Contact Center Statistics Overview

The interactions that take place through the contact center via various channels offer a vast amount of information that companies seek to consolidate, and gain useful insight about their customers as well as about themselves. For this reason, an integral part of contact center software suites are packages designed to collect statistics. 

Data collection and consolidation:

Collection of data can take place on various parts of a contact center. Some usual points this is done are: the PBX, which is a central hub for all calls and can yield information related to call routing, the CTI that might control the PBX, the IVR that shows, among other things, information about the self-service behavior of the customers and the call logger where speech analytics can apply to extract semantic information from actual discussions. In an outbound contact center, the predictive dialer can be a source for information as well. In the case of a contact center based on SIP, the SIP servers can also provide important information. Workforce management software is another source of information, mostly related to human resources. In short, depending on the specific implementation of each contact center, statistics can be gathered from almost every node in the ecosystem, about practically everything that takes place within the center.

For each of the aforementioned points in a contact center, the vendors that produce them tend to include in their software offers extensive analytics tools. These tools not only gather the data about the interactions being performed through the contact center, but also they consolidate them, applying various formulas to extract a variety of metrics (a future post will examine in more detail some of the most widely-used metrics) that can be used to oversee performance. 

Using statistics:

These consolidated statistics can provide a wealth of information that can help substantially improve the contact center. Metrics related with customer service representatives can be used to improve the human resources of the company in various ways. Statistics that show customer preferences over a variety of offered contact channels (phone, e-mail, web chat) can be combined with performance metrics on each of these channels to indicate ways to improve customer service and satisfaction. Other types of statistics may help improve the business processes of the company, and its efficiency in general, showing where bottlenecks typically occur. Outbound campaign statistics can improve, among other things, the marketing tactics of a company.

All the benefits mentioned, and a lot more can be easily gained by including sufficient data gathering and reporting tools in the contact center. However the most important thing is to actually use these statistics after viewing them and also use them wisely. Many companies seem to fail in this area, underestimating the importance of such metrics. On the other hand, some companies go to the other extreme, becoming too attached to specific metrics and trying to improve them at all costs. In the process, they tend to miss the bigger picture and do costly mistakes. Statistics is a great tool but it has to be used with caution.