With Benchmark Portal’s Call Center Campus Week (November 10-14, 2014 | Planet Hollywood, Las Vegas) coming up next week, I got to thinking about the importance of continuous learning and improvement in the call center industry. We have learned that a veritable wealth of information can be mined through any company’s call center support line. Information collection isn’t limited to simple data, like names and addresses. Customer service agents can easily collect information about the age, profession and particular service needs of each customer. Unfortunately, much of this valuable data is never properly used. Instead, in many organizations it sits on a spreadsheet or notepad somewhere and collects dust instead of serving as valuable resources for your business.

Customer Support and Applications of Data Mining

Industry professionals define data mining as ”the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information – information that can be used to increase revenue, cut costs, or both.” Contact Center Managers can raise their game and make a bigger impact on the business when they step up and lever the tools and resources at their disposal. As we all know, often the primary point of contact between the customer and the company is the customer support agent.

With a little thought, planning and then scripting, support agents can collect the type of information that is most valuable to the company, such as demographics and opinion on products. Moreover, they can also be a low pressure high value sales channel if needs can be defined and pain/gain uncovered during a service call. The purpose of basic data mining techniques is to help the company’s marketing team understand what exactly attracts customers to their products. Is it a new trend with young buyers? A business solution for medium-sized companies? Or is it a niche product with a customer base in one specific geographic location?

New Age of Mining

In the old days….One of the best ways to accomplish the data mining process is specifically through text mining. Why? Text could be analyzed by keywords, dates, numbers and even phrases. This made it much simpler for a customer support agent to input data to a platform and also made it possible for data mining software and searches to be successful.

Today however, dynamic tools and platforms allow case dispositions and sub dispositions at all steps in the process. This means that you can do Pareto analysis to determine your big rocks and opportunities with greater accuracy in real time. Also standardized and automated journal entries help you find common issues quickly and reduce the variability between agents. Furthermore, targeted survey functions and interval follow-up tools put the finer detail on the company’s Customer Engagement Process.

Finally, and I think this is the biggest win to date, emerging integration platforms are allowing information to be correlated and mined from multiple platforms in real time. Some folks call this using “big data”…I like to think of it as using available data efficiently. Contact centers that are making information gleaned work for them using actionable reporting and dashboards are already seeing huge bottom line results.

Data mining and management is an intensive process that can undoubtedly help you build your company and earn continued customer loyalty. Moreover…those who are doing it well are building a solid career skill that spans centers and industries. Through various data mining methods, your call center representatives can collect and leverage data to help improve your customer engagement, their customer support enjoyment — and ultimately, your business’s success.