This blog post was co-authored by Genesys technology partner, eMite.

Nearly everyone has a customer service horror story — even people who work in customer service know how frustrating customer experience can be. Most negative customer experiences don’t result from companies that don’t care. They’re a symptom of having little insight into those negative customer experiences so they can’t improve them. That’s why data is so critical — it enables companies to turn their contact centers into customer experience centers.

When it comes to your data, the devil is in the details. As cliché as that sounds, it can be difficult to know what those details are or how to identify them. Often what’s happening with your contact center, good and bad, can feel like it’s going on inside a black box. It can feel nearly impossible to implement a strategy to improve your customers’ experiences. And it’s even more difficult knowing what to care about or what your data means when you have no context around it.

There are three basic steps — and a fourth less common one — for turning your contact center into a customer experience center.

  1. Collect the data. This seems obvious and, if you’re using call center software, you have a lot of the basic data you need. But you also need to consider workforce management software, your CRM system and the helpdesk. All that data matters; it adds context to the basic contact center KPIs we’ve become accustomed to. While you hopefully have all this data, half of contact centers in 2018 said they still have technology needs.
  2. Someone in your organization needs to understand the data you’re collecting. Deploying an analytics solution and building reports is impossible if you’re not familiar with the metrics you need to measure and the KPIs you must monitor. If you don’t have that knowledge inhouse, find a vendor who has out-of-the-box reports and contact center expertise to help you. If you don’t, you’ll spend money on a solution that you don’t use six months later.
  3. You need an analytics tool that can correlate data across your various sources. This might be the hardest step; not every platform can bring the CRM system, helpdesk and other data sources together to correlate with your contact center data. Doing this helps you build expert-level KPIs that give you actionable insights — not just interesting information. For more information on this, check out the latest eMite on-demand webinar.

The final step for companies that are ready to proactively address their customer experience challenges is to have  a scalable analytics solution. If you already have a solution in place and it scales, that’s great. Dynamic and cost-effective solutions empower your teams with self-service analytics, making your entire organization more responsive to every challenge — from the daily to the extraordinary.

Once you’ve done these four things, you can identify and strategize improvements to your customers’ experiences, turning those customers into the brand advocates. If you’re in the market for contact center analytics, check out eMite on the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.