The creation of detailed management reports is a staple activity for any contact centre operation. Reports provide an essential ‘health check’ for operational performance, with an array of business KPIs used to show that all is well in the world of productivity, performance and customer satisfaction. However, aside from providing a vehicle for managing contact centre performance, these reports rarely deliver detailed insights into the nature of the interactions themselves and the associated needs and requirements of customers.
The contact centre is for many brands, one of the only touchpoints through which the company has the opportunity to conduct live one-on-one interactions with their customers, yet it is all too often overlooked as a source of customer experience insight.
The contact centre should be considered a hotbed for harvesting insight, with essential intelligence about customer requirements, behaviours, preferences and feedback locked within the millions of interactions that are handled globally every day. Yet, despite this, the Contact Centre is rarely drawn upon as a primary source for Voice of the Customer (VoC) intelligence, with traditional mechanisms, including focus groups, surveys or social media analysis still receiving the most attention.
Unlike these traditional VoC mechanisms, analysis of contact centre interactions can provide huge data samples, from which insights can be mined as a bi-product of the contact handling process. Furthermore, insights captured without soliciting the customer into targeted surveys are likely to show a broader spectrum of opinion, and not just the polarised angry or delighted opinions that typically surface when analysing survey responses or social media chatter.
I could go on about the virtues of the contact centre as a VoC mechanism, suffice it to say, that the contact centre should be a major intelligence hub for gathering insight into the customer experience, the performance of products, the behaviours of consumers and the drivers behind customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Who is responsible for delivering Contact Centre Insight?
Whether the contact centre is outsourced or in-house, a degree of onus should be placed upon the contact centre management team to deliver value-added insights over and beyond statutory business and KPI reporting.
For most contact centre operations, intelligence and reporting fall into the jurisdiction of the MI (Management Information) team. It will be their job to provide essential management reports detailing SLAs and other performance-related metrics. Reports of this nature are often delivered using a ground-up approach, where MI teams will typically draw upon telephony, CRM and case management platforms to export the necessary data for their reporting requirements. In most cases, all necessary KPIs can be reported upon with relative ease, and minimal data engineering complexity.
However, a sole dependence upon the data sourced from contact centre platforms can significantly inhibit your potential for generating insight. To make the transition from statutory reporting into the world of value-added Insight, a broader approach is required, stretching beyond the remit of the MI team.
So, just how do you differentiate between standard contact centre reporting and value-added insight? The table below provides the Insight Guild’s interpretation of where the demarcation sits:
 REPORTING |  INSIGHT | |
DATA SOURCES | Typically Operational and transactional from native platforms. | Multiple cross referenced data sources (for example):
Survey verbatims, call recordings, chat / email transcripts, social media interactions.
CX Journey, cross touch-point interaction data. |
ANALYSIS | Most analysis focuses on month-on-month trends and KPI performance. | Expert interpretation drawn from correlation of multiple data sources (structured and unstructured) to deliver actionable insights for business transformation. |
TELLS YOU.. | If the contact centre operation is performing in accordance with defined SLA / KPIs. | Actionable insight for Improvements to: |
DELIVERABLE | Static reports or visualisation dashboards. | Comprehensive reports and dashboards. Analysis, conclusions and actionable insight, backed by quantitative and qualitative evidence. |
OWNERSHIP (SPONSOR) | Contact Centre Management | Customer Experience Teams |
RESPONSIBLE (DELIVERY) | MI Team | MI Team |
Naturally it could be argued that any report is insightful, but to me true insight comes in the form of revelations, providing previously ‘un-mined’ intelligence that can be used to transform products, services, profits and customer experiences.
Defining an Insight Strategy – First Steps
So how do you make the transition into the world of insight, and begin to tap into the un-mined intelligence within the contact centre? Firstly, you need to define your strategy, and for this you will require a detailed understanding of the insight requirements of the business.
While the MI team may deliver great reporting, they are not always well placed to identify and understand the insight requirements of the broader organisation; for this, we need to identify the key insight consumers and stakeholders across the business.
Anybody who can benefit from Contact centre intelligence for the continuous improvement of products, services, R&D, retail, operations, online and marketing (I could go on), should be involved in the shaping and development of your insight strategy.
It is to these functional stakeholders that our attention must be turned to discover and capture the true business requirements for contact centre insight; a task that can be accomplished through a well structured and facilitated ‘Insight workshop’.
Insight Workshops
It is critical that insight requirement workshops are headed and facilitated by business stakeholders, not by techies, not by DBAs or MI teams, but by business customers with the mandate for transformation.
This may sound harsh, but the reality is, people involved in the day-to-day world of reporting and data engineering, will often very quickly delve into the weeds of technical feasibility. Naturally, feasibility has a role to play as the strategy develops, but initial requirements gathering and user-story workshops should be free from the constraints of what platforms or data exist within the business today. For the initial user-story modelling workshops, stakeholders should be free to express their needs and conceptualise their insight requirements without technological concerns.
The next step is to determine who will own the workshop and its subsequent activities, which in theory could fall into the jurisdiction of a number of business functions. Insight workshops are collaborative exercises, requiring participation from a variety of business units, many of which may be used to a siloed way of working. If an existing Insight or Customer Experience function already exists, then this could provide a neutral platform from which to organise such an event.
The likelihood is that many of the stakeholders in the business who are approached for participation may have never had the opportunity, platform or transformation framework through which to express requirements of this nature before. Therefore your workshop may draw considerable interest within the business; expect a good turnout and an abundance of ideas.
When the right minds and mandates are in the room, these workshops can be very fruitful, delivering a rich set of user-stories from which contact centre insight strategy can be shaped.
The Feedback Loop
There are of course many ways to conduct an insight strategy workshop; I favour the use of ‘user story’ templates, a requirements capturing methodology popularised in Agile methodology. Most importantly, each requirement (user story) needs to describe the consequent actions and feedback loop mechanisms that will be triggered once the insight is published (The ‘so that’ component of the user story).
The term feedback loop, refers to the cycling back of business intelligence to the stakeholder to whom it resonates, thus enabling them to execute a transformation/improvement that can continuously improve the business. A simple example:
- The software division releases an update to a product firmware
- A customer encounters a bug, that results in a problem when using this release of the firmware, they call into the contact centre.
- The bug report is captured within the contact centre and quantified with all other instances, and reported back to the software division.
- The software division releases a patch to the firmware to address the bug, or issues a knowledge article that can be used in the contact centre as a workaround.
- The contact centre knowledge management platform is populated and the necessary advisories (or training) issued to agents.
This example would rely on a number of platforms, processes and data capture mechanisms to be put in place within the contact centre if the feedback loop is to function effectively.
As discussed earlier, during insight strategy workshops, feasibility discussions (through platform or available data) are off the table, so don’t be alarmed if many user-stories may not be obviously satisfied through immediately available, off-the-shelf, data.
Beyond the workshop
Subsequent to the workshop, data modelling exercises will need to be conducted to understand how each user-story will be fulfilled, and in many cases new methods and technologies will need to be adopted in order to capture and analyse the necessary data. It is not uncommon for EFM, speech analytics, predictive analytics, text analytics, observational analysis and workflow processing technologies/methods to all form part of a comprehensive feedback loop platform.
If such technologies do not exist in the business, then a well-defined set of user-stories can be used to stimulate interest in the building of quantitative business cases to support the necessary investment.
Workshops and requirements gathering are naturally just the starting point on the Insight Strategy roadmap, with many more activities and milestones required before the finished insights are delivered into the hands of the user-story originator.
So, maybe it is time to invest in some long-overdue cross-functional collaboration and design thinking, it could hold the key to unlocking the value that sits un-mined in your contact centre today.
It may even shift the perception of the contact centre from cost centre to value-generating insights hub!
Talk to the Insight Guild today to discover more about our Insight Workshops and Feedback Loop design solutions:
+44 (0) 7471 107549
doug.overton@theinsightguild.com
