Modern contact centers generate vast volumes of data: from customer interaction histories and agent performance metrics to detailed system event logs.
By analyzing this information, contact center supervisors can assess the efficiency of operations within their departments, revealing where room for improvement lies. They can eventually define the proper measures to enhance the performance of contact centers.
Business intelligence (BI) technology serves as the enabler of these improvements by transforming raw data into actionable insights that can elevate overall contact center performance.
BI technologies can automatically collect relevant data from your multiple contact center systems and cleanse, standardize, and enrich the collected data to ensure it is suitable for analysis. BI also includes conversational intelligence drawn from customer and agent interactions.
Equally important, the business intelligence architecture incorporates software capable of transforming data into an intuitive, visual format, enabling users to explore insights interactively and with greater efficiency.
Here’s how BI technology can help you drive contact center performance and productivity, with some success stories.
Streamlining Agent Training and Upskilling
Overall contact center efficiency largely depends on agents’ performance, which is why continuous development of their skills and competencies is critical. Yet in large-scale environments, with hundreds or thousands of employees, identifying individual skill gaps and developing tailored upskilling programs remains a significant challenge.
BI technologies can…cleanse, standardize, and enrich the collected data…
Scoring agents’ performance is key to understanding where they fall short. By automating agent performance scoring across thousands of customer conversations, AI-powered BI systems enable supervisors to identify training needs. They can then create more efficient upskilling and coaching programs.
Case Study: Super-Sod
The example of Super-Sod, a U.S.-based grass seed supplier, can be illustrative in this regard. Previously, the company’s managers had to listen to and score contact center calls manually. But as they could only review less than 1% of the total calls, their ability to identify training gaps across agents was hindered.
So, in 2020 Super-Sod automated the conversation analytics process with the help of an AI-enabled BI solution (Observe.AI). It now helps managers analyze 100% of calls, uncovering missed sales opportunities and cross-selling gaps.
By developing tailored coaching programs based on the derived insights, the company increased sales dollars per call by 13% and the call-to-sale conversions by 8.4%.
BI implementation also helped Super-Sod identify and retain top-performing agents, which enabled the company to scale back its customer support team from nearly 50 members to 31 and cut total wage costs by 20%.
Enhancing Workforce Allocation and Planning
Contact centers traditionally face the challenge of aligning staffing with constantly fluctuating customer demand.
BI software helps supervisors analyze live operational data generated by a contact center. This includes information about current call volumes, handle time, and agent availability, which enables them to optimize staffing resource allocation on the fly.
Case Study: Auckland Eye
Auckland Eye, an ophthalmology clinic located in Auckland, New Zealand, lacked visibility into its contact center operations, which hindered supervisors’ ability to manage customer service agents efficiently. This, in turn, led to missed calls, long wait times, and other service quality issues.
The adoption of BI-providing monitoring, analysis, and reporting systems in 2021 enabled the company to track detailed metrics on contact center performance and drive operational excellence. Through a supplier (Dialpad) that worked with the company’s consultant (CNS), it can now track the number of customers in a call queue in real time.
Pariket Dhabuwala, Patient Services Manager at Auckland Eye, explained: “We currently have an alert set up that notifies designated people if there are four or more callers in the queue or if any call has been waiting for five minutes or more. This feature is really helpful because it means I don’t need to constantly monitor the phone lines and can focus on other tasks.”
The BI solution also allows the company to predict demand spikes and adjust agent schedules accordingly. Pariket added: “The heatmap section is helpful for managing the workforce and ensuring that we have the right number of agents online during peak times.”
Strengthening Risk Management
Modern contact centers must go beyond delivering omnichannel support, troubleshooting, and product upselling. Agents also need to identify and mitigate various types of risks, ranging from contact center fraud and compliance violations to customer vulnerability. Real-time risk identification, however, is rather challenging, especially for agents managing heavy workloads.
Case Study: Serco
BI systems are increasingly addressing the challenge. Serco, a U.K.-based health, defense, and transportation company, shifted from manually reviewing a small fraction of customer calls to analyzing 100% of omnichannel interactions (CallMiner) with an AI-enabled conversational intelligence tool.
Today, Serco can assess any customer interaction against multiple KPIs, including resolution rates, handle time, and customer service quality. This has already helped it improve quality management system (QM) metrics by 4.05%.
The BI solution also enabled Serco’s contact center agents to conduct real-time sentiment and emotion analysis to effectively identify the most vulnerable customers, such as individuals experiencing mental health trauma, and route them to specialized support teams.
In Q1 2025 alone, the conversational intelligence application enabled company staff to identify 2,500 safeguarding incidents. This helped Serco ensure timely support for hundreds of vulnerable individuals.
Final Thoughts
BI systems enable companies to automate and optimize data gathering, visualization, and analysis processes. They can facilitate data access for non-technical users, such as contact center managers.
…AI-powered BI systems enable supervisors to…create more efficient upskilling and coaching programs.
BI empowers supervisors to run accurate agent performance assessments, conduct customer feedback evaluations, and analyze live operational data. This improves both customer experience and contact center performance.
For organizations aiming to deliver efficient, consistent, and tailored customer support, the message is clear. BI implementation is a strategic imperative to achieving contact center excellence.
