Your contact center can handle hundreds of millions of customer interactions each year. At iQor (News - Alert), we believe each and every one of these calls, emails, chat sessions, and social media responses generates a series of important data points – small but useful clues, like strands of DNA. Utilizing the right digital network, infrastructure, tools, and processes to analyze, innovate and act, today’s advanced contact centers can assemble these strands to help organizations develop a deeper understanding of their customers and, in turn, connect with and delight them more intelligently.
CONTACT CENTERS: BIG DATA GENERATING MACHINES
Just a few years ago, only a handful of iQor’s current processes were in use. iQor pioneered the digitization of the contact center with its proprietary technology platform, teQ21. Advancements in this platform have enabled us to not only record 100 percent of calls and screen interactions across all channels, but also segment and categorize the terabytes of structured and unstructured data sets that hide within them. iQor’s expertise in Big Data analytics allows contact centers to take advantage of the patterns that reside in the millions of recorded client interactions and use that information to improve customer connections.
IQOR CENTER FOR APPLIED ANALYTICS
We established the iQor Center for Applied Analytics to help our clients decode their customers’ DNA and gain valuable insights not available through traditional data capture. Our team of data scientists collaborates with our clients to transform data into actionable insights that drive profitability, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.
FOUR KEY STEPS TO CREATING CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
If you want to use Big Data to understand your customers’ DNA, you should follow these four key steps:
Step 1: Develop the Right Data Infrastructure
Before you can understand customer DNA, you need a Big Data technology infrastructure. Your data platform doesn’t need to be costly: you can use off-the-shelf servers and open-source software. But, you must configure your platform to manage all of your data – structured and unstructured – to accommodate both scalability and immediate, on-demand access for your business applications and business users.
Step 2: Identify Your Data Sources
The more data sources you can incorporate into your Big Data platform, the better. You can start with data from structured, in-house sources but to drive new insights, you need sources that may not be immediately available or easily corralled. Your goal should be to combine these unstructured, harder-to-capture data (voice recordings, social media stream, consumer demographics, etc.) with the structured data (from operational databases) to make the breakthrough connections that maximize insight into your clients’ needs.
Step 3: Make Data Scientists Fundamental to Your Operations
The next step in the Big Data transformation process is enlisting data scientists who have the technical skills necessary to navigate your big data universe. Proven data scientists are an increasingly scarce commodity, but they will have the business acumen and analytical ability to develop hypotheses, generate results, uncover trends, and decode even your most complex customers’ DNA. These scientists may be in high demand right now, but without their expertise, you won’t unlock the wealth of information hidden within your data.
Step 4: Continuously Adapt and Evolve Your Data, Platform, and Strategy
Without this last step, you may still improve your reactive problem solving, but neither your data nor your Big Data platform will become a strategic investment. With every measurable success that you achieve through Big Data, you must reinvest in your platform, teams, and Big Data processes. The algorithms, data relationships, and analytical results that help you decode your customers’ DNA today won’t necessarily work next year or even next quarter. So your technology choices, cross-functional teams, and analytical implementations must be not only agile, but proactively, periodically calibrated to keep pace with – or better yet, stay ahead of – your customers’ changing needs and behaviors relative to your products and services.
Our advice to contact center leaders is to start building your Big Data capabilities today, before your competitors know more about your customers than you do. And know that you don’t have to go it alone: if you need data-driven, technology-empowered contact center solutions and a strong competitive edge, iQor can help you today.
