Leveraging analytic solutions to improve insight, performance and customer experiences.

Customers today are empowered. They demand more from the companies with which they engage. Companies are faced with the increasing complexity of customer interactions, managing the growing repositories of data stored across their organization, and the need to provide consistent, legendary customer experiences again and again. By leveraging analytic solutions, companies can improve insight, performance and customer experiences from the contact center to the enterprise.

Historically, decision makers have relied upon data stored in silos, which offers limited employee access to important customer intelligence. Basic and unconnected analytic systems have essentially existed in isolation. Analytic solutions move beyond silo-based systems to provide a cohesive view of customer experience across the organization from contact center agents to executive decision makers. These solutions make it easier for decision makers to access, analyze and share customer information and intelligence from data collected across the contact center to improve customer care, operational efficiency and profitability.

Analytic solutions help decision makers "tune in" to the voice of their customers to better understand and predict their purchase needs or service demands, both today and in the future. Visionary companies are leveraging these solutions to proactively improve their business and performance management strategies to deliver legendary customer experiences that satisfy customers and fuel business growth.

Analytics Defined

Traditionally, contact centers have measured performance using key performance indicators from quality scores to workforce management performance-based statistics. While these provide a snapshot of what's happening at a given moment, they don't offer the predictive power of analytic solutions. Analytic solutions enrich traditional metric-driven data by predicting why or why not a customer purchased and what that customer is likely to purchase in the future. Analytic solutions offer a way for decision makers to access, analyze and share intelligence across the enterprise to improve performance rapidly. Analytic solutions deliver insight based on analysis of large volumes of data, potentially uncovering customer expectations that may not have been visible using less formal approaches or simpler methods.

Analytics Integrates The Voice Of The Customer Into The Enterprise

Today, companies are moving away from silo-based decision making where each department or group makes decisions based on its own metrics to a holistic view of customers' experiences as they interact with the organization. Analytic solutions can help companies improve the consistency of information shared across the organization, improving the quality of decision making. Easy and fast access to the voice of the customer makes it easy to understand business problems from the customers' perspective, facilitating change that has a direct impact on customer experiences. With customer feedback provided on a continual basis, companies can optimize their performance by understanding how their marketing and sales campaigns are performing against their objectives, drive product innovation by integrating customer feedback into development and planning processes and find new ways to reengineer business processes to reduce costs and continually satisfy customers.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Analytics Improves Customer Satisfaction With Better Intelligence

Visionary companies are adopting analytic technology to gain a unified view of what customers expect. The same companies can use analytics to measure how they are delivering on those expectations and measure and integrate customer feedback into processes to delight customers again and again. These companies are tuning in to "the voice of their customers" by listening to those customers describe their experiences with the company and taking action to improve the company's performance. Analytics solutions are providing the information required for effective decision making, improving business performance from increasing customer satisfaction and revenue growth to resolving customer issues faster. Responsive companies can leverage analytics solutions across their enterprises to take advantage of market and customer intelligence faster than their competition. Analytics solutions can provide the insight required to make changes that improve agent effectiveness and contact center and enterprise performance.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Analytics Improve Agent-Customer Interactions

Analytics solutions can be leveraged to measure agent performance--both soft and hard skills. Web-based solutions categorize information according to a company's unique business needs. How effective are agent interactions with customers? Do agents have the right information to cross-sell and upsell customers to increase revenue? Are agents resolving customer issues on the first call? Categorization of these interactions, coupled with analysis, empowers decision makers with the information necessary to understand and provide better evaluations, identify agent skill gaps and create targeted desktop training to improve performance. Web-based views of these interactions and accompanying data make it easy to recognize repetitive customer service issues that may be occurring within the center. Decision makers can quickly drill down into specific customer calls to listen to customers describe their experiences in their own words. With greater insight, decision makers can take action to re-engineer business processes or develop, coach or train agents to become more effective, thereby increasing revenue and customer satisfaction.

Analytics Drive Operational Efficiency And Effectiveness

Analytics solutions can combine data from multiple data sources to provide better customer visibility and understanding of contact center performance. Analytics allow decision makers to perform root cause analysis to understand why customer preferences are changing or why customers are canceling service, or to identify specific reasons customers are continuing to buy products and services repeatedly. With analytic solutions, managers can gain greater understanding of why customers are calling and predict why they are likely to call in the future. Better insight supports more accurate and reliable forecasts and schedules, improving customer experiences and satisfaction. Analytics provide the foundation for better planning by allowing decision makers to predict and prioritize what's most important to customers within the context of corporate objectives, budgets and resources.

Analytics Drive Enterprise Growth And Increase Revenue

Analytic solutions connect the contact center with the enterprise by providing valuable information about a company's most valuable asset--its customers. Analytics support rapid, accelerated growth by providing the information required to understand changing market and customer needs. Raw data can be easily converted into insight that drives organizational effectiveness and efficiency, delivering greater profits. Better understanding drives customer satisfaction that can increase short- and long-term revenue and cash flow and support long-term profitable customer relationships.

Analytics Enhance Performance Management

Competitive companies are leveraging the power of analytics solutions to better understand their customer experiences within their performance management programs. These solutions allow decision makers to continually optimize their performance management programs by understanding and communicating patterns, trends and relationships in customer interactions. Successful companies understand the value of tightly integrated analytics- and performance-based solutions that help call center and business executives continue to evolve and optimize performance objectives based on corporate goals and customers' experiences and expectations.

It's a customer revolution, and companies are responding by investing in analytic solutions to tune in to the voice of the customers with the ultimate objective of improving customer experiences, operational efficiency and overall profitability.

David Pennington oversees product direction and design for Envision (www.envisioninc.com). He manages the development and delivery of innovative, first-to-market software solutions. During a distinguished career in software management, Pennington established a reputation for excellence developing and marketing solutions that provide the highest levels of business value for customers. Pennington is an advocate for advancing the value of coaching agents and its impact on improving the quality of customer interactions throughout the contact center industry.

By David Pennington

Envision