Put Reporting on Your Digital Transformation Roadmap: Harnessing Your Contact Center's Powerhouse of Data Elevates Customer Experience
Catapulting your contact center to the digi-sphere is about more than changing up your processes, tech, and the way you work.
It’s also about scrapping your gut-check reactions and making business decisions based on real truths about what your customers want.
Data is the powerhouse that fuels your customer experience engine.
That’s why by 2020, more than 40% of all data analytics projects on your digital transformation roadmap will relate to an aspect of customer experience.
According to CCW, the biggest challenge for contact centers today is the lack of a 360-degree view of all customers. In fact, it’s a pivotal concern for 49% of organizations. Disconnected systems and bad reporting leave a blind spot in the view of contact center leaders.
When you have millions of data points floating around in different systems, siloed off by team, you’re not getting a full view of your customers. And without that holistic view, you can’t move the needle on customer experience.
Digital transformation bulldozes the barriers between you and your analytics. Transformative projects focus on getting the right tools and processes in place for a digitally mature business. With that digital maturity comes better insights at your fingertips to inform decisions.
Here’s why data and reporting projects need to be on your digital transformation roadmap.
Connecting your systems to share customer data improves customer experience.
Disconnected data keeps companies from growing their revenue and delivering consistently great customer experiences.
With nearly half of companies struggling to see a 360-view of their customers, IT teams and company leaders alike are banning together to connect their systems.
As workflows become more complex, customer channels increase, and expectations of companies grow as high as Everest, your mountain of customer data will only get bigger.
Leaving that data siloed off in separate systems buries the potential for greater personalization and lower effort customer experiences. Further, trying to report on data living in disparate systems is a giant time suck. And, it leaves more room for errors and inconsistencies in your reports.
“Data volumes are growing, and channels available to customers are increasing, which results in inconsistent experiences, different departments working with their own versions of the data, and disconnected applications that create more silos.” – Ajay Khanna for Database Trends
Transform the way your contact center and your company access and use your data. When your contact center platform, your CRM, and your ticketing system all house the same information, your employees have a single source of truth. And, when your reporting allows them to keep up with their metrics, you fuel empowerment and upward growth in your contact center. That translates into knowledgeable experiences for your customers. No matter how, when, or where your customers reach out.
Connecting your systems builds consistency and connects the dots between your departments. When every employee has access to the same information for your customers, they can deliver standout experiences every time.
Your transformation is the gateway to fix your digital processes, unify your data, and get accessible reporting that makes your business better.
Choosing the right cloud platform gives you ownership over your data.
Gartner predicts by 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will see information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics will be a core competency for companies.
As market competition heats up and companies look to the next big thing to outpace industry leaders, the importance of data will grow. Your data gives you customer-specific intel to progress your business. It’s a company asset that no competitor can replicate or use.
Competitors might be able to hijack a marketing message, dish out the same sales promotions, or even build nearly identical feature sets, but the power of your data belongs to your company alone. It’s rich with intel to inform you about what your customers want and how you can get better.
Your data should be yours. It shouldn’t be stuck on your vendors’ servers or locked behind a gate with a high-ticket price. Similarly, it shouldn’t have an expiration date.
Digital transformation gives you ownership of your data (in a concise, easy-to-understand, format). Picking the right vendor partner during transformation opens up the door to data that’s more accessible and protected. Like all your call recordings, transcriptions, and interaction data.
Not to mention, ownership over your data means the ability to take it, distill it down into actionable insights, and share reports with needed stakeholders.
Want bi-directional data sharing, real-time and historic insights, and customizable dashboards? Learn more about Sharpen Insights.
Better reporting informs your customer journey.
Digitalizing your contact center means you not only collect better data, but you build digestible reports and act on what you find, too.
A jarring 94% of consumers are over the broken experience of interacting with your company. Yet, more than a third of companies still aren’t mapping their customer journeys. And even fewer are using data in the process.
Revamping your tech and upgrading the way you think about contact center reporting is the vehicle for a journey that prioritizes customers and conforms to their behaviors.
With visual reports and dashboards that tell a story supported by contact center data, you can distill millions of data points into a single, panoramic view of your customers’ experience.
Using data for advanced and actionable reporting helps you monitor certain thresholds, sentiment, and overall performance in your contact center. Then, it offers up the insight you need to improve your customer journey.
Does your customer service dashboard show your queue times are too long? Or, are customers abandoning calls while navigating your complicated IVR? Reports bring clarity to the broken pieces of your customer journey. They give you intel to improve coaching, change up your call paths, or staff up for your busy season.
And, with excellent customer service being the number one factor that impacts a consumer’s level of trust with your company, the payoff of improved customer interactions is huge.
What’s an added bonus?
Advanced reporting tools (like Sharpen’s) let you tailor reports to different audiences. Does your VP of Ops want an overview of your contact center’s performance last month? Do your team leads want to know how their agents are tracking towards KPIs? Better reporting gives you the insight you need at every level. So stakeholders company-wide have access to the story and the metrics they care about.
To sum up, the longer you wait to mature your digital processes, the bigger your barricade to improved CX.