Leveraging UC Analytics to Engage the Right Person in the Right Place at the Right Time
Leveraging UC Analytics to Engage the Right Person in the Right Place at the Right Time by Nancy Jamison
UC Analytics – An Emerging Analytics Star
An emerging category in the spectrum of unified communications, called UC analytics, harnesses customer and operational intelligence from all areas of the organization—from the contact center to the back office to branch/remote locations—and across all customer touch points and databases, blending workforce optimization tools and advanced customer interaction and desktop analytics, to improve business operations and customer engagement. The first, improving business operations, Blair Pleasant detailed in her February 2010 “In the Spotlight” piece, entitled "Actionable Intelligence through UC." In this article, she talks about how Verint, the first company to offer UC analytics tools, has adapted its Impact 360 workforce optimization solution, which includes workforce management, call recording and quality monitoring, performance management, eLearning, coaching, and robust speech, data, desktop, and customer feedback analytics, to improve business processes that span an enterprise’s customer service value chain.
Blair said, “Impact 360 Speech, Data, and Desktop Analytics help organizations surface key business-enabling and disabling trends across the enterprise that might otherwise go undetected. Automatically categorizing and analyzing call content and interaction data, suggesting the root causes of specific performance metrics, these tools reveal drivers of customer perceptions, business outcomes, and call volumes that can help companies reduce human latency in business processes, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, enhance employee productivity, increase revenue, or reduce costs.”
Customer and Business Impact
The key here is that UC analytics provides a complete view of the interaction of customers across all areas of the business and brings to light what is working and what could be improved, providing the enterprise with real, actionable business intelligence. One of the benefits Blair cited was reducing human latency, which has two components related to UC analytics. One is improving a business process. For example, speech analytics may uncover that a significant number of customers are calling to say they haven’t received a welcome packet that an agent promised them. This root cause for a spike in call volume is then traced back to a back-office problem, which is subsequently automated to eliminate the delay to the customer. However, just as important is using UC analytics to reduce “latency” by getting the customer to the right person in the right place at the right time. Furthermore, the right person might not be a contact center agent at all, but someone else in the organization.
UC analytics adds an analytical (”Tell Me Why”) dimension that enables more effective use of resources to address customer demand. Based on the analysis of trends and customer intelligence, UC analytics creates a more unified work environment whereby the optimization of business processes is based on the corresponding value to the customer service value chain and enterprise, not merely on departmental efficiency and effectiveness. Using UC analytics, organizations can make use of key insights and business trends, in addition to historical data gained from the integration with ACD and outbound dialer systems, to more efficiently and effectively forecast and schedule agents in the contact center, as well as employees in back-office and branch operations. Combining this with the balancing of defined shift rules, work patterns, breaks, off-phone times, employee skills and preferences, UC analytics helps to optimize operations and reduce costs inside and outside the contact center, providing customers with access to the right skill set and level of competence while staffing appropriately to meet workload and targeted sales and service goals.
For example, it’s long been known that within the health insurance industry, the once-a-year open enrollment at companies generates a peak in traffic into the contact center. By using UC analytics, an insurance company can examine peak call volumes, handle times and other contact and productivity metrics impacting performance, and can also draw from speech analytics and customer feedback surveys to get a more granular view as to what the issues are that customers are calling about. The company can then map its findings against first time or existing enrollees, combine that with customer data as to plan, family size, etc., and feed this into its forecasting and scheduling systems to enhance the customer experience by ensuring the availability of certain specialists across its organization to address real-time questions or follow up on specific issues.
Virtualizing Service
Using Verint’s IP recording and speech analytics,, the company’s UC analytics offering can help organizations effectively evolve their contact centers to IP-enabled virtual customer operations, delivering on the “right person at the right time” objective by optimizing the use of well-trained, knowledgeable, location-independent networked experts across the enterprise. Taking this to the next level, using UC analytics to understand call trends and listen to “the voice of the customer,” organizations can exploit UC analytics’ built-in workforce optimization tools, along with UC applications, such as presence and IM, and the resulting customer intelligence to more effectively maximize the use of these resources—from contact center personnel to branch and back-office staff—to respond to relevant customer inquiries and help drive revenue.
Certainly the gains associated with improving the customer engagement cannot be trivialized as it is well documented that the cost of attaining new customers is higher than retaining existing ones. Plus the “soft” costs caused by negative PR from disgruntled ex-customers causes immeasurable problems, so improving the customer relationship is critical. However, just as priceless is knowing how and when to deploy the right resources to improve that engagement and the right number of resources to optimally deliver service. Cost overruns are unavoidable when staffing exceeds workload, while service and the customer experience suffers when staffing falls short or the right resources aren’t available to satisfy customer demand. Utilizing an IP infrastructure can enable resources to work and be available from virtually anywhere, and UC analytics’ tools such as IP recording, workforce management, and customer interaction analytics can easily integrate with this infrastructure to optimize the people and processes most vital to high quality service, revenue generation, and cost reduction.
Summary
To summarize, using UC analytics, which encompasses a synergistic suite of workforce optimization, analysis and reporting tools available to the business, rather than disparate and unconnected tools, organizations now have the capability of fine tuning their operations and business processes based on customer, contact center, and wider business data, as well as the voice of the customer, combined. This not only allows companies to staff appropriately, improve customer service, and improve errors or areas of improvement, but will also allow them to adapt to changing customer needs and business conditions with foresight.
For more information about Verint's UC analytics, read the following:
This paper is sponsored by Verint.