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5 ways to use data to improve your customer service

Today’s contact centers are rich with data – actually, sometimes a little too much of it.

Are your best insights lost in spreadsheets? Or are you drowning in data created by your platform? CCMA’s latest research ‘Using contact centre insights to elevate CX and EX’, supported by evaluagent, is here to help you get on the path to useful data.

Here are five ways you can mine your data and use it to drive improvements at both an individual level and across the wider business.

1. Train agents

Let’s start with the obvious. Knowing where agents are typically going wrong – and where their strengths are – is going to help you laser-focus your learning and development efforts. Rather than going over old ground, you can put everyone’s valuable time to good use in the areas they need it most.

Doing so is not only going to help individual agents feel more equipped, but also make all the difference to your customer satisfaction score, thanks to customer interactions being handled well. The key to capturing this data is having solid quality assurance processes in place – you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and QA is vital to highlighting areas for improvement.

Tools that can help: automated scoring, LMS, auto-triggered learning paths

“We’ve definitely seen improvements across the board because we now have this consistent data. It really is the foundation on which all of our coaching comes from now.”

2. Fix the root cause of problems

Training agents is one way to improve customer experience – but what if you could prevent customers from having to get in contact at all? The contact center is often the first place to hear of problems the customer may be encountering – from quality and logistics, to communications and overall experience.

Let’s say a contact center keeps getting questions about the organization’s return policy. This is insight that can easily be fed back to Digital and Ecommerce teams to update the website with more information. Similarly, if customers repeatedly have to get in contact for updates on an order, or claim, you now have evidence that can be shared with the wider business on how to improve.

Tools that can help: topic detection and audio tagging

3. Inspire product/service innovation

Industries subject to compliance measures – like financial services and the Consumer Duty regulation – have to be proactive about this, since they’re actively judged and measured on service innovation and improvement to demonstrate their compliance. 

For industries like FMCG, where customer service is primarily there to support, insights captured in the contact center are invaluable to identify potential issues with product quality or design, and to identify opportunities for product expansion.

To put it simply: if you spot a pattern where complaints keep cropping up about a particular service, product, or business area, it’s much easier to make the case for improvement. Ultimately, it reduces the need for a customer to get in contact at all.

Tools that can help: sentiment analysis, automated scoring

4. Keep customers happy

This is the real goal. If you can identify at what point in their journey customers typically become unhappy or frustrated, you can make moves to reduce the friction they experience. For example, is it typically…

Identifying these areas and then optimizing not only meets customer expectations and improves their overall experience, but also creates efficiencies for colleagues by reducing demand.

5. Motivate customer service teams

Never underestimate the power of positive reinforcement as a motivator. Recognizing agents for a job well done is a great way to keep them motivated and focused.

Make sure you’re encouraging customers to name agents who have provided outstanding service, and then acknowledge and reward them. You can also introduce mechanics like gamification to reward those who engage with their performance data, repeatedly score highly and engage with development programs.

From the customer service team’s side, it’s also great for them to see team progress on operational matters – whether it’s watching Quality Scores climb, or complaints reducing. Use the data to bring them on that journey with you.

Tools to help: real-time dashboards, leaderboards, badges

If people feel that their day’s work is appreciated and has contributed to an overall goal, that generally makes people happy – and that is greatly helped by evaluagent. It’s zero headache, maximum positivity.

CCMA RESEARCH

Elevate your customer and colleague experience

This latest research from CCMA, supported by evaluagent, delves into the opportunities and challenges today’s contact center leaders are facing when it comes to leveraging insights.

Download the research today