In this special guest feature, Nishant Kadian of The Real PBX, talks about the possible contributions of big data for the contact center industry. Nishant Kadian is an Electronics and Communications engineer, who enjoys exploring the business communication solutions. With The Real PBX, he writes about the technologies and practices that can help the businesses to connect with their customers better and make more profit. He finds Cloud computing, Startups, and SMBs most interesting topics to write about.
A Fable
Let’s begin with a fable. Call center performance is of supreme importance. The social channels, chat boxes, and other marketing efforts are collecting a greater number of leads. Dialers are perfectly identifying the real leads and connecting them successfully. The connectivity rate of the calls to the agents is close to ideal. Easier leads are converted into sales almost instantly. Tougher ones are automatically transferred to the most effective agents to extract the maximum number of sales. Follow up with the customers is streamlined with CRM integrations. All the customer issues are smoothly routed to the correct departments and, obviously, the resolutions are delivered timely as well. Customer satisfaction rate is sky touching.
What It Has to Do With the Contact Center
This fable above mentions most of what contact centers are looking for. They are constantly emphasizing the desire to gain more and more with their call centers. Currently, almost two-third of the contact center operations depends on voice services. But the future of contact centers is no more limited to just voice calls. Dimension Data’s 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report (pdf) suggests that in the next couple of years, a larger number of users will choose digital interactions over voice-based interactions for connecting with contact centers.
The digital interaction medium refers to phone apps, web chats, social media, IM tools, etc. while the voice solutions remain confined to phone calls (agent-based or IVR-based). Now the contact centers have to prepare themselves for digitization very quickly, in case they have not already started. A noticeable point offered the report is that voice interactions are diminishing, but tending toward elimination altogether. From 65% of overall interactions, voice interactions will drop below 50% during this period, a trend which still is quite significant. That means contact centers must keep delivering on their goals with the voice-based interactions as well.
An important question is how can contact centers develop new solutions and still maintain the quality of the existing ones? Also, remember that cost expense is another challenge.
Big data seems to be the reliable solution to bank upon.
Big Data and How It Can Help Contact Centers
Big data is basically an analysis of data in various forms, arrangements, durations, etc. related to a certain category. Relying on the saying that “the numbers don’t lie,” businesses use such analysis for better decision making, reducing cost, performance auditing, etc. Various business sectors have already been working on it and earned some magnificent results. However, the contact centers have lagged behind, especially those belonging to Small and Medium Size Businesses (SMBs).
With a major turnaround expected in the contact center industry because of increasing digital dependency of the customers, it is the right time they started working on big data. Paperwork with data is shrinking. Because of cloud communications solutions, data is making space in the virtual world, where processing and analysis are easier and productivity-oriented. Big data analysis can help contact centers in following ways:
Offer the Right Platform to Customers
Voice interactions are pretty simple and core choices with delivery remains between agent and IVR. In the digital environment, choices are immense and growing. Email, IM chats, apps, social media, etc. are pretty commonly used by the customers and it would not be shocking if another innovative solution is added to this list in the coming period. With so many platform choices, contact centers need to look for a certain factors, such as- popularity, ability, quality, authenticity, etc. in analyzing the customer activities more precisely. This will allow them to offer precise and personalized solutions for the customers.
Bring in New Marketing Model in Action
Keeping up with marketing trends is a challenge that businesses are facing all the time. Marketing practices that were making millions a decade back are no longer relevant. The process is more instant now –almost real-time. It all depends on how well one understands the customers. The contact center is a place where direct interactions with customers are taking place, there is no place better to understanding what the customer is looking for. Collecting and working on such data, you can build an effective marketing model. Soon, your contact center can be the reason for earning a greater number of sales.
Dial the Right Calls
Voice calls are witnessing fall in usage but, they are not vanishing. There are a number of customers who still prefer voice over digital. Big data analysis can be brought in effect to help the business deliver amazingly efficient solutions over the call. It will take some strenuous efforts, but it will embrace the issues faced by the customers more accurately and hence the right extensions (or department) can be reached automatically. Agents can be trained for better responses as well.
Wrapping Up
Big data represents the various aspects of business, which are otherwise ignored, in the form of numbers. That allows a greater control and understanding of the business. The same story goes with the contact centers. As the use of digital means is increasing significantly, the data collection gets even easier. With big data, contact centers can enhance their productivity and at the same time deliver more customer-centric solutions.
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