CONTACT CENTERS ARE LIKE GIANT CANDY STORES FULL OF RICH, TEMPTING CUSTOMER DATA. JIM DAVIES SHARES FIVE DELICIOUS TIPS FOR MASTERING EFFECTIVE DATA COLLATION AND OPTIMIZATION.

I remember the good old days when sweet shops existed on every street. The walls were lined with shelves, filled with large plastic tubs of our favorites—rhubarb and custards, pear drops, lemon bonbons, kola cubes, flying saucers… Happy days. If I owned a sweet shop, I’d have a hard time resisting temptation as I am rather drawn to a sweet or six.

Bringing this back to customer service, I feel the industry is very much like the sweet shop that’s located off the beaten path. Our sweets are our customer data silos. We have a lot of different types and a plentiful supply, but they are just sitting on the shelf and being ignored. And, it’s not just me, the latest statistics prove it.

While consumers increasingly expect a personalized, seamless experience across all channels, 71% of consumers think contact centers are siloed within their organization with another 43% saying this negatively impacts their overall customer experience (CX).

So, like any person who has just discovered an amazing shop filled with their favorite sweets, we should be gorging on the feast in front of us. Let’s dive into how to get started building the perfect mix of data from your contact center.

5 Essential Ingredients for the Perfect Data Pick ‘n’ Mix

While data collection isn’t new, many organizations still aren’t capitalizing on the true voice of the customer. There are several steps you can take to manage the gold mine of sweets, well, customer data coming in and out of the contact center:

1. Access Data Holistically

There’s a myriad of sweets in the shop, but they are usually in individual jars. Similarly, you’ll probably find your data comes from multiple places—different silos where the perfect customer experience falls into a black hole. That’s why we need to aim for seamless data.

When you add new channels, make sure they are fully integrated with the rest of the systems in your contact center. A customer should be able to channel surf. If they do end up speaking with an agent, ensure they have access to the full customer journey and associated information captured along the way.

2. Analyze Customer Data Properly

It’s not just about buying a great analytics tool. You need the right level of human competency to bring it to life. Dedicate the necessary budget to ensure you have appropriately trained resources to help better understand what all that data really means.

Start with the wealth of information held in call recordings and post-call surveys:

• Is it chatbot containment?
• Is it agent availability?
• Is it agent knowledge?

Picking up on the loudest customer frustrations and striving to resolve these will have the biggest impact on CX.

3. Actions Not Words

Over the past few years, the emphasis has moved beyond the collection and understanding of data to actions. Make data insights actionable to drive tangible business value.

For example, give a supervisor a top 5 list of to-dos that will have the most impact on their goals. This could be as simple as ‘Have Fred do a product training course’ because your data has picked up that a customer was frustrated because Fred couldn’t help them.

4. Be a CX Driver

Look beyond the contact center and work with your Marketing, Sales, Product, and HR teams to identify how the voice of the customer can assist them. Currently, only 28% of contact center managers admit to sharing data outside their organization on a daily basis. Half are only doing it monthly or even quarterly.

It’s time for contact center leaders to drive CX best practices across the whole enterprise whilst encouraging their agents to become brand guardians. By doing so, agents will have the power to influence corporate perception, and boost customer loyalty and profits using the customer data-infused sweets in their store.

5. Feast on the Right Technology

Speech and text analytics are now proven AI-driven technologies. Yet only a very small number of contact centers worldwide leverage them. While they’re not the cheapest of investments and you need a level of associated competency to get the most out of them, they offer enormous rewards, such as:

• Operational Efficiency: These technologies are consistently checking for situations that should have been contained within a chatbot dialog or are a growing potential category for self-service inclusion.
• Customer Experience: Classic examples of this are checking for active listening skills versus an improvement in customer sentiment or red flagging when unnecessary callbacks are causing frustration.
• Growth: For example, actively looking for qualified opportunities by assessing an agent’s ability to overcome customer objections to a special offer and then coaching them accordingly.

Unlock Contact Center Customer Data Silos

Is your contact center customer data currently being overlooked? Stop wasting its potential, like a delicious treat sitting on a sweet shop shelf. You will gain significant value from the latest AI-driven tech, I promise. That’s why I encourage you to at least pencil this technology in for serious consideration in 2023 and beyond.

To identify other gaps and opportunities that contact centers could be missing, download our State of the Contact Center 2022 report. You’ll discover how to empower the contact center as a brand guardian.