Changing contact center reporting is difficult and can prevent companies from adopting great customer experience innovations. Reporting Independence means making the next reporting migration your last, creating operational agility, and owning your reporting experience regardless of the data sources.
Of all the challenges to replacing an enterprise customer experience platform, changing enterprise reporting may well be the most daunting. Why? In most enterprises, contact center data is used to run the business. From line managers to executives, the stakeholders who rely upon customer contact-generated data to make business decisions are dependent upon both the data itself, and the format in which it is delivered.
Historically, adopting new contact center technology requires changing both the data source and the reporting experience, which in turn creates significant resistance to the change. This resistance is understandable – nobody wants to take the time to learn a new user interface and new reports if they think that the current ones suit their needs. Besides, they’ve seen this before; at some point the reporting is just going to change all over again, creating an unending adoption cycle.
What is the cost of maintaining the status quo? To paraphrase Seth Godin, it means missing the chance to be remarkable.
One of the key things successful organizations do to reduce the pain of future migrations is declaring independence from proprietary customer contact reporting tools. They establish a reporting interface that looks and behaves the same regardless of the data source, enabling true enterprise agility and innovation without fear of operational mayhem.
Here’s how they do it:
- They define requirements meticulously. Taking the time to define which KPIs and metrics matter as the first step helps is the same reason tailors measure you before they make your suit – it’s the best way to guarantee that the product fits perfectly.
- They build on powerful, flexible, open source tools. Smart organizations build on high-performance, real-time analytics platforms like Apache Druid, which enable them to ingest and report on massive amounts of data at high speeds.
- They build portability into their reporting. Choose a framework that incorporates these open standards and performs equally well in commercial cloud, private cloud, and traditional data center environments. This means giving the enterprise flexibility to change the hosting model as the needs of the business evole, but without starting over.
- They avoid proprietary platforms. There are vendors who provide complex enterprise reporting platforms that require significant investments in licensing, professional services for customization, and ongoing maintenance. Instead of locking yourself into someone else’s model, have one built for you and avoid a significant upfront and annual costs.
