Business intelligence (BI) is now central to the data-driven organisation, and contact centres are no exception. It is estimated that contact centre intelligence will be a $5.78 billion market by 2027, registering a growth rate of 23.5% in 2020-2027. This is expected, given the enormous insight generation capabilities of BI and its ability to solve targeted real-world problems.
What is Contact Centre BI?
You can define contact centre business intelligence (BI) as the set of tools, strategies, and resources used to analyse the data the contact centre generates and transform them into actionable insights that are directly aligned with the company’s business strategy.
One of the biggest improvement areas BI tools unlock is customer interactions.
How do you Leverage BI for Superior Customer Interactions?
Business intelligence helps to improve customer interactions by integrating with your customer relationship management (CRM) and your sales enablement technology stack.
It extracts data from various touchpoints on the customer journey, the different channels through which you offer support, and your myriad product delivery platforms to furnish a holistic understanding of the specific customer scenario.
Your CRM or sales enablement stack ingests data from BI tools to provide action points at the right moment, aiming to improve customer interactions. To take a simple example, BI can help you map which channels are frequented by a customer and instruct an agent to offer support most relevant to those channels, streamlining the customer interaction.
How are Companies Managing Customer Interactions Through BI?
Leading organisations are investing heavily in BI tools as a tactic for improving customer interactions. Heathrow Airport leverages Microsoft’s Power BI solution to anticipate customer needs and help airport staff serve them better. Using BI, it was able to predict that a change in weather patterns like a jetstream can delay approximately 20 flights a day, resulting in a queue of 6000 passengers at any given time.
Power BI extracts this data and feeds into airport staff information systems, guiding customer interactions – directing them to available F&B options, adding extra staff, etc.
Financial services company, ING Direct, uses BI to segment customers, analyse churn behaviour, and examine customer experience. Interestingly, it uses big data instead of traditional analytics to minimise complexity and get more accurate results. Its model-driven marketing campaigns can predict which products would see maximum adoption, thereby targeting customer interactions with remarkably high accuracy.
Tips for Actioning Contact Centre BI Tools
The primary purpose of business intelligence is to provide agents with a complete understanding of customer needs and expectations, informed by data from across the digital world. To glean its full value, make sure that your BI tool encompasses:
- Interaction data – website behaviour, speech analytics, email/chat transcripts
- Attitudinal data – Opinions, preferences, expectations, aspirations
- Descriptive data – Self-declared information, demographics, predicted personality traits
- Behavioural data – Transactions, product/service use history, purchase/upselling history
Together, these four data types will give you all the information you need to manage and improve customer interactions at your contact centre.
