Why Your Data Collection Strategy Is Holding You Back From Getting Results

Henry Ford once said, “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”

Solid advice from one of the most successful business leaders of the 20th Century. But without clear business goals, companies can’t take full advantage of 21st Century technology designed to alleviate the pain points that hold them back. Nor can they get the results they want if their data collection strategy isn’t driving specific, desired outcomes.

Take, for example, a fast-growing automotive company looking for new ways to develop innovative products. To do this, they implemented a speech analytics solution that extracts data directly from customer interactions. This helped uncover exactly what their customers need and want. While they could have collected customer surveys and used CSAT scores to gain a general sense of how customers feel, that data wouldn’t be enough to reach their goal.

Instead, they aggregated the findings from their text analytics solution to influence the development of new marketing and sales programs and new products. And they did all this while improving the customer experience (check out the full case study for more details).

Simply put, gathering data on your business operations will prove fruitless if your strategy ends with an insurmountable pile of data. Gaining customer insights shouldn’t end with recognizing a few trends; it should end with reaching your goal. And it should start with an in-depth understanding of what you want out of your investment in any data analytics tool.

That’s why you should establish desired outcomes before you even begin collecting data to improve your business. This will also help you get a positive return on your investment in an automated monitoring solution. To further this point, let’s look at specific examples in the contact center.

With the advent of data collection and advanced learning technology, corporations began to rely heavily on data-driven solutions to improve every facet of their business. Because most customer interactions are filtered through a contact center, it is an ideal place to gather data.

The success of data collection programs relies on two things:

Many businesses will spend a king’s ransom on data-gathering software and other machine learning tools without first gaining an understanding of their desired outcomes. For example, improving agent performance, enhancing customer experience, and lowering costs are all common goals in the contact center. And there are plenty of AI-fueled solutions that gather data to help companies reach those outcomes. But if the contact center doesn’t establish clear, quantifiable goals directed at positive outcomes, all of that data goes to waste.

In fact, Forbes reported that “about 70% of the data painstakingly collected and stored by companies goes unused, and what is actually utilized is often misused.” This goes beyond the data explosion discussion and gets at the heart of overcoming the obstacles that hold companies back.

Without clear goals, the data used to reach desired outcomes loses its value, and in most cases, will cost the company more money in the end. It’s simply not enough to look at data-driven trends anymore. Data collection must have a direction; it must be guided by measurable outcomes.

Let’s use a few case study summaries to demonstrate this concept in the contact center:

Case 1 – A BPO for financial and lending companies was unable to effectively train agents due to a small QA staff and small call sample sizes used to evaluate agent performance and training needs. They used data-driven insights from their automated call monitoring solution to increase and maintain their KPIs on inbound and outbound calls and saw an improvement in call scores month over month, providing a direct positive impact to the customer experience.

How did establishing desired outcomes with a focus on realistic goals prove successful? With a speech analytics solution in place, they set realistic goals of improving KPIs and call scores, and by focusing their data collection on achieving this, they were ultimately able to enhance CX – their ultimate desired outcome.

Case 2 – A company that provides Benefit Enrollment Specialists to HR Departments had one main goal: for every employee to walk away from a benefits review, held with a Benefit Specialist, with a complete understanding of the benefits their employer offers. But they also needed to scale their QA department to keep pace with the increasing number of new Benefit Specialists while gaining the ability to review more calls for compliance checks. They used automated agent scorecards to score 100% of calls, which gave them the ability to improve the quality of every call by ensuring that agents didn’t stray from the script.

How did establishing the goal of scoring 100% of calls help them reach their desired outcome? They used that visibility to improve training and help agents stay on script. In the end, the data used to make these improvements helped them reach their ultimate goal of providing reassurance to employees enrolling in a benefits package.

Every business wants to be successful; how businesses define success determines whether or not they will achieve it.

So now that you have a place to start focusing your data collection on real outcomes, let us show you how you can effectively use a speech analytics solution in your contact center. And by the way, we don’t just hand you an advanced solution and wish you the best.

You will work with a dedicated speech analyst to help you take a read on your metrics before implementing your analytics strategy and help you understand the results. Rather than hoping for a few generic enhancements derived from a mountain of data, let CallFinder help you define, and achieve your success.

Start with a 15-minute demo or sign up for our no-risk trial.

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