A New Decade Of Analytics

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, May 2005 by Schelmetic, Tracey E

Throughout the past several years, as contact center technologies have seen numerous advances, reporting and analytics have followed only a few steps behind these technologies, in a sort of "unorganized posse." The nature of contact center technologies being what they are (often involving recording for legal purposes, evaluation or training; script adherence; screen capture; clickstream analysis; and storage of data for compliance purposes) meant that, initially analytics came along accidentally. The feeling among company executives was, "Look at this enormous amount of unorganized information. What a hassle and expense it is to store!"

A few years later, savvy company personnel started wondering if they could actually do something with the data. "Let's examine the information and see where we went wrong with that outdoor gear sale campaign." Good thinking, but this practice was still using data to chase down problems that had already occurred - the proverbial closing the barn door long after the pony had split.

The next step in the analytics food chain involved analyzing historical information to make predictions about future customer behavior, both individually and as a group. "Past experience has told us that when we put the sale price of the rain-proof footwear prominently at the top of the Web page, above the photo, the click-through rate nearly doubles. In the future, it's company policy to display sales prices very prominently in both catalogs and on Web pages." Alternatively, a company might find that the demographic assumptions they've been making about their customers are entirely wrong; that, for example, women are more likely than men to buy camping gear, by a margin of two to one, when the company had assumed the opposite was true. This take on analytics is more advanced, but it still affects customer relations only after the fact, or only in theory. (You may know that, because of previous demographics, a young male caller is LIKELY to want to buy a camping box for the top of his SUV; but you also know that, because of demographics, the average American family has 2.3 children. How often do you see one-third of a child running round a suburban playground?)

The next logical step, therefore, is to determine how analytics can be used on real people, on customer interactions in progress. Because of the past decade's CTI breakthroughs, we all know who's calling when he or she calls. We can look at the customer's history and guess on his or her future, but how can we help improve the customer experience on this callt The answer: You need to know your customers inside and out; you need to have those customers' data available to be shared by every agent in your contact center, across all media; and you need to know who your agents are, where their best talents lie and what their availability is.

I'll paraphrase a cheesy old saying: "You never get a second chance to rectify a first impression of a screw-up." Customers don't want much. They just want to be dazzled by your contact center, every time. Is that too much to ask?

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine