How to Boost Call Center Agent Productivity with Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) allows companies to form timely and knowledgeable decisions, making it a critical component to success in any environment, including the call center. With it, you can peer into individual agents’ performance, identify peak call times and match agents with calls for which they’re best suited. The end results are greater efficiency and productivity for the individual and the organization as a whole.
While there is a clear connection between BI and the deeper insights it provides contact centers, many organizations are just embarking on the BI journey. So let’s take a closer look into how BI can be an agent for change in your call center and improve agent productivity.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) isn’t a new concept; it’s simply become easier to accomplish with modern tools like cloud-based call center technology. BI, through data mining, analysis and reporting, has always sought to uncover the big data necessary to making good business decisions.
But without modern technology, your team would have to pull, analyze and report all the data manually, crippling your ability to respond to historical trends and circumstances in real time. One of the goals with BI, after all, remains on-demand agility and decision-making. The two facets ensure you stay competitive in markets that seem to change on the turn of a dime.
Another aim of BI relates to maintenance and improvement. BI seeks to maintain activities that benefit the business and identify and solve potential problems. Business analytics, as part of BI, takes some of that information and combines it with other data to drive transformational and sustainable change.
What Role Does BI Play in the Call Center?
Business intelligence in the call center seeks to integrate your big data into daily operations for maximum effectiveness. You see how agent performance affects business outcomes—in real time. With that information, concerns can quickly and easily be addressed, allowing you to improve the call center in weeks instead of months.
In addition, business intelligence can be used to increase your understanding of the call center, both from a historical perspective, as well as a day-to-day one. The historical data leads to better scheduling, allocation of resources, and cost forecasting. For example, your data could show that the call center needs more agents during the holidays or open enrollment. You could apply that information to hiring needs, additional training and managers’ and agents’ schedules.
The real-time data offers a different benefit: the chance to respond to performance issues as they arise rather than after the fact. Annual performance reviews may still have a role to play in your organization, but they should be coupled with regular feedback for the most impact. Employees are like gardens – they grow with regular weeding and watering, not a once-per-year saunter among the grounds.
Plus, customer demands change quickly. That means agents have to be able to pivot just as quickly to meet them. The only way to accomplish the goal is with historical and real-time business analytics and intelligence.
How Do I Measure Success?
However, adding BI to your business doesn’t automatically produce success. You have to define the metrics that matter in order for BI in the call center to be effective. For instance, you might monitor and measure average handling time (AHT), abandoned call rates and first call resolution (FCR) rates.
The metrics benchmark current efficiency and productivity levels and identify areas in need of improvement, perhaps ones not yet assessed by BI. Discovering the new areas is good. It means current efforts are working, and you can expand those methods across the organization and into new data sets.
TCN’s Business Intelligence Suite makes the work easy with its dashboards and data visualization tools. You can begin with the suite’s pre-built templates or build ones according to your call center’s specifications. Either way, you quickly see how agents are performing and how their work is impacting outbound and inbound initiatives. That data can then be combined with other intelligence to reveal monetary costs and savings, giving you another powerful lever to push or pull, as business needs or seasonal trends dictate.
You don’t have to fly blind when it comes to delivering ROI with your call center. Gain the insights you need with TCN’s Business Intelligence Suite. It gives you the opportunity to understand how agents are performing and to use that data to improve productivity individually and across the organization.
Want to learn more about how business intelligence and big data affect your call center? Check out our business intelligence sales sheet