Call Center Business Intelligence

Many people only think of dashboards when they think of call center business intelligence, but dashboards are only one piece of the puzzle. Call center business intelligence software is about gathering all data points from your company and then providing it in a useful way by providing actionable data for your leadership teams.

Business Intelligence and reporting technologies have been available in the contact center market for a while, but until recently they were focused on individual technology stacks and not the business as a whole.  

Contact centers collect large amounts of data. Traditional KPIs like FCR and AHT are staples on performance reports, but successful call centers are also reviewing NPS, agent efficiency as reported by voice analytics, and more. These metrics provide valuable insights on their own, but when properly compared and integrated through business intelligence software they can uncover a wealth of new information. Taking data points from disparaging systems and connecting the dots through BI is the key to making data-driven decisions within your organization.

How Business Intelligence Software Benefits Your Call Center

Through more intelligence and a deeper understanding of trends, you can now make real business decisions based upon a multitude of data points.  In addition to traditional reporting, you can provide live and actionable data insights directly to the agents.  Data visualization tools give you real visibility in quick, easy and intuitive dashboards to help make your agents more self accountable, leaving supervisors to focus on the key criteria that drives business results.

Companies can tie in data from accounting software, human resource departments, and call centers to find unique trends. For example through long-term data analysis, you may find that the most expensive agents are performing worse on certain KPIs than lower paid agents. After further drill down, you realize that it’s the newer channels that are impacting your long-term employees’ performance. This would allow the company to make logical decisions like shifting focus on newer communications such as chat and email to a different set of agents and allowing your tenured agents to focus on what they do best while they are cross-trained on the new channels.

Call center BI tools enable you to avoid making gut decisions and start making solid decisions based on data points. Data visualization and true BI software is no longer a nice-to-have technology in your contact center…it is a must have!

Considerations when Selecting BI Software for Your Call Center

When considering call center business intelligence tools, you must understand how to get all of the data from its existing locations to the BI platform.  You also need to fully map out your company’s targeted KPIs as a baseline prior to implementation. After implementation you can set goals that actually pull data from multiple sources to give you true visibility into your overall performance.

• Consider the type of deployment – cloud, or hybrid. Where does your data need to reside?
• Do you select a tool set created specifically for call centers or a more general BI tool designed for your whole organization.  (Keep in mind the general tools often require more customization and can increase your implementation timeline and cost.)
• To whom do you want to deploy the data?  Executives, agents or both?
• What normalization of data from your various sources is necessary and does your vendor offer that as part of the setup?

Call Center BI Software Vendors

Business intelligence and reporting are often – incorrectly – used interchangeably. Many vendors will pitch a reporting package as a business intelligence tool, but in reality they are simply selling a reporting suite with a series of predetermined data sources. True BI software is built to integrate data from any source into your reporting and performance metrics.

When you are researching call center business intelligence platforms, you’ll likely run into many brands that have a holistic focus on your entire organization, but contact centers have very unique tools and KPIs that require a focused understanding of our role in the business. Selecting a holistic BI tool as opposed to one intended for call centers is certainly a viable option, but you it’s important to understand the impact this may have on your implementation time due to the likelihood of needing custom development for integrations. Any tool will need integration with a CRM and your contact center omni-channel platform. You may also need to consider your WFM, WFO and voice analytics platforms as valuable data sources. Voice analytics can bring in a wealth of knowledge, leveraging natural language processing to transcript your caller and agent’s words. This opens up a whole new realm of actionable data.

No matter what your business goals are, the selection of a strong BI tool will have a significant impact on your organization, and if you can find the right contact center-focused product suite it an quickly drive the type of ROI you are looking for.  

Let us help simplify this process and do the research based on your needs for you.  Skipping past the RFI stage right to the short list will simplify your life and save you a significant amount of time, effort and money.