Ventana Research Finds Demand for Timely Contact Center Analytics

New benchmark research released by Ventana Research indicates that organizations are aware of the potential for extending the application of analytics to customer satisfaction and other business-related measures, but have a ways to go in developing relevant metrics and KPIs and providing them when both front-line agents and decision-makers need them.

Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to acquire real-world information about maturity, trends and best practices in how contact centers use analytics. It explores how they do this now, how their people feel about the current processes and tools, plans they have to change or improve them, and benefits they hope to gain by doing so.

The research found that the traditional emphasis on efficiency persists, with average call-handling time and the number of interactions handled still the most important process metrics. However, first-contact resolution, which is a measure of effectiveness as well as efficiency, ranked third in the new research. It also showed that awareness of customer satisfaction is an increasingly central concern, but currently only slightly more than half of organizations regularly use analytics for customer experience management. We conclude that customer-related analytics are on the radar of decision-makers, but in practice not many companies have implemented them.

For metrics to be fully useful, contact center practitioners need to receive them immediately. However, fewer than one in 12 companies receive their metrics as soon as they are generated and fewer than one-fifth receive them on the same day. And while the research analysis indicates that most organizations view developing agent-specific effectiveness metrics as very important, organizations lag in providing advanced metrics and tools to help agents improve their performance, though they are looking in that direction.

Analysis of the research using the Ventana Research Maturity Index determined that most organizations are not very mature in their use of analytics in the contact center. More than half rank at the two lowest maturity levels, while fewer than one in five are at the highest Innovative level. Among the four categories in which we assess maturity, organizations are slightly more mature in the Information and Technology categories and less mature in People and Process.

More information on the contact center industry can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com.