Contact Center Data Monetization

Dick Bourke

Businesses now have the ability to track almost all customer interactions and transactions across various devices and channels. They are looking at leveraging their data in new and innovative ways. Contact Centers also have quality assurance tools to enrich their data and make it more meaningful. 

Businesses can now tap into the potential of enterprise data, and monetize it to create new opportunities and revenue streams. Gartner claims that, by the year 2020, 10% of organizations will have a highly profitable business unit specifically for monetizing information.

Data monetization is the process in which organizations take the data that they generate — the interactions they have with their customers, business partners and the entire ecosystem — and then package it and sell it to third parties, or use it to make internal process improvements to financially benefit the company.

The conditions for data monetization are lush: Massive amounts of structured and unstructured data; reduced storage costs; data-driven marketing campaigns that create relevant customer experiences; and better business intelligence and processes through the application of data analytics. And the possibilities are growing as technology advances and data becomes pivotal to brand longevity.

To develop a strategy and realize the full potential of data monetization, you need to assess your enterprise data. Ask some questions to get started:

• Does your data provide insights into consumer behavior?
• Does your data allow companies to identify consumers enabling them to improve and expand their range of personalized and relevant customer services?
• Do you have a high volume of data on high-frequency transactions?
• Is your data unique to your enterprise?
• Can you transform accessible data into a usable and scalable format?

Realizing revenue from contact center data can stem from some unexpected strategies. For example, a business may benefit more from internal actualization of the data as opposed to selling data to third parties.

As a company begins to look at the data it has available, ideas for monetization will evolve. But don’t be surprised if the resulting strategies aren’t quite what you expected.

• Improve internal processes: By an indirect route, utilizing company data to improve internal operations can be a way to get started in the data monetization business. By capitalizing on what they know from aggregate data, companies can unlock new processes and efficiencies to their own operational and financial advantage.
• Leverage it for marketing: Information is power, and one group that leverages it daily is the marketing organization. The customer insights gleaned through the contact center are invaluable in relevant customer engagements and marketing campaigns. While this may not be direct monetization, it does generate incremental revenue for the business which wouldn’t have been available without the captured data. When the contact center and marketing groups collaborate, the information captured can be even more appropriate and targeted.

The trend towards contact center data monetization may be driven by business objectives to not only utilize the contact center as a vital engagement channel for marketing and sales, but also to create methods to offset contact center operations costs.

11 Best Practices for Quality Assurance in Call Centers

The central issue for most organizations when it comes to call center quality assurance isn’t why it needs to be a focus. It’s well known that the phone is considered the most frustrating customer service channel by US internet users, and it’s equally well known that 40% of consumers have abandoned a company for one of their competitors due to subpar customer service. As a result, understanding why organizations need to focus on quality assurance for their call centers isn’t a point that provokes much debate.

Companies should be focusing on improving and maintaining a quality customer experience. Investing in an automated call center quality assurance solution is a good start, but like any business solution, it needs to be used carefully in order to produce the best results. This means having a plan for everything from the starting point to the metrics being tracked, the calls being monitored, and the way your agents are involved in the process. 

Here are 11 tips to keep in mind when it comes to getting the information required for the improvement process and handling of relevant metrics.

#1 Find out where the organization stands. To know their starting point, organizations need to take a look at what customers think about their call center interactions, and how their call center stacks up against competitors of a similar size. Organizations should consider putting a short survey at the end of a call center interaction to give customers the chance to rank their customer service experience. 

#2 Decide what needs to be improved and how improvement will be measured. Focus in on the business processes and customer service improvements needed based on the information gleaned from customer feedback and external benchmarking, then select relevant KPIs and set reasonable, dynamic goals and work towards them using the insights provided by quality assurance.

#3 Monitoring calls efficiently and effectively. A major part of any quality assurance program or solution is call monitoring. Much like the data that can potentially be captured by a quality assurance solution, it’s easy to go overboard do it effectively.

#4 Listen to calls that rank as outliers. Listening or reading back each one either live or recorded is impossible. Instead, an organization should focus on the calls that stray the furthest from average in any direction. The successful calls can serve as training tools while the unsuccessful ones can help tailor very necessary coaching.

#5 And listen to the entire call. While it could very well be a single sentence that is the cause of an issue on a call, or a matter of seconds in a ten-minute interaction, it’s only fair to agents that a call be evaluated after it is listened to in its entirety. Bits and pieces being taken out of context to serve as examples of wrongdoing will undermine confidence in the process.

#6 Handling the humans. When call center quality assurance isn’t carefully handled, organizations run a real risk that frontline agents are going to be resentful and distrustful of the entire operation. But call center quality assurance shouldn’t exist in a vacuum; it should complement training and coaching processes while giving agents control over their own performance (including their earning potential and bonuses). As long as that’s made clear, quality assurance should be welcomed by all.

#7 Hire the right people and train them well. Perhaps it went without saying, but a big part of call center success is having the right people on the team. That means managers who excel at coaching, and frontline agents that are willing and eager to learn and improve for the sake of their careers and the sake of the company.

#8 Provide top-notch scripts. Your agents need to be given all available tools for customer interaction success, and that begins with the scripts they are trained to work from. Significant time and money should be spent on developing scripts as well as tweaking them as calls are monitored and issues become evident.

#9 Involve frontline agents in quality assurance. Nothing is going to make quality assurance feel like a top-down micromanaging system like suddenly springing it on employees, or using an existing system without ever acknowledging its purposes. Taking the time to inform agents about quality assurance will go a long way towards helping them embrace it instead of fear it, as will showing them how it can give them control over their own performance through tools like real-time analytics and performance benchmarking available on their personal dashboards.

#10 Focus on the positive as well as the negative. If agents only ever hear corrective feedback thanks to quality assurance, there will be a sense of dread attached to the entire process. With the actionable insights provided by a quality assurance solution as well as the additional assistance provided by a quality assurance manager, if applicable, managers should have more time to reward agents for good performance too.

#11 Give agents the opportunity to dispute their evaluations. Agents can register their disagreement with an evaluation and receive a second evaluation from another individual has two main benefits. The first is that it can remove conflict from the evaluation process if the agent knows they have a way to make their voice heard, and that action will be taken as a result. The second is that it gives agents an increased sense of power in the face of a solution that could so easily be seen as an adversary otherwise.

Reining it in

By keeping a clear focus when it comes to the data that’s collected and analyzed, the calls that are monitored, and how agents are handled, organizations will be well on their way to having quality assured. 

A version of this blog appears at: http://blog.scorebuddyqa.com/us/11-best-practices-for-call-center-quality-assurance-how-to-ensure-an-optimal-customer-experience