Think of your contact center as one big focus group since your contact center is a gold mine of market intelligence. The analysis of phone calls, e-mails, and other customer communications can help you spot market trends, better understand customer likes/dislikes, identify problems with products or systems and capture ideas for new opportunities. Your call center is the hub of intelligence for the rest of your organization. For example, look at how several organizations used expanded monitoring:

Airline
The contact center team listens to calls every month and forwards its findings to the marketing department. One month it listened to calls regarding a special fare promotion. It learned that many callers didn't buy because of frequent-flier programs at competing airlines which led the airline to offer additional incentives. The airline did not have this information from any other source.

Internet
Using voice recognition technology, this company searches recorded customer calls for:

• Customers who are about to end their service (looking for words such as "cancel").
• Customers who are about to switch to a competitor (searching for competitor names).
• Angry customers (customers using foul language and rising voices).
• Confused customers (customers who repeat words and phrases).

Retail
Agent voice and data keystrokes are recorded. IT staff is able to troubleshoot bugs and problems with the Web site in real time. Since the IT department can see the actual keystrokes that led to any problems, fixes are made more quickly. Fixes are also less expensive to execute, because IT personnel don't have to fly to a contact center in hopes of seeing a recurring problem.