Integrated MI
The spectrum of reporting capability in call centres extends from reports built out of 'cut and paste' compilations to business intelligence solutions that provide integrated views and drill down analysis based on KPI driven scorecards.
Many however still find themselves at the early stages of this journey using expensive resources to manually manipulate data in spreadsheets and locally held databases from ACD, IVR, CTI, QM, CRM, WFM, and dialler sources.
These teams often find themselves repurposing the same data since previous versions cannot be adapted, scaled or easily verified for accuracy. Overall the reporting process is fragile since it depends on key individuals with their exclusive knowledge of how to combine and work the data. In this environment management has to settle for easy to access, real time data sources such ACD reports with occasional historic trend reporting from the process just described.
Linking Reporting To Business Priorities
The priorities for evolving a centre’s reporting capability is always based on performance management needs and the way in which the call centre leadership team intend to run their business. Therefore business planning to unearth the key strategic aims, associated KPIs and set of metrics that help track them, is a necessary first step before reporting needs can be analysed from a technical perspective.
This provides the focus for what needs to be measured and the way in which it will be operationally used once the KPIs and metrics has been apportioned across roles and responsibilities through goal setting and rewards. Some of these will be expressed as targets while others may only need monitoring for trends or anomalies.
The process of cutting out unnecessary reporting and understanding what is vital to performance success builds the foundation for a balanced view of performance across areas such as efficiency/productivity, customer experience, employee satisfaction and financial performance.
From this, the right metrics and their data sources can be identified for such topics as service level, handle time, utilisation, adherence, quality scores, customer satisfaction, customer experience indicators, turnover, cost or revenue measures, self service rate, first call resolution rate and technology performance. These will originate from diverse systems both within and external to the call centre.
Once this level of analysis is done, the next technical consideration for producing a suite of reporting capabilities is driven by the capabilities of the incumbent architecture and associated applications.
The Road To Integrated Reporting
Many centres will find themselves in transition from a call centre infrastructure built on multiple point solutions, most of which will have their own reporting, into a more simplified operating model built around a few core next generation solutions such as interaction hubs and workforce optimisation solutions. These have the ability to rollup data and generate scorecards as one of their core benefits so that separate integration effort to centralise and normalise data prior to its analysis is not so extensively required.
However further integration is still likely to be needed in the most sophisticated reporting cultures. For instance the last and most ambitious integration phase of performance optimisation is to link call centre and enterprise business intelligence together.
This links the call centre data (call statistics, quality scores, customer satisfaction, speech analytics,) with the data and analytics applications across the enterprise; in effect pushing the insights from customer interactions via the enterprise business application ecosystem to a much broader community for the purpose of making customer centric improvements. These types of integration are yet to be provided ‘out of the box’.
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Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Integrated Management Information.