As a CEO and former CFO, I’m very familiar with the sales and financial analysis reports an executive receives. In many organizations, executives still tend to zero in on operational costs as it relates to the contact center, unless the contact center is primarily driven by outbound sales calls.

I mentioned in an earlier post, Everybody Wins, that the executive view of contact centers must expand to include its vital contribution to business success. Focus should be less on cost efficiencies and more on the contact center as a barometer of customer sentiment, marketing strategy, product satisfaction and sales success. This is a challenge that contact centers and their managers must help executives overcome. Contact centers need to find ways to elevate their importance and communicate their value to business leaders.

Many executives overlook the contact center’s wealth of valuable business information resulting from thousands of customer exchanges. As a result, many businesses miss the link between business performance and contact center effectiveness. Recordings of agent and customer exchanges are being made every day, yet this information is often limited to archival for legal protection, mining for HR issues, or spot checking for quality issues and training needs.

Why aren’t C-level executives taking this information and analyzing business outcomes as well?

Let’s take, for example, a TV service provider who uses speech analytics software to analyze how many people say, “I’m canceling” and then compares that data to how many people actually cancel even after the agent offers an incentive to stay.

Let’s say the reports revealed 27 instances where customers said, “I’m canceling” and, of those 27 instances, 26 customers cancelled their service despite the incentive offer. Identifying this trend should spark company executives to re-examine the root cause as well as the remedy for cancelation.

This level of insight is very possible with today’s quality management and speech analytics technology. Businesses can use these tools to capture and tag measureable interactions with customers and analyze the results in a meaningful way.

The caveat, though, is to identify information that correlates to business outcomes such as revenue, retention and other efficiencies, such as first call resolution. With this information, executives and others throughout the organization can better understand the important role the contact center serves to a business. So collect all your data, analyze it and share it in a meaningful way to help your business leaders make the link.

Tom

2011

---