This post is an excerpt from an article that first appeared here and is reproduced with permission from Callinize, Inc. DBA Tenfold
Business Intelligence (BI) tools simplify contact center volume forecasting and agent scheduling across channels, skills and locations for optimal ROI. It helps in making informed decision based on key metrics: cost forecasting, employee forecasting, agent productivity and performance, overall call center performance.
Areas Where BI Helps
- BI gives a holistic picture of the call center, complete with total call volume and its peaks and troughs. Managers can use this information to schedule the right number of agents at the right time. They can also combine call volume metrics with other data, such as holiday trends or open enrollment seasons. By leveraging multiple data points, managers can increase overall efficiency and productivity. Both effectiveness, or impact, and productivity metrics should be used together to have the most insight into agent performance, because the greater the insight, the better the solution.
- BI tools help managers see if employees are fully engaged. This is an effective means to slowing turn around and improving productivity by boasting morale. Companies can learn about issues employees have with management personal or policies in order to enrich the staff needs. BI can enable call centers to tie agent performance to specific quantitative and qualitative customer experience outcomes, which incites them to perform better.
- BI frees managers to do the job they were hired to do: manage call center agents. Rather than pulling reports, they can monitor calls and coach agents. BI is a significant time saver for senior executives, and makes their role as managers much more streamlined.
- As compliance begins to rank higher on a company’s to-do lists, BI is helping play a role in making sure call centers stay up-to-date on all the latest regulations. Speech analytics tools that can transcribe the audio of a conversation to text have been a staple of the industry for years now. Many call centers use speech analytics to aid in enforcing adherence to a preapproved conversation script.
- The use of BI makes it possible for call center managers to measure the ROI per agent as well as ROI of the entire operation. Cost per hire provides an overview of the total cost of each employee. This includes recruiting expenses, staff costs for interviews and application management, training time and maintenance. With BI tools, managers can input quantitative goals and track its progress on a daily basis. They can receive feedback from the software on inefficiencies in the business by spotting internal trends and flagging what is underperforming.
- Call centers that maintain a large workforce need to monitor the monthly turnover rate. BI tools help management plan to cover staffing needs fully.
- The BI tools can show if the workforce is diverse and that they are a socially responsible business that follows all current affirmative action guidelines regarding diversity. The diversity metrics will give the statistical breakdown of the workforce by race, gender, age and disabilities.
With Microsoft Power BI, Metro Bank tracks its call center operations, including customer demographics, call times, and call volume; analyzes online customers’ behavior via their mobile and internet banking services, and pulls off unique customer dissatisfaction reports to help plan workload more adequately. What they like the most about the system are rich data visualizations, and regular feedback from Microsoft’s specialists that helps them make the most of this tool.
