Today, at a time when customer choice and empowerment is at its peak, each and every organization’s constant endeavor and focus is on aligning its strategies in accordance with customer preferences. The wealth of data in the form of customer feedback has the potential to decide businesses’ fates. Businesses today are depending more and more on sorting through the complex maze of customer interactions to gain insight into their customer dynamics.

Contact centers are proving to be one of the most valuable sources for understanding the customer because of the huge data streams that they collect in their daily operations. This data can be structured and/or unstructured and can be acquired from different sources, such as call recordings, emails, chats, IVR interactions, web click streams, CTI streams, customer feedback, quality monitoring, CRM systems and other applications.

Analyze unstructured customer data

Most large enterprise contact centers struggle to properly leverage the unstructured data, such as post-call agent notes, which are actually the largest sample of human-interpreted data about their customers, mainly because it is in unstructured textual format. When leveraged with the right tools, the post-call agent notes actually have the potential to deliver high ROI relatively quickly.

It’s critical for businesses to understand the link between customer experience and business results. With this information they can make informed decisions about how much incremental money, time, and effort they want to spend on making changes. Temkin Group in a report said that a modest increase in customer experience at a typical $1 billion company can earn an additional $272 million to 462 million in revenues over three years.

Need for ROI-driven analytics

Leading businesses fully recognize the value of timely, useful, and actionable information about their customers. With the conversion of huge amounts of unstructured customer interactions into useful insight-based information very quickly, cloud-based contact center analytics gives the competitive edge to the enterprise. While the competitors are wasting manpower and resources working on clumsy customer databases to make sense out of them, a customer-aware contact center can take an unassailable lead with the right investment in ROI-driven, real-time analytics to get closer to their customers by completely understanding their needs and preferences.

However, because analytics is a new application that’s relatively unknown both within the contact center and across the enterprise, it is perceived as a risky investment across other departments. The CFO, or the person who approves technology projects, may prefer to resist deploying analytics until its benefits are more proven. In such a scenario, forward thinking contact center leaders should make it clear how analytics can be a strategic differentiator and can deliver significant financial benefits. Building a business case for analytics is similar to building a case for any other contact center investment, except that the potential benefits may come from incremental revenue as well as cost savings and improved customer service.

Identify missing link in CX puzzle

On the other hand, it also needs to be said that among the most important beneficiaries of analytics are enterprise customers. Today, much of what customers share with enterprises is ignored because agents do not have a system or process for formally gathering and communicating this data. In most cases, CRM applications capture transactions but generally do not reflect customer experience. As such, many companies are leaving opportunities on the table; a report by McKinsey found companies focused on providing a superior experience across customer journeys can realize a 10%-15% increase in revenue and a 20% increase in customer satisfaction.

Contact center leaders should understand and identify the opportunity cost of failing to deploy a text analytics system and what happens if they pass up the opportunity to gain insights from real-time analytics. They should also evaluate how many customers they are losing, and how many of those lost customers could have been saved if analytics were in place. They need to have a proper action plan to better identify the missing link in the customer experience puzzle, to assess maturity of existing analytics systems, make a business case, and, finally,leverage unstructured data to generate significant ROI.

So, how do you ensure the contact center analytics delivers ROI?

We have talked to multiple ebook publishers and are happy to announce that you can download our eBook, 7 Steps to Get ROI From Contact Center Analytics, to learn more about a seven-step action plan that will enable contact center leaders to get the maximum ROI from contact center analytics. Here’s a snapshot of the key steps discussed in the eBook.

Step 1: Assess the analytics maturity of your contact center

Step 2: Build on existing capabilities

Step 3: Focus on a few, critical KPIs

Step 4: Ensure buy-in and effective change management

Step 5: Look for insights that lead to actions

Step 6: Deploy text analytics to understand customer intent

Step 7: Harness the power of the cloud