Business intelligence (BI) is a catch-all term for the data-driven applications, practices and technologies a business uses in order to collect, integrate, analyze and present business information. The overarching goal of BI is to help a business make better decisions.
In the contact center, BI can be incredibly beneficial. There’s a lot of information that can help the contact center improve customer service, so long as the right data is found, meaning is pulled from it and management decides what the next actionable step should be. Here’s how BI solutions can improve efficiency in the contact center:
Smarter time management and scheduling.
Different people are productive at different times of the day. When you’re deciding when your agents will be most productive for scheduling purposes, though, it’s not enough to simply ask them if they’re early birds or night owls. With BI, data can show when certain agents are at their best. Managers can then create a schedule that takes advantage of those peak times.
Identify relevant cross-sells and upsells.
BI tools analyze customer information and buyer persona to help agents pinpoint additional opportunities for sales. The agent can then recommend and cross-sell or upsell the products or services that are most relevant to that specific customer. It’s always easier to convent a current customer than a brand new one, so long as the products they’re hearing about are actually in-line with their interests or needs.
Analyze current and future processes.
Inefficient processes result in more errors, but BI solutions can investigate if a process is working – and if it’s not, when and where it’s failing. For example, you can see if more errors are occurring at a specific time of day or on the same day each week, or if a particular agent is making more errors than your other agents. Not only can this type of insight fix current processes but it can also be used to assess future ones before they’re officially implemented. A hypothetical process can be rolled out and tested with BI tools, then either thrown out or refined for actual implementation.
BI is an integral part of customer service. While there are many different types of BI solutions for the contact center, they all share the ability to glean actionable information. BI can improve customer service, raise customer satisfaction levels and improve contact center efficiency.
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