On average, most adults make or receive at least five phone calls a day to their mobile phones. Depending on age and occupation, some adults exceed 10+ calls a day on average. When you consider that almost 276 million people have phones, you are looking at over 1.3 billion calls a day across the United States.
That is a lot of calls, and with all of these phone calls comes a massive amount of data. But, what happens to this data when you partner with an experienced contact center to support your business?
Calls fielded by a contact center pass-through to a secure, private database. Once normalized in a safe environment, the data converts into business intelligence through notifications, alerts, metrics, dashboards, and reports. This business intelligence then makes it easier for your business to understand your customers’ needs, analyze business trends, create smart scheduling, and more!
In this article, we are looking to answer two key questions:
- What type of data is collected from all of these calls?
- What are the essential metrics to track for contact centers and your business?
First, let’s look at the two fundamental data types available from a contact center: qualitative and quantitative.
Fundamental Data Types From a Contact Center Partner.
Qualitative Contact Center Data:
- Often called soft data, this data usually requires a level of interpretation and benefits from professional data planning skills.
- Some examples: data collected in a poll, messages detailing customer’s opinions, details related to the customer’s tone of speaking, and the customer’s behavior.
- Qualitative data answers questions like: How satisfied are my customers? What are the fundamental problems that customers are looking to solve with my service? What would make us more efficient? How can we better support our customers?
Quantitative Contact Center Data:
- Often called hard data, this data typically involves measurement in numerical form.
- Some examples: total calls dropped, estimation of closed sales, time to answer, total transfers, and resolution time/rate.
- Quantitative data answers questions like: How long are my customers holding? When was our busiest season? How many employees called out yesterday? How many people called about a specific offer?
Now that you have a better view of the type of data that a contact center can collect, let’s dive into the different communication sources that can serve as essential data points.
Text-Based Data.
Text-based data involves SMS, text messages, emails, and other forms of written messages and requests available across various platforms. And, text-based data silos contain a considerable amount of data. In fact, these silos become challenging to compile, store, and make sense of. At Call Experts, we use compilers and cloud-based databasing to collect and store text-based data. This approach makes it easier to search and request valuable information from the silo.
Speech-Based Data.
Speech-based data involves real-time interaction between an agent and a customer. These data points are recorded as audio messages and translated into text-based transcripts. From here, the transcripts are helpful for more than just reporting! These collected messages are used to extract essential keywords and texts to help an organization solve their problems, understand customer needs, and improve customer journey protocols.
Cross-Channel Contact Data.
Cross channel data is an advanced approach. By managing various channels, call centers can track the customers’ activity and understand interactions based on agent, platform, or business location. Call centers can provide customers with the most appropriate and up-to-date solutions using this information.
Desktop Contact Data.
A desktop contact data system is installed to track agent activity. With this system, it helps you track the agent’s data and identify technology and customer support training opportunities needed for individual agents or situations.
Important KPIs to understand for your contact center partner and your business.
Your customer experience is essential to your business. Happy customers mean happy companies. Above all, a negative customer experience can harm your bottom line. But, what is the easiest way to keep your customers happy? Outstanding customer support!
Call Experts partners with businesses to create memorable first impressions, support absence tracking and reporting, lead qualification, appointment setting, and many other valuable customer experience elements. You need to understand how to use qualitative and quantitative data collected from various data sources to optimize your experience and continuously improve your customer journey.
Here are a few key metrics that we prioritize at Call Experts:
- Hold Time.
- Time on Call.
- Time on Hold.
- Transfer & Dispatch Rates.
- Call Conversion.
- Call Forward Rates.
- Time to Answer.
At Call Experts, these critical business metrics are available to each client in their unique customer portal.
Call Experts Portal
The dashboards show, in real-time, how your callers, customers, and employees are being treated, what they are requesting, when they are calling, and more. Within the portal, the messages tab allows you to understand contextually what is happening in real-time and what your callers say on the phone. After that, if you want, you can change the results based on date range and look at calls over a quarter or half-year.
Why does this matter? This data view helps answer “when is the busiest time for my business?” and allows you to prepare sales staff, contact center partners, and technicians! For instance, one of our clients is extremely busy during hunting season. We know to hire more agents or bring in extra support for these days. Above all, a view of data over time can create a baseline to develop alerts and strategies related to managing your customer experience and supporting SLAs.
Summary
Contact centers have a massive amount of data collected from callers. This data is normalized and securely stored, then turned into business intelligence that supports your needs to understand trends, optimize your customer journey, and more. In conclusion, prioritizing contact center data and applying changes to your customer experience can help you grow your business. Learn how we can help by clicking here!
