Are Contact Centers Losing Customer Data?

In recent years, the corporate environment has awakened decisively for intelligence and information security. Technologies such as Cloud Computing and data automation have been changing the internal organization of contact centers: today, most executives recognize the importance of Big Data for strategic planning and efficient business management.

Once this idea has been overcome, another problem arises: how to systematize the data to facilitate access and use of this information? In call centers without support for this task, it is common for each team to collect and store their data in isolation. This is how the so-called data silos arise.

In this post, we will explain how these silos can affect a call center and how to collect customer information.

5 Essentials for Customer Data Collection

While data collection is not new, many organizations are not yet capitalizing on the voice of the customer (VoC). There are several steps that can be taken to manage customer data coming in and out through contact centers:

1) Access to Data Holistically

Customer data comes from multiple places: different silos where customer experience (CX) falls into a black hole. Therefore, it is necessary to collect data continuously.

When adding new communication channels, they must be fully integrated with the rest of the call center systems, since a client must be able to navigate through all of them. If they do finally talk to an agent, they need to have access to the entire customer journey of a customer and the information captured throughout the journey.

2) Correct Analysis of Customer Data

It’s not just about having a great analytics tool. You need the right level of human competence to use it. In this sense, contact centers have to dedicate the necessary budget to ensure that they have properly trained resources and better understand the meaning of all this data.

For example, it is important to analyze the information contained in call recordings and post-call surveys, as detecting customer frustrations and working to resolve them will have a positive impact on CX.

3) Actions, not Words

In recent years, the focus has shifted beyond data collection and understanding to action. Making data insights actionable will help drive tangible business value.

4) Boost Customer Experience (CX)

You need to look beyond the call center and work with marketing, sales, and product and human resources teams to identify how the voice of the customer can help them. Currently, according to McKinsey, only 28% of contact center supervisors admit to sharing data outside of their organization on a daily basis. Half of them only do it monthly or even quarterly.

It’s time for call center leaders to drive CX best practices across the enterprise and encourage their agents to become brand ambassadors. Thus, they will have the power to influence corporate perception, increase customer loyalty and increase profits using user data.

5) Have the Right Technology

Now, speech and text analytics are technologies powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, only a very small number of contact centers around the world take advantage of them. While they aren’t the cheapest investment and need an associated level of proficiency to get the most out of them, they offer huge rewards, such as:

• Operational Efficiency: These technologies constantly check for situations that should have been contained within a chatbot dialog or are a potential growing category for self-service inclusion.
• Customer Experience: Classic examples of this are checking active listening skills against an improvement in customer sentiment or red flags when unnecessary callbacks are causing frustration.
• Growth: For instance, actively seeking out qualified opportunities by assessing an agent’s ability to overcome customer objections to a special offer and then mentoring them accordingly.

How to Unlock Contact Center Customer Data Silos

Data silos are “stocks” of information managed by a specific department, which is kept isolated from the other company systems. This occurs when collaborators choose, for example, to save information on devices or platforms for the exclusive use of a team, instead of uploading it to a network or other unified directory. Data Silos store various file formats, from emails to data that has not yet been processed and analyzed.

These serve to protect the information generated by the call center, avoiding information leakage and improper use of data. In addition to increasing control over access, silos can, to some extent, make it faster to execute tasks and applications that are simpler to operate.

On the other hand, data silos occur, in many cases, along with the growth of organizations. Generally, contact centers do not prioritize the indexing of information at the beginning; as departments are structured and new business units are created, the tendency is for databases to fragment and the flow of information between teams and operating arms to become increasingly complex.

So how do you prevent data silos from forming and “break” those that already exist in the company?

• Managing data with unified systems.
• Reassessing the culture of the company.
• Carrying out an internal audit.
• Strengthening the IT team.
• Being consistent: In general, reducing data silos is a long-term job.