creation is projected to grow rapidly—from 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025 (Statista).
• 80% of worldwide data will be unstructured by 2025 (IDC).
• 97% of Fortune 1000 leaders say they are investing in data initiatives in 2022. In 2021, 92% of organizations reported realizing measurable business benefits, up from just 48% in 2017 and 70% in 2020 (NewVantage Partners).

The growing interest in the strategic use of data analytics will elevate the visibility of contact centers as a vital source of competitive intelligence. In fact, LiveVox CMO Nick Bandy predicts that contact centers will emerge as the epicenter of analytics in the coming 12-24 months.

“Companies will increasingly look to the contact center to provide the insights that enable fast, informed decision-making across the organization—a strategic differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment,” Bandy says.

“The center’s ability to capture the voice of the customer and deep-dive into the data to uncover trends in customer intent, sentiment, and service outcomes will enable center leaders to deliver relevant insights to senior executives across marketing, sales, R&D, billing, and other functions. As a result, we will see contact center leaders finally earning a long-sought-after seat—and voice—at the C-Suite table.”

The following are five steps for leveraging contact center analytics to demonstrate the value of your operation in driving business growth objectives.

STEP 1: Transform the Contact Center into a Value Generator

Understanding why your customers are calling can offer up a bounty of low-hanging fruit to significantly reduce costs—an essential first step in breaking free of the long-standing “cost center” perception.

Yet traditional QM processes are simply not up to the task. Manual QM programs are labor-intensive; as a result, a mere 2%-4% of interactions are monitored or reviewed on average. This leaves companies with a very limited understanding of the customer experience (CX). It’s no wonder that so many contact centers have been hampered by the lack of actionable insights into process breakdowns, performance gaps, and customer pain points.

Fortunately, this is where an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered omnichannel interaction analytics solution can excel by giving contact centers complete visibility into 100% of their voice, email, SMS, and chat conversations.

Managers can access reports to easily understand CX and intent, conversation sentiment, agent performance, revenue-generating opportunities, best practices, risk exposure, and more for every interaction their business handles.

Early adopters of contact center business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools typically report a quick ROI from improvements in operational efficiencies, for example:

• Increasing first contact resolution (FCR) by analyzing indicators of poor performance, including negative customer sentiment, silence time, high escalations, or long hold times.
• Reducing inbound call volume by identifying recurring questions or requests that could be handled with AI and automation or simply adding information to a website or IVR.
• Identifying agent coaching and learning opportunities by tracking silence time, handle time, and sentiment on both sides of the conversation.
• Reducing handle time by evaluating and tweaking agent scripts.

STEP 2: Enhance CX to Increase Customer Loyalty and Growth

More contact centers are shifting their strategic focus from customer issue resolution and operational efficiency to revenue generation. According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of customer service leaders say their top priority for 2022 is achieving business growth through value-added customer service.

The research also found that 82% of organizations either have or plan to implement a value enhancement strategy this year. Gartner identified the two approaches to value enhancement as (1) looking for patterns throughout the customer base to find groups that need, or are more open to, added value; and (2) mining customer data to flag individual customers in need of more value.

AI-driven interaction analytics technology makes proactive value-added service strategies possible by applying:

• AI to process massive volumes of data quickly and efficiently.
• Integrated BI and analytics tools to provide a complete picture of your customers by adding customer demographics and account history from the CRM platform combined with call drivers (or intents), length of the journey, channels accessed, and interaction outcomes.
• Sentiment analysis to add context to trends and a more rounded view of customer conversations since emotions often come into play when interacting with businesses.
• Predictive analytics to identify current and historical data patterns to predict what will happen next and suggest actions to take for the most optimal customer outcomes.

Learning more about your customers’ behavioral patterns across their omnichannel journey can help you discover underlying needs that can be met with upselling or cross-selling opportunities. You can also identify customers who are unhappy or at risk of leaving and take quick action to retain the customer and increase loyalty.

STEP 3: Streamline Processes Across Internal Functions

Value-added service strategies also should be applied to your internal customers. The contact center’s access to near real-time voice of the customer data can be a critical advantage for other business units within your organization. For instance, the contact center can provide feedback about customer reactions to product releases, sales promotions, marketing campaigns, changes to billing, or new policies.

The contact center is generally first to be alerted when something is amiss. Issues with sales, product defects, fulfillment gaps, billing errors, and unclear messaging initially surface in conversations with frontline agents. This allows center leaders to identify emerging trends and share customer concerns with relevant departments so teams can quickly address the issues before they spread.

It’s a win-win proposition for contact centers. Streamlining internal processes across functions reduces customer friction and pain points while positioning the operation as a valuable source of customer insights within the organization.

STEP 4: Drive Customer-Centric Change Across the Enterprise

Contact centers are well-established champions of customer service excellence within the organization. And the ability to deep-dive into caller intents puts the customer front and center when designing products, services, and experiences.

Ensuring that customer data is transparent across all customer-facing sales, service, and support teams promotes organization-wide awareness of changing needs and expectations. Cross-functional buy-in also provides additional opportunities to improve the end-to-end CX.

While contact center leaders may be the guardians of the richest source of customer intelligence, data democratization is key to eliminating data silos and a fragmented view of the customer. Modern interaction analytics tools are built for ease of use with dynamic data visualization that allows managers to simplify the data, quickly identify trends, and draw relevant conclusions. Linking all stakeholders to insights and actions will be key to creating a unified CX.

STEP 5: Provide Executives with Insights for Fast, Informed Decision-Making

One of the most common data reporting frustrations for contact center leaders is the limited access to customer insights beyond the standard contact center metrics. Unfortunately, reporting on operational KPIs like handle time and abandoned calls is not likely to pique C-level executives’ interest in the same way that providing insights that impact profitability and revenue growth will.

In today’s rapidly changing environment, senior leaders feel challenged by planning for an unpredictable future.

Applying integrated BI and performance analytics tools to 100% of your voice, email, SMS, and chat interactions will help to surface meaningful insights and predictions that lie buried within customer conversations.

This quick access to reliable customer intelligence will help you and your senior leadership team to make informed, data-driven decisions for optimal outcomes for your customers and business.

Back Your Company’s Growth with the Voice of Your Customer

Contact centers gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic for their vital role in maintaining the business’ connection with its customers. The next 12-24 months will be a pivotal time for leaders as they build on the momentum gained over the past couple of years and position the contact center as a valuable repository for customer data and fast insights for informed decision-making.

About LiveVox

LiveVox (Nasdaq: LVOX) is a next generation contact center platform that powers more than 14 billion omnichannel interactions a year. By seamlessly unifying blended omnichannel communications, CRM, AI, and WEM capabilities, the Company's technology delivers exceptional agent and customer experiences, while helping to mitigate compliance risk. With 20 years of cloud experience and expertise, LiveVox's CCaaS 2.0 platform is at the forefront of cloud contact center innovation. The Company has more than 700 global employees and is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Atlanta; Columbus; Denver; New York City; St. Louis; Medellin, Colombia; and Bangalore, India.
To stay up to date with everything LiveVox, follow us @LiveVox or visit livevox.com.
[email protected] | 844-207-6663