Cloud Contact Center Featured Article

Cloud Contact Centers Drive Business Intelligence

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

The contact center was once isolated from the rest of the organization when it came to physical proximity for good reason: it was noisy, crowded and chaotic. If it wasn’t in an office basement, it was in another building altogether. Today, it’s likely to be at the offices of a third-party services vendor, or even in a foreign nation. Geography aside, the contact center has often remained isolated from the rest of the company when it came to business processes, too. Customers were routed there when they had questions, and the departments that sent them there – marketing, billing, shipping and warehousing or the executive suites – were usually glad to get customers off their hands.

Today, however, the contact center is becoming less of an operational black hole and more of a place of convergence for all channels of communication, according to Ruchika Rattan, Business Manager for Optimization/Cloud Solutions in South Asia for Aspect (News - Alert) Software, writing for Data Quest. This has happened “thanks to ever-rising consumer expectations of ‘contextual communication’ and heritage of organizations with some heavy technological investments in ‘voice’ channels.”

“Interestingly, the voice legacy brings along, a huge potential of unlocking intelligence vis-a-vis consumer behavior, workforce skill-sets, process improvement, marketing effectiveness, CSAT and so many other unexplored business areas,” wrote Rattan. “And if we extend the same potential to all the other interaction channels including email, text, chat, social etc. the holistic impact on customer experience via your contact centers can surprise you.”

Cloud contact center solutions have been the great enabler of this communications convergence into the call center. Call center assets can be located anywhere in the world, from an office or a mobile device, and can be tapped quickly with no gaps noticed by customers. Contact centers today may be handling voice, Web chat, video, email, SMS, co-browsing, mobile Web, mobile app, interactive in-store kiosks and social media all at the same time. Thanks to analytics, these same contact centers have unprecedented visibility into their operations, which allows them to continually refine their processes to produce the best possible customer experience. Analytics can help convert unstructured data that is locked in the audio of recorded calls and the text of chat, emails, SMS and social media into structured data that can be explored and scrutinized for deep business intelligence, according to Rattan, as long as it’s being processed into a usable format, with reporting and dashboards.

“I see lot of organizations looking for just plain transcription as an outcome of analytics; this may be driven by compliance or other internal organizational asks but surely a short-sighted approach towards an analytical tool-set,” wrote Rattan. “Recommend leaders to look at interaction analytics as one of the baseline technologies (just like a PBX (News - Alert) became the baseline technology for enhancing telephony experience in an enterprise) for enhancing customer experience, with contact centers potentially driving this from the front seat.”

Customer interaction analytics can yield enormous insight into contact center operations, producing intelligence that is useful to every department in a company. Without a suitable cloud contact center solution at its heart, however, analytics is likely to produce a collection of parallel information from poorly integrated sources that may simply add to the noise already buffeting the organization.