Stop Underselling the Importance of Call Center Intelligence

Amid the explosion of industry attention on Big Data, professionals are scrambling to put together robust strategies for managing the wealth of insights emerging through their arrays of customer contact channels.

Few have truly succeeded in that effort. An even smaller quantity has realized that leveraging intelligence to drive the customer experience is about more than analyzing and predicting customer behavior.

"Customer experience is how you acquire customers, how you manage them and how you retain them," explains Alec Brecker, president and COO of The Results Company, in this exclusive Customer Management IQ podcast. "And you have to start by saying how do I acquire my employees, how do I manage my employees and how do I retain them. Those are the value propositions that our industry needs to focus on and really needs to support."

So caught up on figuring out how to shape their customer experience delivery based on customer insights that, many customer management leaders are ignoring the importance of using behavioral data in driving their people management. Agents often represent the most important brand touchpoint, and if businesses do not astutely recruit and develop these individuals based on an informed sense of the data, they are doing their customer experience—and their overall organization—a major disservice.

Businesses often think of data as a series of numbers, but the reality is that it can indeed reflect the "people" element in the call center and customer service process. And insofar as people, prone to human error, are the ones managing staff, data can play a central role in guiding customer support staff properly.

"Big data has a lot of potential to take volatility and variations out of the process. Recruiting, supervising, training are all done by people, and it’s hard to monitor and be sure you are achieving certain levels of performance," clarifies Michael Housman, a managing director at EvolveonDemand, who joins Brecker on this podcast.

To learn how organizations can leverage data to improve performance across the entirety of the lifecycle and how to tailor their organizations to maximize data management systems, all while avoiding common pitfalls, check out the latest Customer Management IQ Podcast, recorded live and on-site at Call Center Week in Las Vegas.

And if Big Data is a focus for your organization, check out the Big Data Business Forum!