It’s all about data: the use of analytics in the cloud contact centre

Guest Post by Dean Manzoori, Vice President of Product Management for UCaaS, Masergy…

Businesses are shifting to cloud contact centre systems. They’re eager to replace their aging, complex and costly on-premise call centres with flexible, scalable and less expensive omni-channel solutions. They want their agents to be able to view and respond to customers via web chat, SMS, email and Twitter feeds from one convenient screen.

But an equally important reason for the move is that they realise their ability to retain customers and grow profits suffers by continuing to rely on legacy call centre systems. On-premise contact centres can’t leverage relevant customer data in an integrated fashion, efficiently route callers to appropriate agents, or offer views into employee performance.

Cloud contact centre systems dramatically change the equation: They bring to the table a variety of analytics to improve customer satisfaction and business optimisation.

Analytics in the Driver’s Seat

Part of keeping customers happy is anticipating their needs, and a cloud contact center can do that with:

Analytics-driven routing that can dynamically predict customer needs and match them with agents who have the best performance record to meet those requirements.

  • Descriptive analytics that assess customer and agent behaviours in order to drive the optimum business outcomes.
  • Predictive analytics, which allow the modelling of what-if scenarios to determine the business impact from changes in customer prioritisations and routing.

Cloud contact centre solutions should deliver these operations-enhancing insights in real-time, drawing on streams of data from an automated call distribution and call routing engine, CRM software and other business applications. As more customer interaction data feeds into the analyser engine, the system’s intelligence ideally grows. Increasingly, more customers will be routed to agents with the best sales records on similar product sales, for instance.

Another facet of a business-optimised contact centre are KPI analytics that managers can access from a dashboard. Data can be segmented, correlated and assessed by call centre managers and analysts and presented in interactive charts for them to glean meaningful insights. They can gain knowledge about anything from agent performance to estimated queue waits during certain hours in order to improve training, staffing or other issues.

A new era is on

It’s clear that business demand for such analytics is rising: Close to three-quarters of respondents in the 2016 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report said that analytics enables better agent performance. Nearly 70% said they drive improved customer experience. I found another really interesting study – the CCW Winter Executive Report: The Future of the Contact Center – that shows more than 70% of organisations said their contact centre cannot be viewed as a success unless it increases customer satisfaction.

This adoption of advanced data analytics across cloud contract centres, in my opinion, is a new and exciting era. Masergy is glad to be part of it with our recently announced Cloud Contact Centre offering. We believe cloud contact centres will be a huge asset for creating better customer experiences whilst simultaneously allowing agents to more effectively offer relevant products and maximise the probability of a sale. Organisations will find they’ll save time and money, too.

I look forward to seeing this evolution continue. It represents a significant step towards providing more personalised, efficient and successful customer interactions.