Author Heidi Glenn wrote an excellent piece several years ago for National Public Radio about the fading of the family photo album. In the story, she talks about our eagerness as a society to capture digital images on an almost continual basis in the hope of preserving our respective life experiences. It’s quite an undertaking that has been facilitated by the convenience of phone cameras that rival the most sophisticated digital single lens reflex. In fact, worldwide, humans will take more than 1.2 trillion photos this year alone. The author is also quick to point out the paradox of this pursuit, as most of these photos will become part of what she refers to as a “...heaping digital mess….” Never organized, never shared, never enjoyed, this catalog of digital memories just merely exists.
Contact Centers Can Be Data Dumping Grounds
Often contact center data is very much like our digital photographs. There are lots and lots of data that is being culled from various sources, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice recognition (IVR), quality monitoring, workforce management, CRM, human resources, homegrown software applications, and more. In many organizations, this data (like our digital photos) just exists—never shared, never organized, its value never realized.
It’s not a mystery as to why this happens within the contact centers of organizations. Chances are the digital mess didn’t always exist. As the organization grew, data became siloed. New departments, additional personnel, or maybe a merger with another company resulted in multiple, incompatible systems and data spread everywhere.
Purge the Mess by Bringing All Data Together
As part of a holistic contact center strategy, organizations need to break down data silos and end the pains of patching together data from various vendors, multiple functional areas, or from data type-specific reporting products. An advanced reporting system should enable the business to accomplish this by fully aggregating and integrating data so that it’s easy to identify and understand the contact center insights scattered throughout the organization.
An advanced reporting system will bring data and intelligence together so you’ll be able to more easily find patterns and make educated business decisions based on actual customer behaviors and actions. You’ll also be able to locate flaws in your process quickly and improve upon the advantages that your contact center is already offering. As a result, you’ll find that your contact center is more productive and better ready to give your customers the experiences they expect.
[Read the Better Contact Center Reporting whitepaper]
Let the Data Drive Productivity
While there’s plenty of actionable tips for contact centers, advanced reporting can drive productivity and help organizations realize the benefits of aggregated data, centralized views and automated collection. In terms of productivity, an organization using advanced contact center reporting can gain the following advantages:
- Better decision making. You’ll eliminate error-prone manual reporting and improve data integrity with a single source of truth that the entire organization can rely on.
- Visualization of insights. Get immediate value with easy-to-learn reporting tools, dashboards, and scorecards. Go deeper with intuitive ad-hoc reporting. Create rich visualizations and convert complex data into insights anyone can understand.
- Collaboration and actions. Easily share and collaborate on intuitive reports, graphs and charts with key stakeholders across the business. Make your opportunities clear—and gain buy-in to go after them.
- Real-time engagement. Employ in-the-moment data insights to hit the ground running, boost employee engagement, and make on-the-fly decisions that immediately improve contact center performance.
You have to understand your customer if you want to engage with them truly. To embrace a customer-centric philosophy, you need to understand market demands and be able to react based on facts. An advanced reporting system should help you find the nuggets of information that make this possible and make your go-to-market approach stronger.
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