It isn’t always easy to understand what the makers of call center equipment actually make. With everyone calling their products “solutions,” it can be hard to parse what specific products do, and whether they consist of hardware or software.
Analytics tools are no exception. Analytics is quantitative, comparative reporting, both historical and real-time, using information from sources like the automatic call distributor (ACD). Analytics involves reporting on whether or not things happened, and how often. But it gets complicated. Analytics tools are often built into performance management software. Sometimes, reporting software is confused with analytics. All of it can help your call center run more efficiently. So what is all this stuff?
When we first covered this area two years ago, it was important to differentiate analytics from traditional reporting. Now, as analytics becomes more common than simple reports as a way to measure call center activity, it’s more important to differentiate it from performance management. But we’ll start with reporting.
Reporting is the first layer of data. A report is simply a one dimensional listing of numbers, records of what happened when. Your ACD, for instance, will give you a report of all the calls that went through, where they came from, who they went to, and how long they lasted. This is only marginally helpful, because it only tells us part of what happened. When we talk about average handle time, we’re getting the numbers from the reports created by the ACD. We know now that average handle time can only be so helpful, because we want short calls so agents can help as many customers as possible, we also want agents to give each customer enough time to make them feel appreciated and get their problem solved or order filled. Besides, if an agent spends a long time on the phone, it’s worth it if he or she sells a lot of products or solves a problem that might have taken a few more calls otherwise, right?
That brings us to analytics. By combining reports, comparing them, and bringing in information like sales figures, we can see that those longer calls are not always bad. This is analytics. If reporting is one-dimensional, analytics is two-dimensional. The next step is performance management. Think of it as a three-dimensional view of the call center’s activity. With performance management, we’re taking analytics and adding some subjective or qualitative judgments. You might take recordings of calls and listen to them, scoring them to try to create objective or quantitative judgments of them. With performance management, you’re adding the personality or finesse of the agent into the equation. You may also look at the customers’ responses, giving surveys after calls and applying that to the agent performance equation.
But performance management tools don’t just help you collect more data. And they don’t just help you make judgments on that data, either. They also help you fix problems. Most performance management software is designed to use analytics and qualitative measurements from call monitoring or recording tools to make adjustments in the way calls are handled, the way calls are routed, and in the way agents are scheduled in the case of workforce management.
BUT IS IT PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT?
According to AIM Technology’s Carl Tsukahara, “analytics is a very important piece of the performance management pie, but certainly not a stand-alone.” Analytics are being combined more and more with performance management software — that’s why it’s been so hard to get vendors to talk about them as separate entities. But for now, analytics is still a distinct component of performance management, if not a separate tool.
AIM’s David Middleton articulates another way of looking at the difference between analytics and performance management: who’s using it. "It isn’t just around team leaders and agents — there are many other groups of people within the business who use the application. Having the analytics helps them to do their work as well, because it forms an overall view of the business. The performance management side of it is aimed mostly at the lower end of the business; the analytics are mostly used at the higher end." What he means is that performance management is used to help the agents do their jobs better.
The analytics lets the higherups see what’s going on from above. This is consistent with a statement from Genticity’s Gail Mercer-MacKay: "Analytics to us is data that helps companies understand their business as a whole; it’s about business intelligence." And it’s closer to Witness’ Kevin Hegebarth: "analytics is really more of a product, by which you can make other business decisions."
Many vendors don’t see the line between analytics and performance management because it’s all on a continuum of business intelligence: things to tell you what’s going on in the call center and the enterprise. If analytics software shows you a spike in service-related calls during a given interval, you use the performance management tools — the call monitoring and recording software and the customer surveys — to find out what’s going on. It’s all part of one system. Furthermore, performance management is the more attractive term. Most vendors would rather call their software performance management simply because it has more pizzazz.
WHAT’S ON THE MARKET
Analytics is a way of collecting and looking at data from different parts of your call center, sometimes in combination with data from other parts of the enterprise. That’s consistent across the vendors, but each one has a different way of doing it.
Genesys' Info Mart is one of the most basic products: a repository or database that collects information. Genesys says: “Info Mart does the ‘heavy lifting’ associated with analytical processing: it collects the data, restructures it (ensuring that duplicates are removed and anomalies fixed) and loads it into a database specifically designed for reporting and analytics.” The analytical processing, they tell me, is left to partners and third parties. You’ll need your own OLAP software.
Similarly, Aspect’s Customer DataMart is software that collects and organizes data. As is common with this type of software, DataMart will collect from Avaya, Nortel, or Aspect’s own switches. The information goes to a database for OLAP processing. It will do reports, of course, but not analysis. For that, Aspect has the eWorkforce Management Analyzer, a software application that has 100 built-in KPIs. If you would like additional analysis, Aspect refers you to their partner, AIM Technology.
AIM Technology’s AIMCall is performance management software. AIM calls what they do “multidimensional analysis,” which is taking previously siloed information and integrating it for analysis. That’s a nice way of describing what analytics in general should do. In their words, it’s “analysis of call center sales productivity, profitability and quality of service, correlated with traditional, cost-based key performance indicators such as customer hold time or transfer time.” AIM works with their clients to create ten dimensions across the enterprise. Spotting trends is easy this way.
Centergistics also takes the performance management approach. Their product, AgentView Enterprise, is a performance management server and AgentView EPM is the component that does the analytics. They don’t call it analytics; they say it can “combine information from all queues (e-mail, ACD, IVR, help desk, etc.) to view the complete performance picture,” but that’s what analytics does. AgentView can bring analytics to everything from your desktop to your mobile phone.
Like a lot of software suites, AgentView does a little of everything. It will do some customer relationship management (CRM), like telling your agent who’s calling and whether or not they are a prized customer, and some performance management like telling the agent how they are doing compared to the rest of their group.
Genticity calls their Customer1 product “Customer Interaction Management” software, but you will recognize it as CRM. The company’s Gail Mercer- MacKay describes Customer1 as: “a browser that consolidates multiple applications (such as back office applications) for the agent and provides caller profile information, call flow with scripting and a knowledge base, workflow and other functions that enable agents to answer calls quickly and get access to the right information.” The Agent and Executive Dashboards are what supply the analytics, and for Genticty, it’s important to have discussions with their customers to find out exactly what kind of metrics to compare. Genticity’s goal is to cut down the time it takes managers to build reports.
Syntora’s Agentivity Analytics may be the closest thing on the market to pure, stand-alone analytics software. It collects information, real-time and historical, and lets you present it in dashboards and Web-based scorecards and reports. Dashboards size can be modified by the agent or manager, and have links to training tools — specifically the Agentivity eLearning software, which can be purchased separately. Syntora uses an industry standard database, which allows for third party data mining tools to be used on it.
Symon’s Symon Enterprise Server (SES) is middleware: server- based software that collects and analyzes. The user decides what data to look at and how it should be presented — for example, on wallboards or dashboards.
Symon’s Bob Brittan explains: “The SES engine collects the data and lets you build business rules (mathematical formulas, set thresholds and threshold triggers) from historical and real-time information that is processed by the SES. SES is currently able to use historical, real-time and comparative data with more advanced analytics available in the near future.” Symon also offers something called Vista, which builds real-time dashboards and scorecards for your browser.
Like Symon, Inova makes middleware. The updated Version 5 of their Performance Optimization Suite has more display options, like the Corporate Broadcaster, which is basically a big screen TV for showing call center performance to many agents at once. Inova’s LightLink is the “core” of the suite. Its task as middleware is to collect data — from virtually any source, Inova says — and distribute it to other software, like their DataScribe, a reporting tool. Inova says DataScribe allows you to “centralize information into a single source of the truth,” which makes it sound almost transcendent.
Witness Systems offers a Workforce Optimization suite called Impact 360, which includes performance management tools like training and call monitoring software. (Witness is excited to talk about their speech analytics software, which mines call recordings for interesting tidbits with speech recognition software, but we’re more concerned with their traditional analytics.) One of the options with Impact 360 is the Application Analysis software, which looks at agent desktop activity.
But the Witness Custom Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Scorecards are where the real analytics are. Key performance indicators are basically goals that you set against various metrics. Witness provides you with a “library” of pre-built KPIs, or you can make your own. Either way, you can look at the scorecards through Witness’ dashboards.
THE LIMITATIONS OF ANALYTICS
We know what the inherent limitations of analytics are; in most cases, if you can’t answer a question with analytics, the performance management tools can help. But what are the practical limitations? Deployment time, says Aspect’s Roger Sumner. But he adds that vendors are getting better at predicting what businesses need, which speeds things up. Inova’s Sharon Brogan agrees: “The limitation is on the creation side; it can be expensive and timeconsuming to set up.”
Another limitation, as Symon’s Keith Roller says, is a lack of an industry standard for reporting. “Something as basic as ‘service level,’ depending on the vendor, is going to have a different calculation,” Roller tells me. “Not only do you have different calculations, but you’ve got different data definitions for the underlying metrics that drive the calculations. The normalization of data and the ability to bring all the data together become key to seeing what’s happening across the enterprise consistently.”
“You want to make sure you’re collecting the right things and measuring the right things,” says Kevin Hegebarth of Witness Systems. “The products that tend to give the customer the most utility and the most value are those that spend time ensuring that the data is cleansed before it gets into the database.”
DOES THIS STUFF REALLY HELP?
Most vendors agreed that businesses were getting better about seeing the call center as a valuable part of the enterprise. We’ve all heard the rhetoric before: the call center doesn’t have to be a “cost center.” We can now, in the dense prose of a vendor who will remain nameless, “transition the call center from a cost center to a strategic operational asset aligned with corporate objectives.” In other words, call center managers and enterprise higher-ups are seeing ways to integrate the call center into the rest of the business, and analytics and performance management tools are helping.
Analytics is not a product or a product category. It is a function, and a way to make sense of business activity through measurement of all sorts of data. Because of that, it can be a confusing and overlapping environment for the potential product purchaser. You will find analytics embedded into many other tools.
No matter what the case, it’s important to use and understand the power of analytic software to effectively entwine your call center with the rest of your enterprise.
