Leveraging data to enable better customer interactions.

Data. It's a huge part of our daily jobs. Part of operating a successful contact center is managing and coordinating interactions and data. When it really works, we bring the two together with the right representative and the right data, and it equals a happy customer most of the time.

In practice, then, we should think of contact center managers as data experts. These individuals manage data, collect it incessantly and store thousands of gigabytes of it. Contact center managers do their best to make relevant data available at the time of customer interaction. But, they're also guilty of storing data in silos where few people know about the information and few people can access it and benefit from it. Sound familiar?

We asked a group of contact center executives: Do you use the data collected in your contact center to help make decisions elsewhere within the enterprise? Sixty-three percent answered "often," but that they could do more. Almost 40 percent answered "seldom."

All contact center managers are in the same boat. They inherently know the value of data and realize that having the right data at the right time during a customer interaction can mean the difference between success and failure. But, as contact center managers, we generally are not getting the benefits out of the data we own, especially for the rest of the enterprise. The data in contact centers holds a thousand secrets, including answers to key company questions involving:

* Customer inquiries;

* Product problems;

* Business trends;

* How to optimize workforces and control labor costs; and

* How to provide better customer service.

We also asked: Do you share data across the enterprise? More than 50 percent answered that they still operated in a silo manner.

The Impact Of Multichannel Contact

Increasingly, contact centers have been forced by consumer demand to support multiple channels of customer contact including e-mail, voice, Web chat, text and more. In many cases, this has compounded data problems because when these data channels are left in silos, the true value of the data is lost because an agent doesn't have a complete view of the various interactions a customer has had with the company. As a result, companies may require more money and effort to maintain customer loyalty and drive revenue.

Evolution Of The Contact Center

Despite the risks of asking customers to repeat information, reducing agent productivity and increasing customer and agent frustration due to non-integrated data, many contact centers are stuck doing things the old way. Metrics that control the cost of each interaction at the expense of customer satisfaction dominate old values. While we may talk a good game about customer service, metrics, like average call handling time, bog down the call center. Call centers operating in this fashion are managed strictly as a cost center.

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While the values of yesterday still linger, an evolution is underway. Today, contact centers are moving toward creating a better customer experience because they realize building revenue and satisfying customers are two sides of the same coin. These contact centers make relevant data available during customer interactions, and they have established clear metrics to analyze customer satisfaction.

Visionary companies take it a step further. These organizations create philosophies and implement technology and processes that clearly link the revenue of the organization to interacting successfully with customers. Historically, these are larger companies since, until recently, the technology hasn't been affordable or easy enough to implement for mid-sized companies. With visionary companies, data is successfully used at every level in customer interaction to drive loyalty, revenue, growth and reduce costs. When this occurs, the contact center operates as a profit center.

We asked: Who would benefit from sharing more data and knowledge around the enterprise? Forty-four percent answered "the customer."

The New Data-Driven Model

Our customers are also evolving. With greater found freedom and choices, they won't put up with bad service. Therefore, simple CTI approaches that retain data silos must be replaced with systems that provide a unified view and access for data.

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A new data-driven model for the contact center allows knowledge applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and workforce optimization to use the data. This makes it possible to gain insight about the entire enterprise, about product issues, resource deployment and what customers respond to. The end goal is to share as much data as possible across as many departments and interfaces as possible to leverage the right data for improving customer interaction.

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How Can You Get Your Contact Center To A Profit Center?

When choosing your contact center provider, look for technology companies who "get it" and can help you build the right data structures. Make sure your vendor offers the following, and be sure to ask the pertinent questions:

* A unified contact transport or routing layer that supports virtual enterprise communications.

* An interaction technology layer supporting and integrating multiple channels, locations and roles within the enterprise.

* Methods to leverage data to drive decisions and customer interactions.

* Suppliers who can help contact center managers answer these questions.

* Who is the customer and what is their value to you?

* Who/what is the best resource to deal with this customer?

* Have you enabled the person handling the interaction to understand the complete context of the interaction?

* Is data being shared effectively across the enterprise?

The new and improved contact center model drives data up through an organization, coordinates interaction between contact types, and leverages data during customer interaction.

For more information about Amcat, visit www.amcat.com.