Call Center Analytics Guide (2024)

The process of collecting and analyzing call center data to gain valuable insights about agent performance, call center performance, customer satisfaction and product performance is called call center analytics.

Which data to gather for analysis?

Different types of data that can be gathered for analysis include call recordings, tickets, customer satisfaction surveys, voice and speech and net promoter score (NPS). It is important to decide which data you want to collect before you start collecting them. This depends upon the key metrics that you want to monitor, such as call handling time, customer satisfaction score, agent turnover and ticket resolution rates.

Call center analytics provide insights not just into what is happening in the call center but also what you can expect to happen next. Let’s look at the most important call center analytics that are crucial to call center operations.

1. Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics helps in identifying and solving problems that can potentially happen in future. For instance, predictive analytics can help you determine the number of people required to handle call volumes during the holiday season. Forecast customer issues can also crop up more frequently in the coming weeks based on the current trends.

2. Voice Analytics

Voice analytics analyzes the audio for parameters, such as tone, pitch, stress and rhythm, of both the caller and the agent and is a necessity for call center managers.

Call center managers have always been able to monitor a call in real time but voice analytics gives them the necessary tools to predict in real time if a call is progressing in an undesirable way. This can lead to timely intervention to help the call agent resolve the issue. They can also create personalized training programs for their agents based on this information.

3. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics focuses on the words used in a conversation. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques, speech analytics tools can identify the key phrases and words used during the conversation. This helps gain customer experience insights and understand customer sentiment trends.

Advanced speech analytics can also enable managers to provide feedback to their agents as well as develop customized training programs for call agents.

4. Customer Satisfaction Analytics

Almost all call centers send out customer satisfaction surveys immediately after a call has ended. The very fact of whether the customer fills up the survey or not provides valuable information about customer satisfaction levels. An expertly designed customer satisfaction survey can be used to gain further insights into product performance, agent performance and customer experience.

5. Interaction Analytics

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to understand your customer better so that you expand not just your customer base but also understand how to reach out to them.

Customer interaction analytics offer insights into customer behavior, their unique needs and brand expectations. Sufficient size of customer interaction analytics can help businesses identify trends and uncover upselling/cross-selling opportunities.

6. Omnichannel analytics

Any customer that calls your contact center may already have interacted with the brand via other channels, such as social media, email or self-serve portal. Having omnichannel analytics data helps agents provide a highly customized experience to the callers, improving call handling times as well as customer satisfaction levels.

Call center analytics helps businesses not just understand what is currently happening with their call center operations but what they can expect in the future. Call center analytics primarily provide these benefits:

• Generate actionable insights that help improve future interactions with callers
• Help agents improve performance by analyzing their own customer interaction data
• Use AI and ML tools to analyze voice and speech for the calls, which helps managers provide timely interventions and develop personalized training programs
• Develop optimized workflows on the basis of customer behavior patterns
• Improve customer satisfaction levels by providing a highly personalized experience
• Reduce costs by decreasing call handling times as well as call volumes
• Identify issues that can be solved by interactive voice response (IVR) or self-serve portal

If you operate a call center or your business handles large call volumes, it makes sense to use call center software that helps in

• Setting up IVR
• Managing calls
• Routing calls automatically
• Analyzing call center data
• Optimizing agent productivity
• Reducing operations cost by using the latest technologies, such as voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP)

There are dozens of call center software, such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, Aircall and Salesforce, that provide excellent analytics to power your call center operations. Forbes Advisor evaluated them to come up with this list of best call center software of 2024.

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A word of caution here. Before you explore the different options available, you must be clear about your own business needs, budget and preferences. Only then should you assess the software on the basis of their capabilities, flexibility, support and cost.

Bottom Line

Call center operations generate humongous amounts of data. Which data you should collect and analyze depends completely upon your business needs and preferences. It is often seen that even if the analytics are available, they are not really implemented for business growth. It could be because the amount of information available is overwhelming, or there is no consensus in the organization about implementation.

It is advisable to draw up a business plan with respect to the data you wish to collect and metrics you wish to monitor before you generate the insights and start implementing them. Even when there is consensus on implementation, start small with just two or three metrics and scale from there.