The foundation of real-time analytics in a contact centre is to provide call data metrics as calls happen. From monitoring call volumes to abandoned call activity, the role of real-time analytics is to analyse and anticipate and provide the right answers to customers. By using real-time analytics, organisations can spot changes immediately and react accordingly, adapting to the customer’s desired interaction.
Real-time analytics can supercharge contact centre agents and supervisors on the success of calls. With hundreds of organisations opting for cloud analytics solutions, vendors have to reconsider and adapt their solutions to benefit both businesses and customers.
Since the onset of the pandemic, the market for analytics has grown and become extremely competitive. But how easy is it to find the solution that covers everything a contact centre involves?
With that in mind, CX Today welcomes Akixi Business Development Manager Simon Colledge to provide an insight into their incredible portfolio of solutions.
Most of Akixi’s solutions have a dashboard view. On why they are a benefit, Simon explains: “With dashboard views, hundreds of cloud-based customers can have an overview of what’s going on at any platform at any given time. This can be call queues coming into particular groups and departments within their organisation. With regards to outbound calling teams, organisations can analyse information such as volume of outbound calls on a daily basis, hourly basis, any given time period, and break that information down into maximum wait time, average wait time, which agents or extensions within the business are carrying the largest weight of handling those outbound calls.”
Colledge continues: “We also offer a safety net to organisations with regards to abandoned or lost or missed calls. Organisations have the ability to see if calls are coming in at particular times of the day or week, for one reason or another, maybe there’s been a spike in traffic. No missed calls are left uncaptured, which makes it easier for organisations to leverage existing or new business opportunities. Each missed call can be associated with a monetary value, for example, a 500 or 1000 pounds of missed business opportunity, and this potential revenue can be reported on.”
To elaborate on Colledge’s description, Akixi solutions offer a myriad of information and data sets all sorted through wallboards, reports and dashboards that keep track of key metrics and KPIs. The staff can easily access these wallboards and have a real-time view of calls waiting, average answer time, longest answer time.
“This gives the team leader or manager of a particular contact centre area or organisation the ability to act on these metrics and key business information instantaneously. Now if they can see they’ve got a high volume of calls waiting coming into a particular area of the organisation, they can potentially call on resource from other areas of the business, and bring those guys into that group to handle those calls and eliminate bottlenecks.”
What makes Akixi unique in this area is that they make available APIs that enable customers to build their own dashboard outside of Akixi’s solution to bring other business intelligence, telephony information, CRM information into one single pane of glass.
New Age of Customer Journey
Each new technological innovation changes the customer journey even in the slightest amount. When it comes to contact centres, the customer journey can take unexpected turns depending on how well-equipped that contact centre is. College tells how real-time analytics changes the customer journey for the better:
“We may have inconvenienced the customer by missing their call, but by capturing that information and calling them back, it’s a good PR tool. It tells the customer that they’re important to you and that you are taking the time to call that customer back and deal with their enquiry or product request. It is most definitely assisting organisations in ensuring the customer journey into their organisation is far better.”
Colledge also mentions the ability to track different streams of communication through dashboards, as omni-channel is the way forward for businesses planning to succeed.
“As we see more and more organisations utilising those different streams to communicate with customers, the Akixi solution can report on the voice, chat communications and email communications as well. And that can be separated within reporting and real time views. All of that information can be brought together to monitor and manage and ultimately improve customer experience.”
Future Trends
We asked Simon if there are any particular real-time analytics trends to look out for in the coming times and here is what he says:
“What we’ve seen is that shift from traditional PBX to cloud-based PBX, and customers have now implemented that. They’ve managed to move their staff to home workers, giving them access to the same tools and business systems that they had when they were in the office, but what they’re discovering is that reporting and analytics solutions were within the office itself.
There might have been a supervisor or a team leader within the office who had their display from a supervisory situation on their screen. While working remotely, it is a bit tougher to track how the team is doing, if they are meeting KPIs, whether there is a particularly busy time with regards to inbound calls etc. With Akixi, these reports and metrics are made available to all in an easily digestible format.
Customers are expecting the same quality of customer service on every channel an organisation offers, whether it’s phone, email, chat or social media.
Colledge continues: “There’s definitely been more requests and requirements for communication and monitoring of other streams. Voice has always been something that Akixi has monitored very effectively. We’re seeing more requests and requirements for email and chat, as well as calls. It has been probably very much the domain of the larger call centre. But we’re seeing more organisations within SME, and not necessarily the large end of SME, utilising things like live chat, and sales email inboxes. And again, businesses are looking for that type of communication to be monitored and acted upon the same as voice. And as we said, we can look at that within the Akixi 3000 solution. So again, that single pane of glass is very easy to review and act upon. By utilising all those other streams, you maximise the productivity of your workforce, because you’ve got individuals who can deal with a phone call and a live chat and an email at the same time.”
For more information on Akixi solutions, click here.
