The Call Center Analytics Guide: How To Analyze Call Data

If you’re looking to improve the performance of your call center, call center analytics may just be the thing you’re looking for. By measuring KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like average handle time, call volume, and customer satisfaction, you can create effective strategies in real time that will lead to happier customers and more efficient agents.

If you’re looking to learn more about call center analytics, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’ll explain what call center analytics is, types of call center analytics, its advantages and disadvantages, and best software. Plus, we’ll go into detail on important features, advanced analytics, and how to use them.

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What Is Call Center Analytics?

Call center analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing, and interpreting data you gather from customer interactions with your call center. Before VoIP and AI technology, you used to have to manually gather call center analytics, listening to hours of recorded phone calls to track patterns and trends in customer needs and preferences. Today, powerful advances in call center technology can automate this process for you.

The goal of call center analytics is to gain insights into your customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points. You can also track agent performance and optimize staffing levels to match customer demand. Using those insights, you can take data-driven action that will lead to real results.

Types of Call Center Analytics

Data is power, but gathering too much can be overwhelming and counterproductive. That’s why it’s important to focus on the right kind of call center analytics for your business. There are many different types of call center analytics, each focusing on different areas of call center operations and the customer journey. Here are some of the most common types of call center analytics:

Business intelligence: Business intelligence uses call center analytics to transform raw data into actionable insights. Business intelligence helps you understand KPIs, trends, and patterns to optimize your operations and see business growth. Business intelligence tools usually include dashboards, reports, and data visualization.
Interaction analytics: Interaction analytics focuses on interactions with your customers, analyzing KPIs like abandonment rates, response times, resolution times, and call transfers. Interaction analytics helps your call center better understand the needs of your customers to develop better relationships. In addition to focusing on the big picture, interaction analytics also let you track individual agent performance.
Speech analytics: Speech analytics are a type of call center analytics that focuses on analyzing the content of spoken interactions. It involves transcribing recorded calls, identifying keywords and phrases, detecting sentiment, and categorizing calls based on predefined criteria. Speech analytics helps you extract valuable insights from customer conversations, such as common issues, improving agent performance, and ensuring compliance with regulations.
Customer surveys: Customer surveys are an important tool that can be used to understand customer experience and satisfaction levels. Common ways to deliver surveys include immediately after the call, or in an email or text. Customer surveys help you collect data that can be used to improve the customer experience.
Predictive analytics: A lot of call center analytics focus on historical and real-time data, but predictive analytics takes things a step further. Using predictive analytics in your call center, you can forecast future trends, such as call volume, customer churn rates, agent performance, and customer satisfaction levels.
Omnichannel analytics: With the popularity of contact centers, your call center analytics need to focus on more than just call metrics. Omnichannel analytics allows you to analyze customer interactions across multiple communication channels seamlessly. This gives you a holistic view of the customer journey and helps you understand how customers engage with your brand across various touchpoints.

Speech Analytics

In the past, speech analytics required you to listen to hundreds of hours of customer calls to transcribe recorded calls, analyze customer sentiment, and categorize by topic. However, advances in AI now automatically transcribe and analyze recorded phone conversations to identify patterns, trends, and insights.

Here’s a little bit about how this type of call center analytics works:

Transcription: Speech analytics software automatically transcribes recorded phone calls into text. This helps call centers to search and analyze large volumes of conversations efficiently.
Sentiment analysis: Speech analytics can analyze the tone and sentiment of customer interactions to identify instances of frustration, satisfaction, or neutrality. Understanding your customers’ sentiments can help your organizer address issues and improve customer satisfaction.
Keyword detection: Call center analytics can be used to identify specific keywords or phrases that are mentioned during conversations. This helps your call center track mention of products, services, competitors, or specific issues.
Topic classification: Once a recorded call is transcribed, the text can be analyzed and categorized by topic. This allows you to easily organize, search, and analyze tons of text from transcribed phone calls.

Speech analytics is a powerful type of call center analytics that can help your business improve. So how do businesses utilize speech analytics? Here are some common applications:

Compliance monitoring: If you’re in a highly regulated industry, such as healthcare, speech analytics can help your call center ensure compliance with HIPAA or other regulations. Call center analytics can identify inappropriate language, unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, or failure to follow script guidelines.
Performance evaluation: Speech analytics can be used to evaluate the performance of your agents. By analyzing communication skills, adherence to scripts, and effectiveness in resolving customer inquiries, you can provide feedback to agents and coach them in how to improve.
Quality assurance: Speech analytics can enhance quality assurance by automatically flagging calls that meet certain criteria for review. This allows quality assurance teams to focus their efforts on the most relevant conversations and identify areas for improvement.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Call Center Analytics

Before call center analytics, figuring out what was and wasn’t working in your call center was pretty hit-and-miss. You could record phone calls, but going through thousands of calls to gain insight was a laborious process. Luckily, call center analytics gives you powerful information without the need to hire a team.

Using call center analytics offers several advantages if you’re looking to improve call center operations. Here are some of the key benefits:

Improved performance: Call center analytics provide valuable insight into performance metrics like call volumes, response times, and agent productivity. By understanding where your call center needs improvement, you can come up with actionable strategies based on data.
Enhanced customer satisfaction: Analyzing customer interactions lets you better understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points. When you address these, you will notice improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Integrated: Most call center analytics software is integrated with your cloud contact center software. This means you don’t have to learn any advanced technical skills in order to take advantage of call center analytics.
Real-time monitoring: Some call center analytics tools provide real-time insights that let managers monitor operations as they unfold. This means your organization can make quick decisions to address issues promptly.
Optimized staffing levels: Call center analytics can help your organization optimize resource allocation and staffing levels based on call volume forecast. This ensures that you are adequately staffed to handle incoming calls without overstaffing, leading to cost savings and improved efficiency.

While call center analytics offer tons of advantages, there are some potential disadvantages. Here are some of the key drawbacks:

Impersonal: While call center analytics can give you an idea of overall customer trends, at the end of the day, metrics are not very personal. If you only focus on the numbers, you may not adequately take care of individual customer needs. It’s important to strike a balance between data-driven insights and human judgment and intuition.
Manipulated: Some call center agents who have been working for a long time know how to manipulate their metrics by shortening calls. This leads to unhappy customers whose concerns are not actually taken care of.
Resistance from staff: Call center agents may perceive call center analytics as a means of micromanaging them. This can lead to concerns about job security or privacy. It’s important to involve agents and help them understand the benefits of call center analytics.

The Best Call Center Analytics Software

With so many different providers of call center analytics software, it can be tricky to find the one that will work for you. You’ll want to look at your specific needs, the size of your call center, budget, and integration capabilities. Here are our top picks for call center analytics software:

Nextiva: As our top pick, Nextiva is a robust solution that offers CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) with advanced call center analytics. With Nextiva, you get real-time monitoring, visual wallboards for managers, and historical reporting of KPIs. Plus, Nextiva has some of the best customer service on the market so that you can minimize downtime and tackle issues fast.
Five9: Five9 offers a cloud-based contact center platform with integrated analytics. It includes real-time reporting, historical analytics, speech analytics, and AI-powered insights to optimize your operations. Five9’s analytics platform is flexible, with both pre-built and custom metrics so you can track what matters to your organization.
Nice CX: Nice CX is a cloud-based contact center platform with built-in AI that automates call center analytics and helps you provide a more personalized experience for customers. Nice provides interaction analytics, generative AI for taking data-driven actions, a dashboard for easy access to reporting and process analytics.
Talkdesk: Talkdesk offers a cloud contact center with built-in analytics. This platform is particularly great for speech analytics, with interaction analytics, topic classification, and sentiment analysis. Real-time sensors help you address issues before they escalate, and business intelligence helps you make data-driven decisions.

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Important Call Center Analytics Features

While the exact features that you need will depend on your organization, there are some key features that will make using call center analytics work for you:

Real-time monitoring: The ability to monitor your call center operations in real-time lets your supervisors and managers quickly identify issues like high call volumes or long wait times and take immediate actions.
Historical reporting: Historical reporting features enable your call center to analyze trends and patterns over time so you can then forecast future needs.
Integration: Integration with other systems and data sources, like CRM systems, workforce management tools, and quality assurance platforms, is crucial to effectively use your call center analytics. Look for software that can integrate with the platforms you already use.
Omnichannel approach: With the popularity of contact centers, you need call center analytics software that takes an omnichannel approach. If you’re only getting data from customer calls, for example, you miss out on valuable insights from other touchpoints along the customer journey.

How to Analyze Call Center Data

With powerful technology enabled by AI, collecting data has become simple. But data alone isn’t enough. Learning how to analyze call center data will help you make data-driven decisions that will take your organization to the next level.

Here’s a general guide for how to analyze call center data:

Define objectives and key metrics. Determine the KPIs and metrics that are relevant to your goals.
Collect and prepare data. Gather from call recordings, CRM systems, ticketing systems, and quality assurance evaluations. CCaaS like Nextiva makes this process seamless by integrating all your platforms in one.
Explore data. Use data visualization tools and techniques to explore data and identify patterns. Histograms, scatter plots, and time series plots can help uncover insights and anomalies.
Develop strategies. Use the call center analytics to predict future performance and develop data-driven strategies for improvement.
Share with your team. Find an engaging way to share the call center analytics so that your team will be more likely to buy in.

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How Advanced Analytics Can Improve Your Business

While basic KPIs like average handling time, call volumes, and agent productivity give you important information, they don’t tell the whole story. Advanced analytics like text analytics, self-service analytics, predictive analytics, speech analytics, and business intelligence give you a better understanding of your customer, their needs and preferences, as well as their pain points. Going beyond quantitative analytics can significantly improve your business by providing deeper insights that enable better decision-making. Here are some of the ways advanced analytics can improve your business:

Customer understanding: Because advanced analytics techniques map a fuller picture of the customer journey, they give you a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs and behavior. By analyzing historical data, you can identify trends, predict future behaviors, and tailor your services and marketing efforts to better meet customer demand.
Risk management: Advanced analytics enables your business to assess and mitigate risks more effectively. By analyzing large volumes of data, you can identify potential threats and vulnerabilities. Anomaly detection and predictive modeling, for example, can help you anticipate and proactively address risks related to fraud, cybersecurity, and market fluctuations.
Innovation: Advanced analytics can also fuel innovation during product development. Because these call center analytics help you understand market trends and consumer preferences, you can identify new opportunities for innovation and stay ahead of your competition.

How to Use Call Center Analytics

Once you’ve collected and analyzed your data, your job isn’t done. You need to develop improvement strategies based on the call center analytics. Here are a few ways you can use call center analytics to improve your business:

Track agent performance: With call center analytics, managers can track the performance of agents using KPIS like average handling time, first call resolution rate, and adherence to scripts. With this information, managers can find areas for improvement, provide tailored coaching and training to agents, as well as identify top performers.
Improve customer relationships: Another way you should be using call center analytics is to improve relationships with your customers. Sentiment analysis tools can gauge customer sentiment during interactions, identifying positive or negative emotions expressed by customers. Call center analytics can also help identify common issues, trends, and preferences. With a better understanding of your customers’ needs, you can tailor your strategies to improve relationships with them.
Act in real-time: Real-time call center analytics gives you the power to make data-driven decisions in real time. Managers can view real-time dashboards and alerts to address issues promptly. Speech analytics, for example, can help you monitor customer sentiment during agent interactions and step in before the call escalates.

If you’re ready to start using call center analytics, OneStop Communication can help. We’ll provide you with quotes from different providers to help you find the contact center software with the right call center analytics for your needs. We’re also here for all your other business telecom needs–whether you’re looking to get started with VoIP or find high-speed business internet.

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