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Infinity CCS

GUEST BLOG: Taking call centre analytics to the next level

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

It’s not just your customers that are making more demands of you; so are your competitors. You need to be able to get business-wide insight in real-time just to keep up. Is your analytics suite up to the task? Geoff Land, Managing Director of Infinity CCS, investigates…

In a complex environment such as a modern contact centre, decisions are made every minute that affect customer service, customer satisfaction, the customer experience and, ultimately, revenue and profitability. Having accurate and up-to-date data on which to base those decisions is no longer negotiable.

There are three key elements you need to get right in order to unlock the insights required. The first is to connect all the different areas of the business and their disparate data sources to create a single view of the whole business and of each customer.

The second is to be able to collate, analyse, interrogate and visualise all that data in order to uncover connections that have previously been hidden. Finally, you need to be able to take that new knowledge and turn it into operational insight that tells you and your teams what needs to be done to transform your ‘business as usual’.

Single view of your data

Within all the departments, business functions, IT systems and databases, you will have lots of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Structured data would be things like your customer and transaction databases, through to unstructured data which could include things like website visitor meta-data.

There is a lot of extremely valuable business information locked up in all that data if only you could interrogate it and make sense of it. Using deep-dive data mining, the location, type and volume of all this data can be discovered. This search should encompass anywhere that customer and other relevant information might reside; from your operational systems to customer testimonials to marketing mailing lists to email inboxes to customer complaints and everything in between.

It could be contained in structured databases, semi-structured XML files, unstructured file systems on individual workstations, or cloud-based file systems. Around 80% of all organisational data is thought to be unstructured, and modern data discovery tools should be able to uncover most of it.

In order to be able to ask questions of all this data, it needs to be tagged and collated. What we are really talking about is creating an indexed copy of all your data, which means the original databases and files do not need to be altered. The goal is to organise the data in such a way that every piece of data which belongs to customer John Smith, for example, is tagged as such.

What you now have is a portal for accessing all your data, enterprise-wide. This central repository should be kept up to date by running the tagging and indexing routines on data as it is acquired and updated. While this also enables you to meet all your GDPR obligations, its true value is in giving you a single view of your business, and of each customer.

Unlock your data to gain insights

In a business world where established companies, business models, and even whole industries are transformed and made obsolete almost overnight, the ability to spot a trend before others and act on it quickly is a tremendous source of competitive advantage.

As the contact centre is now the touchstone for so many customer interactions it is one your company’s most important sources of information – including customer feedback and complaints; CSAT, NPS, and other KPI data; analyses of contact frequency and type; sales, up-sales, and cross-sales results; and even meta data on website and self-service usage.

Assuming you have gone through the data discovery stage outlined above and have all this data tagged in some sort of central repository, you now need to be able ask questions of it.

There are three considerations when it comes to business analytics: speed, accuracy, and depth of information. Your operational and management teams need the freedom to ask all sorts of different questions, which means they cannot be limited to a set number of pre-defined reports. Your analytics suite should allow them to quickly create reports without coding, writing SQL, or getting the IT Team involved. Using a simple drag and drop interface they should be able to create complex, cross-tabulated reports on multiple data sources.

When reports are run, the data used to compile them should be as up-to-date and as accurate as possible. This means your central repository, if you are using one, should be updated regularly if not in real-time as transactions happen and data is acquired. Running reports manually is incredibly time-consuming, particularly if the data has to be prepared beforehand. Your analytics system should be able to automate most of these tasks and give reports daily, or in real-time, to the people who need them. Managers can then spend their time analysing reports rather than producing them.

For humans to learn anything from all this data – even if it has already been analysed by some deep learning or data mining AI system – reports need to be presented in a way that allows users to drill down and interact with them. Sometimes a trend is not visible at the very top level and it takes looking deep into the data, and cross-checking with other sources, to tease out valuable insight. Spreadsheets of numbers just don’t work for most people, so different types of visualisations of data should be available.

Business improvements

The objective of business analytics is to constantly transform your organisation based on accurate business intelligence in order to maintain or improve market position.

With a single view of the business and customer, and the tools needed to analyse data and turn it into insight that can be visualised, your business will be able to:

  • View and follow the complete trail of phone interactions, website visits, emails, purchases, social media comments of every customer and prospect.
  • See the business outcomes of those behaviours in terms of purchases, cancellations, returns, complaints, and customer service requests.
  • Use that insight to improve products, services, processes, and customer journeys with a view to increasing revenues and profits while reducing costs to serve.
  • Uncover new business opportunities in your own market, or related markets, that you otherwise would never have known about – at least until a competitor did it.

In the contact centre specifically, this greater level of insight at the level of the individual customer enables you to:

  • Seamlessly manage interactions that cross multiple channels without asking the customer to update you or repeat information;
  • Route customer enquiries to exactly the right team or person without delay;
  • Proactively engage the customer to head off service issues before they become a problem;
  • Personalise upsell, cross-sell, and renewals offers to meet a customer’s exact needs and circumstances;
  • Understand the commonalities of your best customers so you can find more like them.

It has long been said that a company’s data is one of its most valuable assets, but how many companies take this to its logical conclusion? If your data is not tagged and collated in a central repository; if your business analytics suite is not automated, customisable, and visual; and if your management is not able to interact with and deep-dive into reports, then you are potentially missing out on opportunities.

For a white paper on how to create a Single Customer View of your data for GDPR and business analytics download our white paper here: https://www.infinityccs.com/gdpr-and-single-customer-view-guide/

Geoff Land is Managing Director of Infinity CCS (Contact Centre Solutions), provider of dynamic workflow engines that power contact centres across 13 countries. Infinity works with some of the world’s largest contact centre operators such as Teleperformance, Webhelp, HGS and Bosch to deliver customer experience solutions that yield measurable efficiencies.

An experienced CX executive, Geoff has spent his career helping to lead some of today’s leading brands transform their businesses. Geoff previously held senior positions at Bright Star Communications (Saudi Arabia), founded Inspire FZE in the United Arab Emirates and has held a number of local and international positions at Nortel Networks.

Data is not enough for better customer experiences: Use workflows to channel it where it’s needed

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

By Geoff Land, MD, Infinity CCS

A few weeks ago, we looked at how important it is to develop a ‘Single Customer View’ of your data if you are to deliver a great customer experience. We saw how the arrival of GDPR gives companies an opportunity to catalogue their data to create such a view. But once you’ve done that, exactly how do you use that data to improve customer experience? The answer is to get it into agents’ hands exactly at the moment during each interaction that they need it…

Failure to let data flow is behind most bad customer experiences

There are many ways to design great customer experiences, but most of them have one thing in common: efficiency. It is the efficient flow of information from customer to company, and company to customer, that ultimately makes for a happy customer.

Whether a customer is querying a bill, placing an order, cancelling an order, setting up a payment method, reporting a problem, or chasing a delivery, what they want is their issue dealt with quickly, ideally in a single, short interaction.

Customers find it frustrating when they get transferred between departments, need a call back, or have to wait on hold. The reasons these things happen are nearly always due to complex internal processes that even well-trained agents find difficult to follow; data siloes between different departments; and agents having to log in to and use multiple IT systems to access information or data input forms.

Having a “Single Customer View” of your data streamlines the process by eliminating all your data siloes. It essentially allows an agent or system to access in one place all the information about a given customer (at least, all that is relevant to their own role and appropriate for their security level).

But even if all that data is now sitting in a single system or knowledge base, it still doesn’t streamline interactions very much if agents still have to access multiple other interfaces to actually get things done.

What’s needed is an interface that pulls everything together – data, processes, and systems – into a single view for the agent.

Agents need the right tools as well as the right data

In recent studies, such as Dimension Data’s Benchmarking Report, companies say they are struggling to deliver exceptional customer experience for a number of reasons including limited technology budgets, complex internal processes, lack of multichannel, insufficient or incomplete customer data, and overly complicated IT systems.

To deliver what customers want it is important that the appropriate technology system, business process, and customer transaction data are all immediately available to an agent (or automated system) at the right time during a customer interaction.

Most processes can be broken down into simple steps, which means that with the right software agents can be guided through these steps one at a time in a flexible manner. Instead of logging in to multiple systems all the information and input screens the agent needs are presented to them in a single user interface.

This type of robust workflow results in faster, more accurate customer interactions, less hold time, fewer call backs, and no need to transfer customers between different teams (unless your internal structure demands it – and if it does you should consider changing that where possible).

In our experience companies deploying workflow solutions in their contact centres on average see a 20% boost in productivity. Which is why we’re even seeing this type of technology deployed in emergency command centres (i.e. 999 and 911 centres) where just improving call response by seconds can make the difference between life and death.

Behind the scenes is where all the magic happens

The above benefits can be applied to any channel and with little capital investment as no existing hardware or software needs to be replaced. This is because there is no need to integrate existing systems and data sources with each other. They can all continue operating just as they do now, in their own siloes.

Instead, everything gets integrated into the agent desktop via the workflow using APIs (Application Program Interfaces). This vastly simplifies the process of integrating multiple systems because they don’t have to ‘talk’ to one another, just to the workflow.

Let’s say a customer has called in (or is using webchat, or Messenger, it doesn’t matter) to change their address and query a previous payment. Rather than having to access different software applications to perform these tasks, the agent first runs a workflow which includes an interface they can use to input the new address. It also shows the old address and other information they need to confirm the customer’s identity.

Next the agent opens another workflow they can use to search through the customer’s past transactions. While these all really sit in another database on another IT system (or several) they are brought together in a single view in the workflow. The agent can search for the appropriate transaction, pull up further information about it, and launch further workflows if they need to make a change, add a note, or escalate the query.

The workflow software acts as a central point of control, allowing data to be drawn into it from multiple siloes and systems, and for the agent to input data back into those systems. If all that existing data has been catalogued to provide the “Single Customer View” then the meta-tags that pull it all together can be used by the workflow to find and associate pieces of data more effectively.

For more information on how to create a Single Customer View download Infinity CCS’s e-Guide here: http://www.infinityccs.com/gdpr-and-single-customer-view-guide/

GUEST BLOG: Is your data the key to delivering a better customer experience?

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

By Geoff Land, MD, Infinity CCS

When looking at the challenges of delivering the type of multi-channel, digital customer experiences that are being demanded of businesses today, most CX professionals cite the current limitations of their technology, people, or processes.

While it’s true that those are the challenges most companies encounter, these are generally expensive and time-consuming problems to solve – if they can ever be truly solved at all. The business and technology landscapes change so quickly that as soon as a company has caught up on what customers want now, they are already on to the next thing.

What often gets overlooked is that delivering great customer experiences is really about allowing information to flow as freely and as quickly as possible between the customer and company and back again. As important as they are, technology, people, and processes are just conduits for that information, and the much-hyped digital and automated channels just new ways for customers to access it.

Efficiently storing, indexing, and processing the huge amounts of customer data that companies now hold can vastly improve customer experience.

The joined-up business

To deliver the customer experiences being demanded of you today, your contact centre’s processes, technologies, staff, and data must be all aligned to the same ends. Specifically, the right piece of technology or software, the most appropriate business process, and the relevant customer and transaction data all need to be made immediately available to the agent, or automated system such as a chatbot, that is interacting with a customer.

Where there are limited budgets to invest in technology, lengthy internal processes, complex agent desktop tools, a lack of multichannel options, and a lack of understanding about customer behaviour this can be difficult to do. But a lot of the battle can be won with better quality data even without replacing legacy systems and processes.

Single Customer View

Having a single view of all your customer and transaction data essentially means that every piece of information about a given customer is accessible by everyone who needs it, when they need it. To accomplish this, either all data must be pulled together into a central location, or all the data that sits in different siloes should be tagged and linked together.

The end result is the same: customer-facing people can see everything your whole company knows about a given customer or prospect.

GDPR changes the game

The problem with creating a single customer view has always been that it is difficult to identify every piece of data the company owns and then tag it correctly.

The difference today is that this is exactly what companies that hold large amounts of data are being asked to do in order to maintain compliance with the EU’s new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations).

Responding quickly to requests from data subjects – for example to share all the data you hold on them, or remove all their data – is time consuming and difficult without a central repository of all your personal customer data.

This same inventory can also form the basis of the single customer view that your sales, marketing, and other customer engagement staff can use to improve service and better target offers.

Data discovery and tagging

As we have already said, you do not need to bring all your data together in one place to create the single customer view, or living data inventory.

The first step is to scan all your structured databases, semi-structured XML files, unstructured file systems on individual workstations, and cloud-based file systems to find all the personal and sensitive data the company holds.

Data discovery software – basically deep-dive data mining tools – can find all this information and search against it simultaneously, instantly finding and collating everything from siloed data sources. An automatic metadata tagging process can tie all the pieces of data together so that you can quickly understand, for example, which bits of data relate to customer John Smith.

Living data inventory

The goal is to end up with an indexed copy of all your data. Now, no matter where data is held across your IT infrastructure it can be accessed as if from a single location.

This gives you a portal for accessing all your data about any individual customer which can be kept up to date by regularly running the discovery and cataloguing processes on newly acquired data.

Even without updating your legacy systems or existing processes, customer-facing staff have the ability to pull all the relevant data on a customer and their transactions into whatever tool or workflow they are currently using.

This enables your contact centre to manage multi-channel interactions without asking the customer to repeat information; route customers to the right team or person; proactively head off service issues; personalise upsell, cross-sell, and renewals offers; and identify the best customers to find more like them.

The addition of desktop workflow tools that can front legacy systems and integrate them with the new digital channels can add an additional layer of efficiency, again without ripping and replacing any expensive technology.

For more information on how to create a Single Customer View download Infinity CCS’s new e-Guide here.

Or visit www.infinityccs.com.

Infinity CCS partners with Connexica for GDPR compliance solutions

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

Infinity CCS has partnered with Connexica to offer an analytics suite that includes a Data Discovery and Management (DDAM) module specifically designed to help companies become GDPR compliant.

Delivered on its own, as part of the analytics suite, or alongside the full Infinity Platform, Infinity CCS says DDAM can be installed and configured quickly and is already helping a number of business to achieve and maintain GDPR compliance.

An added benefit is that while indexing customer data, DDAM also creates a Single Customer View that provides agents and other staff with the tools to access intelligence from a single user interface so that it can be used to improve customer interactions.

Geoff Land, MD of Infinity CCS, said: “If your organisation is carrying out call centre activities on behalf of a client, you’ll need to ensure that everything you do in relation to that client’s customer data is detailed in your service agreement, contract or whatever legal framework you have in place. Our solution and partnership with Connexica is enabling us to quickly and cost effectively help businesses to do this”.

Jenny Jones, Marketing Co-ordinator at Connexica, added: “We are delighted to partner with Infinity CCS and to work on a number of exciting projects including GDPR and the Single Customer View. The Infinity Platform combined with our own CXAIR Platform has the ability to create market leading solutions designed to help organisations to achieve the unimaginable in relation to data insight and analytics”.

For Infinity CCS’s free guide on how about GDPR and how to boost omni-channel customer experience capabilities, click here.