Carl Tsukahara on metrics
"Traditional metrics are all about efficiency -- things like hold time, average handle time. Every organization uses those to a degree, but what we're seeing is that our customers are moving toward things like first call resolution: finding that the customer experience can be best managed when they get all of their questions answered the first time they call into the call center."

"People are getting a little more sophisticated about metrics, but this transition is still in its infancy. Metrics that talk more about the customers' experience versus the agents' efficiency are becoming more popular," Tsukahara says, but traditional metrics aren't being thrown out; they are being added to.

David Middleton on KPIs
"One of the values that we get from our process is to be able to take key performance indicators that get their value from multiple data sources. Within the call center normally, most of the KPIs that they work with are actually based around a single data source. It's typically coming out of the ACD or else the workforce management system. We can provide KPIs that work across the data sources. You can get revenue per call calculations by taking information from a billing system and combining that with information from the ACD." Middleton says that the businesses they work with decide on exactly what they'd like to measure and how to build KPIs, so AIM can install that in the application.

David Middleton talks about Multi-Dimensional Analysis
The discussion of KPIs led to multi-dimensional analysis. I asked Middleton to explain what multi-dimensional analysis was to AIM Technology. Here's a transcript of his whole explanation:

"It sounds daunting: this idea of having a multi-dimensional view of something doesn't fit easily in our minds. To an extent, the business intelligence industry has tried to hide behind what it does. In the end, that sort of devalues what power this can give a business.

Our whole business was set up around doing multi-dimensional analysis. The easiest way to demonstrate it to a customer is to actually show them their business as a multi-dimensional model.

There's the organization's own hierarchy, which starts at the top of the business, and then goes down to the call centers. You might have one top level, and then three call centers, and underneath that, fifteen call center managers, 150-200 service managers, 500 team leaders, and at the bottom, 8,000 agents. That would be the organization hierarchy.

Let's say they're a telecom company. They sell services: cable, phone systems, and packages of products. That would be another dimension; it would have a similar hierarchical relationship between the base items and the top groups of products and services.

For every one of these areas of interest, different sections of the business, we'd create a dimension. What we'd normally have at the end of that process would be around ten dimensions. That allows us to view the business from any angle. You can look at it by organization and by time, and you can also look at it as being by organization by product by service quality.

By modeling the business this way, you're not restricting the users to a particular way the business has to be looked at. When you look at a normal relational report, what it typically shows you is rows and rows of figures with column headings, and you have to wade through the report to find the bit of information you're looking at. With our technology, and with business intelligence technology based around multi-dimensional analytics, you can put the information specific to the user right in their face when they log in.

What drives it all is performance indicators (it's difficult to call them all key performance indicators). A typical application may have in excess of 100-150 performance indicators: number of calls, average hold time, things like that.

There are a number of these that actually form the key performance indicators, the ones that really drive the business along. Those are the ones we focus on at the higher levels of the analytics, the ones that the call center managers and the VP of operations -- people like that -- are interested in. They have a set of KPIs that drive their business, and then at the bottom, the agents have similar KPIs, but usually much simpler in terms of information that they work with."