Today’s companies collect huge amounts of information every day. Every conversation with a customer, live chat, self-service interaction, and sales discussions generates data.
Analysing this data is how business leaders get a better insight into the nature of their CX strategy, and how effective it may be. With the right analytics, it’s also possible to boost employee productivity, align teams, and ensure ongoing efficiency.
Now that Gartner studies suggest 82% of business leaders are planning to allow remote work at least some of the time, hybrid work is gaining attention as the strategy of the future. As new hybrid workforces emerge, business leaders are beginning to unlock the benefits of predictive analytics and real-time insights to enabling and empowering the modern team.
Real-Time Analytics and the Hybrid Worker
The benefits of hybrid work are clearer than ever following the events of 2020. Most companies have already discovered how valuable remote working can be for reducing costs and improving work/life balance. Yet, innovators also know that some roles simply aren’t suitable for remote work.
Hybrid working can give businesses the best of both worlds. You get a cost-effective remote workforce with flexible schedules and excellent engagement, as well as a thriving in-house team. Unfortunately, there are also some challenges involved with managing this hybrid workforce.
For instance, how do you keep in-office and remote workers aligned towards the same goals when they’re separated? Real-time analytics could be the solution. Real-time insights show employees and business leaders how teams are performing in regard to crucial metrics.
Supervisors can create dashboards within the CX ecosystem, where employees can track their performance on things like call handling times and first-time resolution rates. At the same time, each employee can benchmark their results against the performance of their peers in and outside of the office, making it easier to maintain engagement and motivation.
Business leaders can use real-time analytics to inspire remote workers and keep them engaged when working in a less formal environment. Competitions and rewards are often excellent motivators, and they’re enabled by the gamification factors of real-time analytics. Managers can also use these valuable insights to determine whether hybrid working strategies are working, and track how internal and external performance levels compare.
In some cases, companies can even invest in AI tools and automated alerts which inform supervisors when an agent’s score drops below a certain threshold. This makes it easier to see when and where agents need immediate assistance to avoid losing a customer – even if they’re working remotely.
Predictive Analytics for Hybrid Workers
Real-time analytics are a valuable tool for keeping all parts of your new workforce engaged and focused. However, they’re only one part of the analytics puzzle. While real-time analytics can give you an insight into what’s happening at the moment, predictive analytics gather information about the past to help with making informed decisions in the future.
Predictive analytics build months or years of information from company conversations and interactions into a stream of data you can use to predict future trends. Predictive analytics is particularly valuable for the hybrid workforce because it can help you to determine when you need a higher number of remote or in-office team members to be available.
If you’re having a launch that requires a lot of face-to-face interactions and in-office activities, then you may need to increase your number of in-person employees for a short time. If you’re dealing with a lot of admin at one point, you may be able to increase your number of remote employees and reduce your reliance on physical real estate.
Predictive analytics give you an insight into the kinds of customer service trends that your customers are most interested in, so you can train your hybrid workforce correctly. For instance, you might need to provide support for future staff members to use more video conferencing tools for live demonstrations and face-to-face chats that don’t require in-person meetings.
You can also use your historical information to predict how you can use your remote and in-office staff members more effectively. For instance, you might learn your remote workers are better suited to handling live chat requests, while in-office employees can deal with more phone calls and video conferencing requests at scale.
Having an insight into industry and customer trends paves the way for better hybrid team support, so you can empower every worker in your company to deliver the best results.
As the hybrid workplace continues to evolve, good analytics could be the key to keeping team members engaged, maintaining high-performance standards, and reducing churn.
