Contact centers 
have enormous potential to provide departments across the organization with valuable insight and support. This can include input on customers, products, services, and processes—information that, when captured and used, can transform your organization’s ability to innovate, meet customer expectations, and provide great experiences.
The benefits to the broader organization can be significant and varied. Consider the value to functional areas (and the potential return on investment) when the contact center does the following:
- Helps operational areas or manufacturing units pinpoint and fix quality problems, which boosts customer satisfaction and repeat purchases, reduces costs associated with warranties and repairs, and prevents unnecessary contacts to the organization. (A related benefit of this effort is that you’ll discover how your contact center is annoying customers and ways to fix them.)
- Assists marketing in developing more effective campaigns. For example, having a better understanding of what customers need and want can improve personalization and response rates, reduce relative marketing costs, and help the organization boost market share.
- Serves as an early warning system for potential legal troubles. Product defects, reactions to food or prescription drugs, security holes in an app or website, inaccuracies in warranty statements or customer invoices—the list can go on and on, and the contact center is often first to hear of these issues. Having strong, collaborative ties to other areas of the organization is a prerequisite to handling them quickly and effectively.
- Helps research and development identify customer needs and the organization’s competitive advantages. In many ways, focus groups, market research and traditional broad-based surveys are no match for the insight the contact center can capture through interactions with hundreds or even thousands of prospects and customers. This input helps the organization provide better products and services, favorably influencing costs, revenue, market share, and the organization’s reputation. And it’s often a big boost to employee engagement.
- Enables the organization to improve self-service and knowledge management based on the assistance the contact center provides to customers who opt out of or need help with systems or apps. This improves and lowers the costs of providing service, boosts customer satisfaction, and ensures that the center can focus on issues that really require or benefit from agent involvement.