Analytics as we understand it here, is quantitative, comparative reporting, both historical and real-time. Analytics involves reporting on whether or not things happened, and how often. Performance management goes further -- it's qualitative.

We want to make certain we have a clear definition of analytics, so we'll be asking vendors to define their terms: what is analytics, and how is it different from performance management?

As with last year, we'll be concentrating on agent/customer interactions, not IVRs, speech recognition, or trouble ticket systems. We're primarily concerned with standalone systems.

Here are some of the questions we'll be asking. This is a sampling, and we don't expect every respondent to answer every question.

• How do you define analytics? How is it different from performance management?
  
• What are some of the limitations of analytics?
  
• What's new? What's changed since last year at this time? Any exciting trends?
  
• Have analytics tools had an effect on how call center managers manage? Have we reached a point where managers can use analytics as tools to improve the call center rather than merely for damage control?
  
• Have we gotten beyond the idea that long calls are always "bad" calls?
  
• What about metrics? Which metrics do you use? What are some under-used metrics?
  
• Are there metrics that some vertical industries use that might be helpful to others?
  
• Are there guidelines or recommendations for types of metrics that work well in specific vertical sectors like finance, retail or health care?
  
• Why are some call centers so reliant on traditional telecom-based metrics, when they have so little relevance to what the rest of the enterprise is thinking about? Wouldn't it be better to quantify success on the basis of revenue or customer satisfaction than handle time or queue length?
  
• How do we disentangle the measurement of the performance of a call center as a whole from the measurement of the performance of specific agents? Don't they require different sets of metrics, as well as different tools?
  
• Is the industry still trying to convince upper management that a call center isn't a cost-center? Is there a change in the kind of metrics we're using that can make the argument for the call center as a critical application to the rest of the company?
  
• A while ago, we asked vendors' impressions of the debate going on about replacing traditional metrics like Service Level with more complex, nuanced measures like First Call Resolution. Is it still a debate? What's going on now?