Knowing why customers contact you and how you address their needs is a foundation for managing business operations such as customer contact centers, retail stores and branch offices. Solutions capturing this information provide views of:

• The issue, question or offer that triggers a customer contact
• The underlying condition or need that caused the trigger
• How the issue is resolved
• How these factors vary over time, ie, trends
• How these contact reasons are different for each channel, for instance across branch offices, customer contact centers and self-service alternatives

Discover the Right Mix of Data Sources

There are many approaches to capturing contact reason data and a solution should be as automated as possible, limiting manual data entry. There are two different themes to address in understanding how to capture the data. The first represents a set of business questions:

• What are the business uses for the information?
• How accurate does the data need to be to meet the business goals?
• What is the value of the information? This provides a guide to the appropriate level of investment and operating costs.

The next set of questions focus on comparing alternative methods for data capture and providing the foundation for solution design:

• What are the alternative data capture methods?
• How accurate is the data resulting from each?
• By combining the results of several data capture methods, can data accuracy increase?
• What is the investment and operating costs of each solution?
• How well do they meet the business goals?

A single approach, such as agent entered data or PC APIs, may or may not give one the desired results. A company may have to combine the results of several methods of data capture into a single solution in order to achieve the resolution and accuracy needed to meet the business goals.