Contact Center Moneyball

This week, as we hosted customers and partners during our Calabrio Customer Connect (C3) conference here in Minneapolis, we took a deeper dive with many of our clients during breakout sessions as they discussed their experiences with Calabrio.

One of the most popular topics was analytics, and we know that multichannel analytics are changing the way contact centers listen to the voice of the customer. When we hear success stories from our customers, it reinforces that analytics technology will only continue to grow. One such success story comes from customer Ryan Bradley, the Director of the Center of Excellence at Erie Insurance Group who, in his breakout session, put a Moneyball spin on analytics.

How to Hit a Homerun with Analytics

For those not familiar with Moneyball, Branch Rickey’s techniques have been tried and refined by numerous professional sports teams over the past seven decades. Rickey was the first person to implement statistical analysis in sports during his tenure with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he spurred what is now known as the “Moneyball” approach—the process of using statistical analysis to uncover talented players who did not perform well for traditional scouting tests.

Moneyball is what ultimately led to the 1991 Oakland A’s 20 consecutive game winning streak. Interestingly enough, this type of analysis also blew the doors open for analytics to infiltrate many of the business decisions we make every day.

As many of us know, analytics are part of the lifeblood of the contact center and, similar to Moneyball, analytics can be leveraged to adjust strategies in order to set the contact center up for the best possible outcome: customer satisfaction and loyalty.

But in a world of “infobesity,” it’s not a matter of gathering information, it’s of being able to whittle it down in order to translate it into meaningful insights.

That is the real struggle that has business leaders agonizing over how to take advantage of the wealth of information living within the contact center. Erie Insurance Group had similar challenges, but here are some of the plays that Ryan and his team made to get in the analytics game.

1. Put in the time

When the project started, a team of four quality management employees spent around 300 hours defining the business needs and developing a framework. Although a labor-intensive process, it paid off when the team was able to quickly identify and implement changes. Most importantly, the QM team spent a lot of time listening to calls in order to build the most precise results possible. Had they not put in that on-the-ground effort, the project may have been misdirected.

2. Determine the metrics

Erie Insurance had questions, and they turned those questions into insights. For them it was about understanding the impact of a payment option change on customer loyalty. Whether their questions had been about determining why some calls lasted longer than others or understanding why specific customers called more than once, the important part was that Erie Insurance asked the right questions and developed the right processes around those questions. Their reward was that they got the answers they wanted.

3. Cultivate buy-in

Ensuring the success of any analytics program requires buy-in from both management and agents. Erie Insurance started small, easing all stakeholders into the new process by serving up starter metrics around First Call Resolution. While not terribly exciting, the team’s findings about the budget spent on call redundancy ultimately helped create the buy-in needed to ensure future project success.

Analytics gives us the ability to see statistical insights that allow us to make more informed decisions, and they most certainly aren’t going away.

Want to know more about contact center Moneyball strategies and analytics? Check out these resources:

• White paper: “Transforming the Contact Center into a Customer Intelligence Hub”
• Article: “Why Random Sampling Alone is Not Enough to Ensure Contact Center Quality”
• Comprehensive Calabrio Analytics suite

Matt Matsui

Matt Matsui, Chief Product Officer, oversees Calabrio’s companywide product efforts. Matt joined Calabrio with more than 25 years of experience leading product and marketing organizations for a broad range of companies, including ACNielsen, Cognos, Andersen Consulting, and numerous early-stage analytics firms. Through this experience, Matt developed a keen sense for growing markets with a heavy emphasis on big data, AI/ML, and applied analytics. Matt’s proficiency is bringing to market scalable and flexible enterprise SaaS solutions that leverage the power of analytics in simple and powerful ways. He holds undergraduate degrees from the University of Maryland, a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and a master’s degree in Applied Psychology from the University of Southern California.