Regardless of where your personal interests lie in information technology, you're likely tasked with the details of implementation for everything from new printer configurations to optimizing your contact center with multiple communication channels. The latter can be a challenge; you have a lot of data and a lot of needs. Where do you start? And what do you need to know when you're assigned to this endeavor?

Let's talk about data first.

Mining Data from Your Multichannel Contact Center

Optimization demands data. You'll probably be mandated to gather certain information. From a technical standpoint, you'll need three things: documentation, real-time reporting and historical reporting.

Your reporting system needs to be robust. It should combine reports for voice conversations, your web presence, email, text and even faxing and social media (if that's still a form of contact you use). Don't use disparate systems; those lead to disparate reports and difficulty optimizing. You'll want to manipulate all of your information in a single reporting infrastructure, which also helps to mitigate increased workflow.

What if you don't have a way to document everything? Now might be the time to get started with new technologies, like voice documentation with analytics. From both quality assurance and compliance standpoints, voice documentation has high value. You'll need something that isn't controlled by an agent (in other words, non-biased) and that is archivable and automatic.

Today, you can find technologies that not only record voice, but also record agent screens and tie the screengrabs to the voice data. Your applications should include voice quality standards — and if you want to get ahead of things, you should take the next step and begin sourcing analytics solutions. These packages run queries through all of your voice data, doing the grunt work. You could find out, for instance, exactly how often a specific statement crosses your rep's lips, or how often customers ask a certain question.

Most voice analytics systems will allow for recording, but data mining your analytics is a new topic. You might already be recording voice data for compliance purposes, but never checking that information unless a compliance issue arises.

"Recordings can give you a vast treasure trove of information. But because it's so vast and so random, no one will take the time to sort through it," says Jim Tynan, Twinstate's VP of Sales. With solutions that run queries, you don't have to spend the time sorting. You just get more, better and easier to parse data.

Today, these solutions might come with a price tag larger than what your company is ready for.

"But with technologies like this, the application's price will be driven down over time," says Tynan. "It will be commonplace in five years."

Technical Optimization Needs

Now that you know your data mining needs, optimization is your next step. Everything you do should be in a virtual environment (whether it's on premise, in the cloud or co-located), in order to increase resiliency and uptime and decrease management touch points. That also gives you high availability.

If your multichannel contact center is not a source of excellent data that tell you how you can improve, it's probably not doing as great of a job helping your business as it could be. So gather information about management's needs and organizational costs, and start working toward compiling the best possible reports to show where you need to go next. Then you can begin optimizing both workflows and technology to suit both your customers and your organization.

If your multichannel contact center is not a source of excellent data, it's not helping you. Click to tweet.