The performance of your outsourced contact centers will play a large role in determining your company’s overall ratings for customer satisfaction. When your outsourced team improves its performance, your customer retention rates should improve.

That’s why embracing data analytics is so important if you run an outsourced contact center. This strategy shows companies from every industry their biggest opportunities for improvement and helps them take the steps necessary to stand out from the competition.

But what is data analytics, exactly? What benefits do they offer? And how do you use them in a contact center?

We put together this guide to answer those questions and to provide further clarity on how a successful data analytics strategy can help you take your outsourced contact center to the next level.

What Is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is the process of reviewing raw data to derive insights. It’s used by a wide variety of businesses to identify opportunities for improvement.

Today, data analytics is typically conducted by machines, software, and algorithms. These devices take in raw data and put out meaningful trends that humans can quickly understand.

If there’s any aspect of your contact center that you want to improve – from improving response times to increasing customer satisfaction ratings – there’s a good chance that data analytics can help you do it.

What Are the Benefits of Data Analytics in Outsourced Contact Centers?

Now that we know what data analytics is let’s take a closer look at some of the most impressive benefits it offers. Here are five that are worth your consideration.

Personalised customer experience

In contact centers, data analytics can help you provide more personalised experiences to customers. You can use them to evaluate what customers with similar profiles tend to want and then fine-tune your processes to account for those differences moving forward.

More informed decision-making

Data analytics will also set the stage for more informed decision-making in your outsourced contact centers.

How should you route different types of customer inquiries? What are the most effective ways to respond to customers with different types of complaints? How can you speed up processing times to reduce customer wait times?

These are all questions that you may be able to answer more effectively with data analytics. This approach allows you to use data to make the best decision for your company every time.

Streamlined operations

Data analytics can also help you figure out how to streamline operations in your contact center. Response times are everything, but it can sometimes be difficult to even identify your biggest opportunities for improvement. Data analytics will help you do that by telling you where you’re wasting the most time in your operations.

Risk mitigation

You can also use this strategy to mitigate risk in your outsourced contact center. From employee time theft to questions of legal liability, data analytics can help you discover the biggest risks in your operation currently and even pinpoint them down to a few problem employees if you have any.

Improved Security in Outsourced Contact Centers

Finally, you can also use data analytics to improve your company’s security. This can be a challenge in outsourced contact centers.

Data analytics will help you identify the past causes of data breaches so that you can resolve them moving forward. This strategy can even help you create statistical models that help you prevent future attacks.

Types of Contact Center Data Analytics

Alright – we’ve covered what data analytics are and why they’re valuable. Now it’s time to start looking at the specific ways that you can use this strategy in your contact centers.

Here are five types of data analytics for outsourced contact centers you may want to try.

Speech

Speech analytics is a growing field that involves analysing the audio of customer conversations and voicemails. It leverages the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide deeper insights into customer conversations.

You can use this type of data analytics to figure out what your biggest recurring complaints are, what type of deals customers respond best to, and much, much more. It allows you to use customer speech as data, which has a ton of valuable insights that many other companies aren’t going to benefit from if they’re not also using this type of analytics.

Interaction

Interaction analytics is a sub-field that specifically looks at communications between agents and customers. It does so across multiple channels with the goal of discovering insights that can help with agent training, customer satisfaction rates, and employee engagement, among other benefits.

Predictive

Predictive analytics is another huge field in outsourced contact center data analytics. It involves using historical data to help predict the future. You can use predictive analytics to discover the best ways for agents to respond to different requests and complaints from customers, among other goals.

Textual

Textual analytics involves using text data from sources like customer emails and live chats on your website. The benefit of this is that it will help you identify recurring issues and common sentiments around different products or services.

For example, you might discover that one of your subscription packages is getting a lot of complaints for not offering a certain feature. This could inform you that you need to either include that feature moving forward or offer another package with the feature included.

Desktop and Mobile

Finally, you can also use data analytics while evaluating the performance of your agents. This is a field called desktop and mobile analytics.

The goal of this is to analyse how your agents are performing on a daily basis. You can use the data you get to retrain underperforming agents, show appreciation for over performing ones, and identify any problem employees who may be holding the team back from its full potential.

You’ll get insights into everything from KPIs to customer interaction rates and conversion rates for remote sales teams. It’s another powerful way that you can use data analytics to help your outsourced contact center improve its overall performance and deliver more value back to your company.

How to Bring the Benefits of Data Analytics to Your Team

If you’re convinced that data analytics can be a gamechanger for your outsourced contact center, the next step is figuring out how to implement it. Here are some tips and strategies you can use in order to do so as effectively as possible.

Implement real-time tracking for supervisors and agents

The first thing you need to know is that the quality of your data analytical insights will only be as good as the data you feed the tools making those insights. You need a lot of high-quality data to truly get as much value out of this strategy as possible.

That’s why you’ll want to start implementing real-time tracking for supervisors and agents. Doing this will ensure you get accurate data throughout every phase of the customer journey, so that you can generate as many insights as possible while using data analytics.

Integrate data from multiple sources

Next up – make sure that you’re integrating data from multiple sources before making any big decisions based on data analytics.

For example, it would be important to utilise data across each channel you use to communicate with customers rather than just phone or email. This way, you’re making your decisions with a data pool that’s more representative rather than a single one that can be skewed.

Eliminate Silos

It’s also important to remove as many data silos as possible when using data analytics to improve outsourced contact center performance. You don’t want to be making decisions based on incomplete data, and you want to spread the insights generated by data analytics across as many teams as possible. Removing data silos will help you achieve this.

Invest in the right technology for Outsourced Contact Centers

Finally, it’s also important to choose the technology you invest in carefully. Some data analytics platforms are better-suited to outsourced call centers than others – especially if you operate in a unique niche or deal with a special type of data.

Make sure to really research your options and read reviews from previous customers before finalising your selection. Doing so will help you avoid wasting money while you seek to benefit from data analytics.

The Cattalyst Can Help Your Contact Center Embrace Data Analytics for Optimised Performance

There’s no time like the present to start leveraging the power of data analytics to improve your contact center’s performance. But this is often easier said than done.

That’s why you should consider contacting The Cattalyst. We have decades of outsourcing experience that we can leverage to help you start getting as much value out of data analytics as a strategy right away.

So why wait? Get in touch with us today for a free consultation and to learn more about how we can help your outsourced contact centers thrive.