The best contact center software vendors today boast of contact center intelligence capabilities in their applications. With customer experience being a popular buzzword in today’s digital environment, how are businesses to utilize contact center intelligence for delivering excellence? As more and more brands compete across a fierce business landscape, customers are spoilt for choice. With an endless availability of options, customers are more likely to abandon a website or mobile app, with the hope of better options elsewhere.
Although every business has its unique set of challenges to face when it comes to building a contact center strategy, adhering to certain rules of thumb when it comes to contact center intelligence can pave the way for learning and meeting customer experience objectives that are beneficial to your business. Alternatively, contact center intelligence can offer a treasure trove of insights via big data, so businesses can identify patterns and predict trends well ahead of time.
In other words, contact center intelligence is one of many e contact center benefits that enables companies to distinguish themselves from their competitors, while retaining existing customers in markets that are already saturated with an endless supply of brand names. Add to this the potential that AI and its various subset technologies can bring, by integrating these with the contact center intelligence system in your business.
Contact Center Intelligence for Customer-Focused Insights
Let’s face it: building a unique customer experience for your business is significantly harder, without contact center intelligence. Without knowing what customers like and dislike, the customer experience journey you create will be a pilot project at best. Through contact center intelligence tools, your contact center will be equipped to derive real-time insights pertaining to customers, which can be used for future interactions, in turn.
Such contextual insight provided by contact center intelligence systems can make your agents come across as mindful and perceptive, especially since customers need not repeat the same information. Conversely, contact center intelligence can also be a great starting point for businesses that are keen on implementing data science to identify patterns and create data visualizations from existing big data.
For advanced reporting and analytics, contact center intelligence can be integrated with AI and machine learning to not just offer predictive insights that are more accurate, but also automate common workflows and offer intelligent recommendations. In turn, these contact center intelligence capabilities closely tie in with project management tools that your business currently uses, so agents always have their task panes up-to-date with what has been automated, and what demands their strategic attention.
Such customer insights from contact center intelligence can also benefit sales teams and their CRM pipeline. Again, contextual insights powered by contact center intelligence can enable sales teams to pursue potential customers without any delay, while nurturing other potential leads over time to progressively result in conversions.
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Contact Center Intelligence for Improving Agent Productivity
Contact center intelligence is a valuable resource for both customer service managers and HR staff, since it can help monitor workplace productivity and performance. Contact center intelligence can be further integrated with contact center call recording software to monitor the quality of calls that agents produce, and use results as reference for constructively training agents. Subsequently, the same results can be part of employee performance evaluations, so HR staff can observe trends surrounding agent output, overall call quality, revenue generated and savings made, among other statistics.
On the other hand, contact center intelligence can also be an integral part of agent training processes. With contact centers having dedicated training departments, contact center intelligence, together with big data, can be used to gauge which inquiries are most common among customers, which communication channels receive the highest traffic, or which products receive the most complaints. This will especially be the case for contact centers that are part of an enterprise Unified Communications system, as omnichannel communications across multiple interdepartmental applications will generate large amounts of data pertaining to customer interactions.
Unlike a conventional call center which solely handles customer inquiries over the phone, a contact center can offer more capabilities that enable businesses to truly understand their customers, identify agents’ weaknesses and build customer service strategies at scale. Although the integration of contact center intelligence is one out of many factors which determine a contact center vs call center, many other variables distinguish the two - and also build the case for businesses to upgrade to an omnichannel contact center.
How to Integrate Contact Center Intelligence With Your Contact Center
Any form of contact center integration with other interdepartmental applications generally serves the purpose of building complete customer journeys which the entire organization can attend to. In turn, this enables all teams outside of customer service to get involved with providing customers with swift and targeted service. Therefore, integrating contact center intelligence with your contact center can pave the way for further investigation into both customer behavior and employee productivity, so these journeys can be further honed in the interest of providing excellent customer service.
Similar to selecting the best contact center software for your business, integrating contact center intelligence with an existing contact center also depends on a few key factors. For one, contact center intelligence can be an external application that may be owned by a vendor other than your contact center vendor. In this case, it is important to coordinate between both vendors, to determine how an integration can be done accurately, affordably and with minimal downtime.
On the other hand, contact center intelligence may already be offered by your contact center vendor, either as part of the subscription you’ve purchased, or as an add-on, for an extra fee. A contact center intelligence integration in this situation is much simpler, as both applications are proprietary to the same vendor.
Additionally, AI and machine learning technologies may or may not be part of the mix, when it comes to contact center intelligence. Again, discerning between the capabilities provided by your contact center intelligence provider and the proprietary AI capabilities which need to be infused is a strategic business decision that needs to be made after careful discussion and planning.
