Everyone knows that call center analytics are essential. But are real-time analytics really beneficial, or are they simply a nice-to-have for bigger brands?

Real-time analytics are quickly becoming more common in call centers and can allow teams to monitor, analyze, track and implement changes continuously and quickly. In our experience—with decades of customer service experience behind us and years of experience implementing and using real-time analytics with our clients—we believe that real-time analytics can benefit almost every modern call center.

In this article, we’ll discuss why—the benefits of real-time analytics, how they can help, and how your team can be prepared to implement them.

Real-Time Call Center Analytics: An In-Depth Look

Real-time analytics provide call data metrics, but, of course, in real-time. Modern software monitors and updates analytics dashboards and data sets continuously. In addition, real-time monitoring can provide enhanced and ongoing metrics and QA coverage for agent calls and customer interactions. Not only does this provide more accurate and up-to-date metrics, but it allows call center management to react to current call center conditions accordingly.

For example, call volume and call wait time are two of the most-commonly tracked call center analytics. With standard analytics, you may be able to identify periods when call volume and wait times were high and forecast accordingly for the future, but it wouldn’t have helped you in the moment—because you wouldn’t have even known at the time that call volume was increasing.

Real-time analytics let you monitor data like wait times and call volume on an ongoing basis, so you can act accordingly. If call volume is spiking, you might pull in additional agents, start routing calls to an overflow center or take other action to manage changes as they occur.

Of course, call volume and wait times are not the only real-time metrics you can track. Many call centers also use real-time analytics and monitoring to measure:

• FCR rates
• AHT
• Abandonment Rates
• Time in Queue
• Average Hold Times
• voice and speech analytics
• productivity and operational analytics

Benefits of Real-Time Analytics in Call Center Operations

Though any analytics are better than none at all, real-time analytics can provide ample benefits for your call center operations, quality and customer satisfaction. Here are five key benefits real-time analytics provide:

Enhanced customer experiences. Creating a consistent and memorable (in a good way) customer experience at every touchpoint is one of the key benefits of a contact center—and real-time analytics help make this possible. For one, real-time analytics allow your team to solve problems in the moment as opposed to identifying and addressing them months down the road—when it’s likely too late to deliver better experiences to your existing customers.

Consider that 92% of customers will change brands after just three—or fewer—negative experiences, and you realize that you don’t have much margin for error. With real-time analytics, you can ensure consistent service by staying agile and constantly being on top of your current experiences.

Improved operational efficiency. The more consistent and continuous your data, the better ability you’ll have to operate efficiently—as you’ll be able to see metrics in real-time and understand what’s helping or harming your operations. For example, monitoring FCR or AHT on a monthly or quarterly basis can give you a great overall picture of how your agents and quality are improving or declining over time. But having a constant picture of FCR or AHT—compared to that morning, yesterday, or last week at the same time—can allow you to more easily identify patterns and deliver necessary support to improve operations as things unfold.

Stronger QA support. Typical QA programs require recorded voice calls that are then transcribed and analyzed—either by a software program or manually. While software speeds this process considerably, it still all happens after the call is completed. In contrast, real-time call monitoring provides monitoring and analytics as the call unfolds, providing immediate support for escalations, solutions and restoring customer satisfaction.

Not only does this strengthen the quality of your service in the moment, but it also allows teams to provide monitoring, analysis and feedback on a significantly greater portion of calls—potentially even all of them, rather than a small subset—enhancing your QA program and reducing the time between analysis and implementation to nearly zero.

Greater agent feedback and empowerment. The sooner feedback occurs after a given interaction, the more effective it is. Unfortunately, many QA processes take weeks or even months to complete, meaning that agent feedback is generally delivered to agents several weeks after the call in question occurred—making it more difficult for agents to remember and implement feedback. With real-time monitoring and analytics, you can offer agents solutions in the moment and provide post-call feedback faster.

For example, with text and speech analytics, you can monitor sentiment and key phrases that indicate a call might be escalating or derailing and provide agents with real-time support to fix problems before they begin. Real-time call feedback can also provide agents with helpful solutions and knowledge base support based on the questions or key phrases the customer is using.

Guiding strategic decision making. The quicker you can get data, the quicker you can implement it. As today’s market—and customer expectations—shift quickly, real-time data helps you be more agile and strategic about your business decisions. Know what’s working and what’s not right away, so you don’t have to spend months heading towards a dead-end before pivoting. Instead, real-time analytics allow you to make strategic decisions both for customer experience—with sentiment analysis and call center voice analytics—and operations.

Implementing Real-Time Analytics in Your Call Center

How can you implement real-time analytics in your call center?

First, understand your current analytics situation and readiness. Do you already have analytics software implemented and an effective process for analyzing and implementing data and insights? Or are you starting from scratch? Obviously, if you’re not yet monitoring any (or many) metrics, implementing real-time analytics will require more resources and support.

In addition, you’ll need to be running your call center on compatible software and systems. For example, many traditional phone systems can’t monitor or track call data, which makes implementing real-time analytics impossible. Instead, you’ll need to be using up-to-date call center technology, such as cloud-based telephony systems, modern CRMs and so on.

Once you have the appropriate foundations in place, you’ll need to choose an analytics tool that has the capability you need. Many modern contact center solutions will offer omnichannel analytics or other analytics tools, but not necessarily real-time analytics, so look for that functionality directly. At ROI CX Solutions, we use Five9 systems which supports real-time, as well as predictive and historic analytics.

Finally, you’ll need to ensure your staff—agents and management—are fully trained on using and leveraging real-time analytics to generate the strongest business insights. Agents should be familiar with any real-time monitoring available, but management should also be trained on effective feedback techniques, data analysis and interpretation and so on to get the most out of your tools.

Conclusion

All of this can be difficult to manage in in-house call centers, but outsourcing can make it significantly easier to implement real-time call center analytics.

At ROI CX Solutions, we’ve helped implement real-time analytics for clients in industries as diverse as Automotive to Fashion. After implementing advanced real-time analytics, our clients have seen:

• improved agent performance due to real-time tracking
• 3x as many booked appointments
• reducing email response times to just 30 minutes
• maintaining high service levels, answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds or less
• improved customer satisfaction after implementing virtual agents assistants

If you’re ready to make use of real-time analytics to improve your customer satisfaction and strengthen your service, see if outsourcing can help make it possible. Connect with an expert from ROI CX Solutions and we’ll show you how we can help you achieve your goals with real-time analytics in just a few months.