Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Q&A With InetSoft on Business Intelligence

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

One key management axiom is that “you can never have enough information.” The more you know, the better the chance that the decisions you make will be the right ones.

Business intelligence (BI) enables organizations to derive information from the vast and increasing amounts of data collected -- and needed -- for timely and effective decision-making. That includes strategically for enterprises and especially tactically in contact centers where revenues and operations can be improved and costs lowered to drive up profitability.

For those reasons, BI is hot. And to get a handle on BI needs and trends, TMCnet recently interviewed Mark Flaherty, who is chief marketing officer of InetSoft Technology, a leading BI solutions firm.

TMCnet: Outline the BI needs for contact centers. Do you see more interest in BI tools and what are key drivers?

MF: Contact centers create mountains of data, and for decades now contact center management has become a science of performance management. The common metrics people watch for are things like average hold time and first call resolution rate.

But there is so much data being generated, that there is a lot of untapped potential to track even more metrics. For instance, you can get down to data at the representative level and use it as a tool to improve individual performance. Even marketing and product management departments have knowledge to gain from mining data that can lead to new marketing campaigns to upsell products or to new product features or fixes. So now the drivers are squeezing more knowledge out of the large amounts of data that are pouring through contact centers.

The interest in using more BI tools is going up. CRM and contact management applications will continue to evolve to have better built-in BI capabilities to help contact center managers do their jobs better. And the new capabilities for self-service in standalone BI solutions that access contact center data directly make it possible for other functions to explore and analyze the data for these second-order benefits.

TMCnet: What role do you see predictive analytics play in BI applications? Are contact centers shifting from a reactive to a predictive mode, for what areas and why?

MF: I think you have to be careful in setting expectations for predictive analytics. I think some vendors are marketing it as artificial intelligence that will solve problems for you. Predictive analytics still means using past performance to project future performance, not predict it.

That being said, there are at least two key applications for predictive analytics today in contact centers. One is to spot deviations from normal or historical trends. Things like call spikes that don’t map to historical seasonal patterns can jump up as alerts very quickly.

A greater opportunity exists in areas like customer retention. Predictive models can be built that take into account individual customer’s contact activity to raise alarms if one shows a pattern that matches that of people churning in the past. Building such a predictive model, however, is not something BI applications can do automatically. It still requires statistical modeling and segmentation analysis using specialized software and highly skilled analysts. But once models are built, a flexible BI application can use them and apply up-to-the-minute data to generate the desired alarms.

TMCnet: What impacts are other trends e.g. rise of the mobile and social channels, increased IVR/speech and web self-service and growing privacy and security are having on BI deployment and usage?

MF: Each one of these trends has an impact on BI deployment and usage. The mobile channel influences the usage demands of contact center managers. Now they expect to be able to stay in touch with the BI application they are using to manage their operations when they walk away from their desk. In response BI applications are improving their support for mobile access, optimizing displays and interaction capabilities for the smaller screen space and different input methods.

The growth of the social channel affects BI deployments in that it opens another data source that needs to be integrated into a BI solution. First, you need an application to capture things like mentions of your brand name and conversations like tweets that are directed to your corporate Twitter IDs. Then you need your BI application to be flexible enough to add this new data source so that trends can be tracked like any other contact method.

TMCnet: Should the BI scope be widened to include data gathering, management including data cleansing, normalization, integration and warehousing and why?

MF: It is true that a BI project needs to consider all of these things. But a single BI system doesn’t include each of the tools necessary for each step. Any time a new data source is to be added to a BI environment, the questions have to be considered about each of these steps. If it’s an internal operational database that has already been in operation, then these steps have already been taken, if necessary. New external sources will need most of these steps.

One part of the BI project that is changing somewhat now is the role or need for a data warehouse. It used to be the case that a BI application only worked with a data warehouse, so you needed the extra steps of ETL, et cetera to copy data from the operational source to the data warehouse. But now flexible BI systems can access operational data stores directly without impacting operational performance. This eliminates the frustration of the lagged timeliness of a data warehouse, not to mention the extra efforts of loading one, or duplication of data.

TMCnet: How can BI tools assist individual contact center managers?

MF: The better BI tools lend themselves to embedding inside the contact center management applications already in place. Having dashboards being the “home page” of an application guarantee they get attention, and having other performance management charts just a click away, instead of requiring a second application be loaded, make a lot of difference in time spent and adoption rates.

TMCnet: What new BI tools have InetSoft developed and have in the works to meet these needs?

MF: Our recent advances in our BI software have taken self-service to higher levels. The next area of development for InetSoft is enhancing the mobile BI experience of using interactive dashboards and reports.

Non-BI specialists can embed dashboards that mash up as many different data sources as necessary right into any Web-based contact management solution. And contact center agents and managers can interact with them doing things like filtering, sorting and drilling down to give them access to a huge amount of information that beforehand was only accessible to database analysts. And we’ve added lots of personalization capabilities so each person can optimize how their dashboards look and work, without any IT assistance.