Data Marts
Data marts provide a foundation for reporting, analysis and performance management across an entire call centre estate. Their function is to provide a central repository that automatically transfers and stores data from multiple data sources and applications, providing a single, optimised source for all necessary reporting and analysis.
In practice this means they have to be able to integrate and normalise data from multiple applications using pre-built data models, transformation logic, and data extraction processes. From this can be generated any range of insight from enterprise level performance to drill down reports on individual situations. These can be presented as operational reports, executive dashboards or agent scorecards.
Reporting needs to be historic and real time. In fact both often need merging to provide real time reporting in the context of historical trends to help identify issues and opportunities. These can be supplemented with any form of ad hoc analysis.
Non call centre data can also be introduced from financial, HR and marketing systems to generate business metrics such as revenue by agent, profit by customer, satisfaction by customer segment, and so on.
From a technical evaluation perspective, it is important to note that choice is necessarily limited. Because of their inherent complexity, data marts that have been specifically developed for call centres tend to be customised for particular vendor portfolios. In many cases they are built by the vendors themselves especially those that offer interaction hubs which are ideally suited for consolidated reporting.
Interoperability
However in recognition that most centres evolve as multi vendor environments most data marts offer guaranteed interoperability with rival solutions for major data sources such as ACD, IVR, CTI, help desks, workforce management, web/email interaction and the like. This means that data from legacy assets can be still accessed although the data marts prime relationship should remain with its compatible vendor solution.
Another area of choice lies in the choice of reporting and analytics since they often hand off analytic duties to establish business intelligence solutions which provide analytic and reporting tools including sophisticated multidimensional (OLAP) data mining solutions.
In summary technical due diligence should evaluate the following issues in relation to data marts.
- Is it business-user friendly so that no significant IT involvement is required?
- Is it able to perform multi-dimensional, drill-down, and trend analysis?
- Is it able to integrate interaction data with external data stores through pre-defined data hooks for end-to-end view of customer data to measure loyalty and customer churn?
- Can it be used to feed interaction data to corporate data warehouses in conjunction with CRM, HR and other data sources?
- Is it able to integrate with industry standard reporting and analytics tools?
See alternative business needs description
Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Data Marts.