Contact centers help to keep your customers happy. Today regardless of your business vertical, size of your company it is advisable to invest in a sound contact center. It is like having a finger on the pulse of your customers’ needs. But there is another dimension to contact centers that has not yet been explored as widely as it should have been. We are talking about the mountains of data that a contact center generates and using it to come up with insights for your business growth.

Though contact center is data-rich, not all contact center data might be valuable. But the trick is to find those nuggets of information that can be conveniently converted into something valuable. It is like converting the numbers into the art of storytelling using the right analytics.

We have outbound and inbound contact centres . For an inbound contact center you get a call only when the customer has a query or faces a tough time fixing something. The data gathered across a large set of inbound calls can point to a lot of insights.

What are the customer groups that are facing problems? What could be the likely reason for that? Are we seeing a pattern among those who are facing problems? These are the kind of questions you could be asking yourself as a business entrepreneur.

Read more: Enhance Customer Experience with efficient Contact Centers

Today’s contact centres are a fry cry from what they used to be even a decade ago. Everything is closely monitored and bears the scrutiny of data analysts. There are various parameters like speech and sentiment analysis using which it can be predicted to a large extent as to how the customer is feeling.

Consider a company that has launched a new product and the management wants to gauge the customer response to it. The contact centre is the best way to do it. Depending on how the customers feel and react to the product features gives a clear idea of where the product is headed. Some of the issues that the customers are facing could be the areas of improvement that the management can look into.

Speech analysis is widely used to look for telltale signs of interest, anxiety, frustration, and various other verbal cues. Important keywords uttered by the customers are also automatically tagged. Thus based on the most dominant customer emotions they can be bracketed into groups for further analysis. This can then shed more light on how to serve those customers better. All this makes perfect business sense and can be achieved without having to spend huge sums of money on customer research, feedback and fancy initiatives.

A new approach to customer understanding

Today’s customer insights do not exist in traditional databases and spreadsheets. There is an urgent need to dig deeper and that is where contact center data fits into the whole scheme of things. There are huge unexplored opportunities for brands to go beyond just creating satisfied customers. It is genuinely possible to move higher up the ladder to turn happy customers into brand advocates.

Customers are taking charge of how they want brands to treat them. Contact centers naturally give unparalleled information regarding this. Using analytics much value can be conveniently unlocked. The insights thus gained can be incorporated to provide better service with the distinct possibility of cross-selling and upselling.

Some critical data that can be accessed via contact centers:

• What makes a certain product or service so valuable?
• How does it add value to the customers?
• How interested are they to buy other products of your brand?
• What are the pain points associated with your product and how to overcome them?

Regular analytics can only shed light on what your star products are, the total adoption rate, break-up of customer spending and such other identifiers. But it cannot help you understand why a certain customer is going for a certain product. That is where live interaction between the customers and the company’s contact center can fill in the details. With the right technology and expertise, every customer interaction can be a potent tool to measure the brand’s impact and gain insights into the customer’s buying behaviour. This can ultimately steer your business and drive it on the fast lane to growth and prosperity.