Agent analytics is starting to get the attention it deserves. It's very closely tied to improving customer satisfaction and success, as well as reducing agent turnover. And as a result, it should be a key selection criteria for those enterprises looking at contact center providers.
Today, Nice inContact announced its Summer 2018 release for its CXone cloud customer experience platform, and focused it squarely where companies see the most value: on analytics. (See related No Jitter coverage from contact center analyst Sheila McGee-Smith here.)
Customer satisfaction analytics is--by far--the top technology that IT and business leaders expect will transform their customer experience, according to Nemertes' 2018-19 Digital Customer Experience research study, which included detailed input from nearly 700 global IT and business leaders. To give you an idea of how important analytics is, consider the results of the research (shown below): In a weighted scorecard, analytics received 811 points, making it the top technology by a wide margin; the next highest was artificial intelligence/cognitive learning, with 493 points.
Circular Improvement
Nice inContact's CXone Quality Management Analytics Pro leverages speech and text analytics, across channels, to target the interactions used for quality evaluations and agent coaching sessions. It also can analyze customer sentiment, along with identified categories or phrases, to select the best voice or digital interactions to keep agents on task. Screen pops can keep agents in compliance with regulatory requirements or on script with the brand. Or, specific calls can be used to improve agent skills (based on a sales scenario agents are running into frequently, for example).
Agent analytics directly ties to customer satisfaction. By using customer sentiment analytics to identify areas of concern, and then taking that information to continually improve agent performance, customer satisfaction increases. It's basically circular.
By spending more time training and coaching contact center agents and less time on administrative tasks--or simply finding the calls to use as examples--companies will improve their overall customer experience. Better-trained agents will serve customers more efficiently. The more advanced analytics that companies can continue to add, the better.
Think of All the Data!
Think of all the data a company can analyze and use both for real-time decisions and strategic shifts based on trending analysis.
What channels did the customer use? Which agent? What was the problem? What was the customer's tone of voice and word choice? How quickly did we solve it? How did it correlate with unstructured data in social media channels? How did our CSAT score change? What was happening competitively? You could go and on with fascinating data sets and correlations that improve customer experience, reduce agent turnover, and avert a catastrophic situation.
That said, agent analytics is a huge area, and contact center providers are addressing it in a variety of ways. For example, Sharpen focuses heavily on agent analytics, allowing companies to customize which areas (empowerment, efficiency, effectiveness) are most important. Then, they use behavioral analytics (along with weightings based on what's most/least important to the company) to provide an ongoing agent score that keeps them focused on what's most important to keeping their score as high as possible. Such an approach keeps agents focused--and also competitive!
Analytics overall is also a massive area. In our research, companies identified three analytics-specific projects they are launching to improve digital customer experience:
Each of these areas showed significant success in core areas measured. In our research, we asked companies for their before-and-after success metrics for each digital customer experience project they implemented in several areas, including customer ratings, operational costs, sales, customers won/lost, and agent turnover.
For agent performance analytics alone, companies saw 121% increase in customers won, 68% increase in the use of self-service, and 45% increase in customer ratings. What's more, they saw a 37% increase in digital sales.
With these documented success metrics, IT and business leaders can make a strong case for evaluating and selecting solution providers with strong analytics overall, and specifically strong agent performance analytics.
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