Contact center intelligence evolved into a crucial part of the customer experience landscape in recent years. As customer expectations evolve, and interactions grow more complex, countless companies are relying on advanced tools and intelligence to enhance customer satisfaction.
With the right AI solutions, businesses can simultaneously improve compliance, enhance customer experiences, and make more intelligent decisions for the future. Intelligent tools can even help to improve employee productivity and efficiency, reducing CX operational costs.
However, getting started with new technology in the contact center can be complex. That’s why we’re sharing some of the top strategies and best practices for leveraging contact center intelligence.
What are Contact Center Intelligence Tools?
The term “contact center intelligence” is relatively broad. It covers a wide range of different AI-driven tools and solutions, designed to empower businesses and their employees. In the past, many companies used a variety of different disconnected solutions to enhance the contact center.
Options ranged from call and screen recording tools for capturing interactions, to sentiment analysis tools, live monitoring apps, quality management tools, and advanced reporting platforms. Now, innovators are emerging in the contact CX field to provide access to more comprehensive solutions.
A full contact center intelligence platform combines artificial intelligence with call recording, quality management, and voice analytics features for an all-in-one solution.
15 Best Practices and Strategies for Contact Center Intelligence
With an end-to-end platform for contact center intelligence, companies can rapidly leverage contact center intelligence for a range of use cases, from improving business decision-making, to investing in employee productivity. Here are some of the most valuable strategies you can use to make the most of your contact center intelligence, and some best practice tips for guidance.
Strategy 1: Use Intelligence to Augment CX Metrics
Virtually every contact center relies on customer experience metrics and KPIs to gauge the success of its customer service strategies. However, quantitative metrics don’t always provide a clear picture on their own. Even sending out customer surveys can be unreliable, as some reports suggest less than 5% of customers will actually complete a post-call survey.
Additionally, many quantitative metrics miss important nuances related to an agent’s performance and a customer’s experience. Fortunately, with a contact center intelligence platform and voice analytics, companies can build on their insights.
“Contact center intelligence solutions provide valuable insights into customer sentiments regarding your product, customer service, and brand. This understanding empowers you to make informed decisions that align with customer preferences and enhance overall customer satisfaction. “ – Gennadiy Bezko, CEO of MiaRec
5 Best Practices for Augmenting CX Metrics:
1. Dive deeper into CSAT scores: CSAT surveys often ask customers to rate their satisfaction after a call on a scale of 1-5. With a conversational intelligence platform, you can ask the same question, but glean deeper insights with topic and sentiment analysis, offering insights into how customers actually felt about specific products, services, or interactions.
2. Enhance NPS insights: Similar to CSAT, NPS scores are often assessed by asking customers to rate how likely they’d be to refer a company to someone else on a scale. Topic analysis tools built into a conversational intelligence platform can allow companies to actively track how often a customer mentions being referred by another person.
3. Analyze call durations: A long call duration doesn’t always translate to an inefficient call. With voice analytics, you can determine exactly why a call lasted for a specific time. You could find out if the customer hung up because they were unhappy, or because of a bad connection, and examine the complexity of the conversation.
4. Evaluate first-call resolution rates: Voice analytics tools can also provide insights into first-call resolution rates. They can examine the exact steps agents take to ensure they’re delivering a good experience to customers. These insights can then be shared with agents to help improve their performance, and deliver more meaningful training.
5. Explore call escalations and transfers: Transfers and escalations can be common in the contact center, but an unusually high number could indicate a problem. Using topic analysis in a contact center intelligence platform can help you to identify why and when agents are transferring calls. This could pave the way to better routing strategies.
Strategy 2: Improve Agent Performance with Insights
Another excellent way to use contact center intelligence to transform your business is to leverage the insights you collect to empower and support agents. There’s more to creating amazing agents than evaluating their average call numbers or handling times.
With the right intelligent insights, businesses can determine exactly which agents are their top performers, and how their actions contribute to customer satisfaction.
“On average, contact centers utilizing a manual agent evaluation approach can evaluate only 2-5 percent of their calls. With solutions like MiaRec, companies can automatically score 100% of their customer calls. “ – Gennadiy Bezko, CEO of MiaRec.
5 Best Practices for Empowering Agents:
1. Measure agent behavior: Contact center intelligence platforms can provide a deep insight into agent behavior, and how it influences the customer experience. You can analyze calls that include profanity to find out what caused aggressive behavior. Business leaders can also analyze how well agents follow scripts, or when they fail to answer questions correctly.
2. Review agent knowledge: To answer customer questions, agents need to have a comprehensive knowledge of your business and its processes. Using topic analysis tools can help you to highlight gaps in agent training. You can also use these insights to determine what kind of support your agents might need throughout calls.
3. Ensure compliance: Compliance is crucial to any contact center. It’s important to avoid regulatory fines and issues, but it also has an impact on the customer experience. Contact center intelligence tools can help you track whether agents are following compliance policies.
4. Prevent understaffing: Analyzing contact center interactions with intelligent tools makes it easy to pinpoint common problems, like long waiting times and queues. If customers regularly mention they struggle to reach an agent during specific days or times, this can inform your scheduling strategy going forward.
5. Train agents: Assessing performance metrics like script adherence and agent knowledge with contact center intelligence paves the way for more informed training strategies. You can use the information you gather to create personalized coaching and development plans.
Strategy 3: Understand Customer Behavior with AI
Delivering an excellent customer experience, and elevating your business above the competition means understanding your customers and their needs on a deeper level. Unfortunately, surveys and polls can only convey so much information.
Contact center intelligence tools make it easier to understand and track customer behavior, with behind the scenes insights into their thoughts and feelings.
5 Best Practices for Understanding Customers:
1. Measure sentiment: Analyzing customer sentiment is one of the best ways to get a behind-the-scenes look at how customers feel through their purchasing journey. You can examine how a customer’s sentiment changes in response to different scenarios, and look for common pain points you might be able to eliminate from the contact center.
2. Review common issues: Using topic analysis tools, business leaders can get an insight into how frequently customers call about a specific concern. This makes it easier to pinpoint potential problems with your products or services. It can also help with the creation of FAQ pages and self-service tools, to reduce call volumes in the future.
3. Create more personalized experiences: With customer insights from your intelligence platform, you’ll be able to examine customer preferences and common needs. This helps to ensure each agent gets a more personalized follow-up experience. You can even use the insights you gain to personalize call scripts and service strategies.
4. Look for causes of churn: With contact center intelligence, it’s easier to determine exactly why customers choose to stop working with your company. If you can recognize issues that lead to churn, or a customer ending a call, you can improve your retention rates.
5. Examine preferred communication channels: Using contact center intelligence, you can get an insight into which channels your customers prefer to use for service. This makes it easier to assign the right resources to each segment of your contact center.
Leveraging Contact Center Intelligence
Contact center intelligence is one of the most powerful resources today’s business leaders have. It provides insights into everything from the customer journey to agent performance, and even enhances your existing CX metrics.
With the right contact center intelligence platform, you can even get an insight into your customers’ preferred communication channels, their pain points, and even what they want most from your products and services. The more intelligence you gather, the more you’ll be able to make the right decisions for the future of your company.
