Contact centers are the gateway between customers and the company. It’s no wonder companies across the globe are pushing to update their contact center technology—and enhance their customers’ experiences.
However, adopting new technology doesn’t always flow smoothly. We’ve seen companies struggle, fumble, and fight through contact center optimizations. Fortunately, you can learn from their mistakes.
We’ve identified four common contact center technologies—desktop analytics, workforce management, interaction analytics, and journey analytics—and pinpointed lessons we’ve learned from helping teams adopt each.
Desktop Analytics
Desktop analytics is a solution that tracks and compiles information about a contact center user’s desktop activity. It lets managers monitor what apps employees are using, analyze their daily performance, gauge online safety, and track other important digital workplace data.
Why Is Desktop Analytics Important?
Remote and hybrid work has surged in recent years. Contact center managers can no longer walk the floor and look over their employees’ shoulders. Desktop analytics gives managers a fast and easy breakdown of daily activity, so they can step in and repair everything from fraud threats to diversions and distractions that hurt productivity.
Lessons
Here are a few lessons to keep in mind if you’re using desktop analytics to optimize your contact center:
- Analyzing productive versus nonproductive apps requires nuance: When you’re tracking app productivity, try not to rush to judgments. We’ve seen some managers sound the alarm when nonproductive app usage looked high—only to realize that apps marked “nonproductive” may be serving an important purpose. For instance, some collaboration apps might be considered nonproductive, but they’re essential for building culture through water cooler chats and increasing productivity through collaboration sessions.
- Look for coaching moments: Desktop analytics can reveal moments when employees define their own processes to fulfill their responsibilities. In many cases, they may not have even considered using the company preferred process or communication channels. Find out why employees are creating their own path and look for automated solutions that help them cut down unnecessary work.
Workforce Management Software
Workforce management solutions are essential technology providing insights into staffing, scheduling, and forecasting. . It enables managers to sharpen workflows, optimize schedules, automate processes, and increase engagement.
Why Is Workforce Management Software Important?
This technology helps managers identify shortcuts to productivity improvements. It’s especially useful for companies with different business lines that are undergoing transformation projects, such as reorganizing the company or moving to a single platform. It also can help employees produce more accurate staffing forecasts or other reports, which can reveal ways to serve customers better.
Lessons
These are some big takeaways from working with workforce management solutions, including:
- Training can only move the needle so far: Transitions can be challenging, and the amount of work that comes with training users on the new platform, integrating new vocabulary, and changing the fundamental ways they think about work can catch companies off guard. To drive change, leaders need to build out a clear decision-making methodology and prepare to devote significant time to spearheading the transition.
- Pay attention to technical details: If you force data into a new system, you may end up throwing off your results. In some cases, you’ll need to modify data before you feed it into your new system. Otherwise, you could be tainting your whole optimization plan with bad information.
Interaction Analytics
Interaction analytics is software that reads recorded or chat conversations and breaks it down into insights that managers can use to improve an agent’s performance—as well as the customer’s experience.
Why Is Interaction Analytics Important?
Interaction analytics takes swaths of raw conversation data and packages it into a form that managers can use to make decisions. It makes it easier for managers to see room for improvement, decide where to dedicate resources, and determine how to create more loyal customers.
Lessons
These are the lessons we learned while working with interaction analytics software in contact centers:
- Dedicate a point-person to both analysis and problem-solving: Focused root cause analysis is very powerful, but yields nothing if action isn’t taken to address the issue.. Real positive change happens when there is an expert who can discover how many bad calls exist and map out a plan to repair the underlying pain point causing them. That’s why it’s important to assign a leader to both interpret reports and deliver findings to the business.
- Specialize management roles: Too often, a company will pluck an individual out of a quality assurance team and ask them to run text analytics. Or the company may select an analytics team member to manage the contact center team. In both scenarios, the leaders can end up focusing solely on the realm they’re familiar with, which can cause mistakes or process meltdowns.
- Don’t shy away from cross-departmental communication: At times, issues are driven from another department and damaging online customer experiences. For instance, a call center manager might review analytics that reveal that the website is driving complaints and think that has nothing to do with them—or be afraid to share negative feedback with someone outside their department. When teams are afraid or unable to connect with cross-departmental teams and resolve issues, analytics won’t be of much use.
Journey Analytics
Journey analytics solutions gather tools and metrics from contact centers and connect them to the customer journey. This software facilitates analysis to optimize the customer’s experience across different touchpoints at different stages of the customer’s journey.
Why Is Journey Analytics Important?
Journey analytics feeds valuable information about the customer’s experience. In turn, these insights drive customer satisfaction and increase long-term customer loyalty.
Lessons
These are the top lessons we’ve learned from using journey analytics:
- Remember that no friction point is insignificant: It’s a mistake to focus exclusively on one stage of the customer journey or to ignore seemingly small customer experience blemishes. Everything from broken links and confusing letters to payment portals and other hold-ups can have a significant negative impact on the customer’s experience. Every instance can be an opportunity to upgrade customer success.
- Don’t let problems fester: Customer experience problems can balloon if they aren’t dealt with quickly. For instance, if there is a dropoff in payment portal activity, it could indicate a technical or UX issue with the portal itself. Waiting for complaints about your portal means you’re sacrificing the experiences of countless customers and damaging your company’s reputation.
Are You Ready to Optimize Your Contact Center Technologies?
Using the power of contact center technologies to improve the customer experience is one of Andrew Reise’s superpowers. When they’re hitting on all cylinders, these technology solutions drive businesses forward. Still, technology can feel as though it’s changing at the speed of light, and you don’t have to master it on your own. Schedule a consultation with Andrew Reise now and we’ll walk you through ways we can help you lift your customers’ experiences with new innovations.