For years, organizations have struggled to balance customer satisfaction with the requirement to increase revenue and minimize the cost of customer service. Managing these conflicting goals is difficult and is complicated even further by the many different enterprise functions and supporting processes involved in serving customers including the contact center, branches and back-office operations.
Different functional areas within the organization often lack standardized processes for sharing and correlating data with other areas. Each back-office unit, branch, or contact center may report on a different set of metrics altogether, making it difficult for data to be rolled up into meaningful reports. This prevents organizations from receiving a holistic view of performance, making data analysis for enterprise decisions nearly impossible. Compounding the issue further are management applications, interactive voice response (IVR), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems that provide a staggering amount of statistical data about what is happening in the organization, but fail to explain the “why.”
Collectively, these challenges pose a formidable barrier to strategic decision making and superior customer service. In fact, they can foster fragmented customer service. In a survey of 176 North American firms with revenues of $500 million or more, Forrester Research presented respondents with a list of potential customer service issues. Seventy-three percent of firms selected “getting alignment across organizations” as a significant obstacle for improving the customer experience they deliver.
Seeking an enterprise-wide solution, organizations have turned to technology to help them improve efficiency, manage performance, increase visibility and reduce the cost of customer service. Contact centers — often the front line of customer service delivery — have benefited from a range of technological improvements, including recording and quality monitoring systems, as well as automated forecasting, scheduling, and adherence tracking. More recently, speech and data analytics have enabled root-cause analysis, allowing centers to transform customer data — structured and unstructured — into actionable intelligence.
The combination of enterprise WFO and speech and data analytics results in a powerful, end-to-end solution that helps organizations uncover trends, determine why certain employee and customer behavior is occurring, and respond appropriately — across all relevant departments. This combined solution is known as customer service analytics.
Using customer service analytics, organizations can maximize information flow across every department while minimizing the total cost of ownership. In a customer-centric organization, a customer service analytics solution helps forecast customer demand and schedule the right staff with the right skill at the right time. It provides insight into customer satisfaction, shifting the emphasis of quality management from what the employees are doing to what the customers are doing. What are they saying? Are they satisfied? What can be done to fix problems? The solution can sort through thousands of interactions, pull the necessary information quickly, and using the Web, WFO can disseminate it to the people who can act on it regardless the number of centers or branches. It’s the only practical way for organizations with more than a small number of employees to achieve true customer-centricity.
About the Author:
Oscar Alban is a global market consultant for Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, the business line formed through the combination of Verint and Witness Systems, and a leader in analytic software-based solutions for workforce-enterprise optimization. He speaks regularly at industry trade shows and conferences, and performs consulting engagements at customer sites worldwide – with a focus on the mission critical aspects of capturing customer intelligence and optimizing workforce performance. Visit www.verint.com for more information, or contact the author at oscar.alban@verint.com.