The Benefits of Real-Time Metrics in the Contact Center

Do you know exactly what’s going on in your contact center? 

What happens between your agents and customers during a call? How often do your reps adhere to the compliance and quality guidelines you’ve set out for them? Are you spending too much time dealing with queries, or not enough? 

Historical reports and analytics can give you an insight into the trends of your customer service function. However, if you really want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to know what’s happening in real-time too.  

Real-time monitoring could be the key to discovering issues within your contact center and solving them immediately. The result is better budget and resource management, happier customers, and a more productive team.  

What is Real-Time Monitoring?  

There are two ways that companies can collect information about the contact center.  

Historical reporting and analytics allow users to gather information over time for a better look at the bigger picture. You might be able to see the average number of abandoned calls you’ve had in a week for each employee or how many calls you’ve handled overall throughout a single workday.  

Real-time monitoring is different because these tools allow you to see what’s happening in the moment. You’re not getting data after the fact, but an overview of what’s happening in every part of your contact center instantly.  

Real-time monitoring tools allow managers and supervisors to oversee agent performance and track tasks as they’re carried out. Real-time monitoring gives business access to various crucial insights in real-time. You can analyze the quality of calls and pay attention to issues with your network. Companies can set up dashboards with real-time alerts and notifications.  

Real-time monitoring also allows companies to design wallboards for their employees, so team members can track how well they’re performing at any moment.  

With real-time metrics, you can respond to issues as they happen and eliminate problems immediately before they have time to leave a lasting imprint on your brand reputation.  

Here are the benefits of real-time metrics in your contact center 

1. It Creates Consistent Customer Service 

With a historical analytics system, you can track the ups and downs of customer experience over a specific period. For instance, you might notice that during certain days last month, you had more abandoned calls than usual, or more “unsatisfied” clients.  

Unfortunately, there’s little that you can do to fix those negative metrics, except from trying to figure out what caused the problem and avoiding it in future. With a real-time call monitoring solution, supervisors can be instantly alerted to issues as they happen. When a supervisor sees a conversation with a customer going south, they can jump into the discussion in whisper mode and deliver guidance to employees – even when those staff members are working remotely.  

The right software can even come with “barge-in” features that allow supervisors to take control of the discussion if the agent needs a higher level of support. With real-time monitoring, you can maintain a consistent level of high-quality experiences for your customers, and rectify problems while conversations are still in progress.

2. Real-Time Monitoring Enlightens Employees 

When you have a comprehensive system in place to track what’s happening in the contact center, you can give supervisors an end-to-end view of the customer journey. However, you can also provide your agents with the extra information they need to make the right decisions during a discussion. Through things like sentiment analysis, you could potentially detect the presence of an unhappy customer and use AI to search for proven strategies on how to fix the problem.  

A speech analytics system could respond to words like “close” or “cancel” by automatically providing your employees with advice on what kind of deals and offers they can give an unhappy customer. Through wallboard technology, you can also help your employees both remote and in the office to track their performance.  

Wallboard tools make it easier for you to show your staff members how their performance measures up to the benchmarks that are typical for your business, or industry. You can track everything from the call resolution times of your agents to how many calls are typically abandoned each day. With wallboards, your staff members are more likely to feel engaged at work, even if they’re not working in the office.  

Tracking the most valuable metrics and sharing them with your team keeps everyone working towards the same goals. It also means that you have the information you need to reward top performers and inspire other team members to follow suit.  

3. It Shows Who Needs Extra Training 

Real-time reporting is an excellent way to collect information about which of your team members are the true superstars, and which may need additional help. Every agent will have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. With in-depth information through real-time reporting, you can get a better idea of what makes one agent great, and another less so.  

You may also be able to get a better idea of which areas your team members need more training in. For instance, if your employees regularly keep call resolution time to a certain level, maybe they need help figuring out how to resolve problems faster? Perhaps you could teach your staff how to access your available tools to find information faster to resolve queries?  You might even find that using different tools leads to better results. For instance, do employees using Microsoft Teams for collaboration resolve issues faster? 

Once you’ve implemented your coaching strategies, you can also use your real-time metrics and monitoring to measure the impact that different kinds of development have on your team.  

4. Real-Time Monitoring Helps with Compliance 

Compliance is an issue that no company can afford to overlook. To stay ahead of the competition and delight customers, today’s business leaders need to ensure that they’re recording the right information, storing data correctly, and staying secure.  

In a world where more employees are working away from the traditional office, it’s not always easy to keep a close eye on which of your team members are following policies and guidelines. Your real-time monitoring solution can help with this. By providing you with an insight into what’s really happening in your organization, your monitoring system can protect you from serious issues.  

You may even be able to recognize when a compliance issue is happening in real-time, so managers can quickly jump into action and resolve the problem. Proper monitoring could be the key to protecting your business against some significant privacy problems, regulatory issues, and even fines. It’s also a great way to see whether you need to update your policies or provide extra information to team members who might be struggling with compliance.  

5. You Can Adapt to Changing Trends and Needs  

Customer expectations and service trends are changing at a rapid pace. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a rapid evolution in the way that people interact with companies. If you rely exclusively on historical data to show you how your business needs to adapt, you may find that you’ve already lost crucial customers before you’ve made the right changes.  

When you can see how every part of the customer journey works to drive positive or negative connections with your customers, it’s much easier to build strategies for long-term success. You may discover that you achieve higher satisfaction scores with your customers when your remote employees tackle message-based conversations, and your in-office staff deal with calls.  

You might learn that offering your customers more ways to get in touch with your business through SMS and messaging means that your average hold time begins to decrease for team members. Real-time analytics allow you to build an agile contact center that can evolve at the same rate as your customers.  

Make the Most of Real-Time Metrics 

Using real-time metrics in the contact center is how businesses can ensure they’re taking a proactive approach to excellent customer service. Historical reporting and information collected over time can give you a bigger picture of how your business and CX strategy has evolved. But in today’s fast-moving landscape, you’ll need information in real-time to make sure that you’re staying ahead of the competition.  

Particularly now, in an age of remote and hybrid work, where your employees are confused, and your customers are searching for stronger levels of support, speed is of the essence. By the time you’ve pinpointed the trends in your historical data and made appropriate changes, your assessments may already be out of date.  

Accurate real-time metrics show you behind the scenes of the experience landscape. Don’t be left behind due to a lack of relevant information.