Using Competitive Analytics to Improve Your Call Center

It’s no secret that data analysis can provide many useful insights to businesses, but gathering, analyzing and then implementing changes based on data can be difficult. Competitive analytics gives you real-time business intelligence, analytics and reporting through easy-to-navigate and customizable dashboards.

Eliminating the Hurdles

While the consensus is that business data analysis is important to a company’s success, actually diving into data analysis is easier said than done.

Some common hurdles to embracing business data analysis, especially for small businesses, include:

• Budget. Installing new servers for data retention and collection and hiring a good data analyst can be pricey.
• IT Knowledge or Experience. Especially at smaller companies where IT departments are likely to be small or nonexistent, users might not have the expertise available to meet the technology needs of data analysis.
• Data Cleanup. Analysis can only be as good as the data, so incomplete, incorrect and duplicate data needs to be scrubbed before a company can gain any real insights.

Competitive analytics blasts through those roadblocks to provide you with the best insights. Using interactive insights, competitive analytics presents your company’s data in a way that’s easy to understand and explore. And, because competitive analytics is a cloud-based solution, you don’t need to worry about IT or expensive hardware setup costs.

The Right Stuff

There are a variety of business challenges that data analysis can tackle, but first you need to have the right data. Competitive analytics comes with several pre-built templates that allow you to gather the right metrics on different facets of your call center, like:

• Agent Overview
• Manual Calls
• Inbound Calls
• Outbound Calls
• Cost Summaries and Totals
• Call Center Overview

Users can also customize templates for other types of analysis and measure other metrics.

With the right data gathered, you can turn that information into action.

“Data is only as good as its use and/or manipulation that results in some outcome that positively impacts a company’s top or bottom line. Data for data’s sake is useless,” said Charles Hogan, Tranzlogic CEO. “Small businesses must be able to turn data into actionable insights. That is to say, conceive the end result and then try to reverse engineer a means of achieving that outcome.”

What Data Can Do

Analyzing your data can unlock insights into cost savings, better service, staffing needs, more efficient staff scheduling…the list goes on!

For call centers there are two main metrics to measure:

• Average Handle Time – the length of time a call center agent is on the phone with a customer. Ideally, the average handle time should be low which indicates efficiency. Customers also appreciate a low average handle time, as it means using less of their time.
• First Call Resolution Rate – the number of calls a customer has to make to get a resolution. Ideally, your call center should have a 100 percent first call resolution rate.

Tracking the average handle time and first call resolution rate for your entire call center and individual agents can help you manage personnel and offer appropriate training to certain employees.

Tracking the data pays off too:

• The average inbound call to a call center costs $5.90. Reducing agents’ average handle time will cut down of the cost per call and help your call center work with more customers. Your data can show you where there is room for improvement.
• Even a one percent increase in first call resolution rate can mean big savings – $276,000 for the average call center. Looking through agent data can point you to employees who could use more training to be able to resolve customer issues the first time.

To learn more about TCN’s Competitive Analytics solution, visit: Competitive Analytics.