It's important to know what you want to use analytics tools for, Symon VP of development Keith Roller tol me. You have to ask yourself what you are looking for. "In general, as you move up the organization, there's either a formal or informal strategy. It involves pulling data across many different systems to get that global perspective of what's happening across the customer interactions, and most importantly, why things are happening."

Roller echoes many of the other vendors' lament of a lack of industry standards for data reporting. "Furthermore," he says, "there is no industry standard for tagging segments of customer interactions and implementing an infrastructure to maintain unique call IDs from segment to segment as a customer interaction goes through multiple channels and through multiple systems, there's no easy way to consolidate that information and bring it together."

I asked Bob Brittan what they saw as under-used metrics. His list included transfer rate, variance in forecast workload, calls times handle time, unit cost per call, and general compliance percentage.

Keith Roller added, "we're seeing more and more companies promoting more of a composite score looking across systems to bring together not only the productivity data that's inherent to what comes out of the PBX and the ACD, but integrating that with quality and compliance and schedule adherence. We bring all that data and turn it into a single score."

Roller said that making that data available throughout the average day, rather than the day after things happen, enables managers to solve problems as they come up. The Symon Enterprise Server is quite capable of delivering information as close to real-time as five seconds ago, but Roller said that isn't useful for everyone, but giving up-to-the-second updates to an agent with only a few KPIs on their desktop will definitely affect their behavior.