5 Reasons Your Call Center Should Be Using Cross-Channel Interaction Analytics

In today’s multichannel digital landscape, the question isn’t just “Which channels are my customers using?” but “How many different channels are my customers using?” As noted in an SAS article on indirect and direct communications channels, multichannel marketing is important for one very simple reason: You must be where your customers are.

For call centers, the challenge isn’t just determining customer channel preferences (although this is important in its own right), it’s also tracking customer interactions across various channels. In fact, analyzing such interactions can be the key to preventing customer churn and improving loyalty.

Here’s a look at 5 specific reasons your call center needs to be using cross-channel interaction analytics:

1. Shape interactions in real-time

One of the primary benefits of interaction analytics tools is that they provide organizations with customer interaction data across channels (voice, chat, email, SMS, social media, etc.). With these real-time insights in hand, companies have the ability to categorize interactions and search for trends in customer behavior (e.g., uncovering the root cause of customer complaints), regardless of the communications channel used. Armed with this type of information, call centers can focus on providing an improved customer experience overall.

2. Extract key business intelligence from customer interactions

Research shows today’s customers want multiple communications channels for contacting companies. With the proliferation of various interaction channels, call centers have the opportunity to capture and leverage new sources of insights to influence the customer experience. CallMiner Semantic Building Blocks™ allows companies to take customer interaction analysis to the next level by reusing previously defined language searches or analytics queries and making conversational analysis quicker and easier to achieve.

3. Develop a unified view of the customer

As customers have embraced multiple channels to communicate with companies, call centers have needed to adapt their analytics tools accordingly. “Today’s customer interaction analytics platforms aim to understand the complete voice of the customer, incorporating social media analytics, survey tools, and centralized reporting where businesses can view interactions across all channels in one place,” as noted in an Ovum white paper on selecting an analytics vendor. For call centers that have not yet embraced this technological shift, the time to start is now.

4. Improve agent performance

Capturing customer interactions across channels doesn’t only lead to more satisfied customers; it also helps you to understand how to improve call center agent performance, which can positively impact the customer experience. Interaction analytics tools such as speech analytics can help managers and supervisors identify agent coaching and training opportunities as well as provide agents with actionable information they can use to improve their own performance.

5. Improve future interactions: While the above represents the various ways call centers can (and should) be using cross-channel interaction analytics to improve the customer experience, the key is to look at ways to continually improve interactions. With the customer experience management market predicted to grow 17% over the new few years (from $3.8 billion in 2014 to $8.4 billion in 2019), companies simply can’t afford to ignore these interactions insights.

Final Thoughts

With the convergence of traditional and emerging communications channels comes the need for companies to capture interactions on the channels their customers prefer to use. The end result of doing so is developing a better understanding of customers and providing an improved customer experience overall.