As a manager or supervisor at a contact center you know that during day to day operations it is easy to get drowned in the order of the day. Maintaining a consistent view of the status of your operation as well as long term trends on the other hand is challenging. The challenge is made all the harder by the supporting distributed operations, remote workers, different customers, different platforms etc, etc.
Monitoring and analytics, what should I look for?
Let’s start by clearing up some common misunderstandings, firstly “monitoring” is not the same thing as “analytics”, and analytics is not “reporting”!
- Reporting is defined as the process of organizing data into informational summaries in order to monitor how different parts of the business are performing while…
- Analytics is defined as the process of exploring data and reports in order to extract meaningful insights. Analytics can therefore be performed on its own or can be an add-on to reporting platforms which in Contact Center environments is often the preferred approach. This is an attempt to reduce the number of platforms, the cost associated and avoid the need for a data scientist to perform the analysis.
- Monitoring is the catch-all term that describes the capturing of the data feeding the reports and analytics to provide a contextual view of “what’s going on”. Often this combines common metrics into a dashboard that can easily be consumed in the eye of the beholder.
The fundamental challenge with most platforms is that they lack the ability to support monitoring and analytics, drawing on the same data for analytics that the monitoring uses to report, and the fact that most platforms have not been designed for subject matter experts (SME’s) for SME usage. Take Avaya’s CMS for example with its different data feeds, as an SME trying to answer a critical business question you are left in the cold.
A modern platform should therefore provide at least the following capabilities:
- Monitoring and analytics in a single platform, allowing you to draw on the same data for reporting and analytics
- The ability to ingest and analyze large amounts of data from different sources, allowing you to look at trends over months or even years to understand opportunities and challenges
- A fast learning curve, meaning that the tool needs to mask complexity that is irrelevant to the SME and provide a simple, easy to use and understand interface with templates “out of the box” to get started quickly
- Ability to access from anywhere and customize the views for the target audience, for example allowing a supervisor only the ability to access relevant information for their team while providing operations managers, IT/Telecoms or even customers broader and different views
- Customization options; allowing the creation of custom reports to meet specific needs
- Ease of deployment, lowering the burden on your IT organization, lowering the startup cost, and ideally offering a cloud-based offering for customers that can accept such a solution with an on-premise option for sensitive environment
- Cost effectiveness, both in terms of system related cost but also the total cost of ownership (TCO)
The current landscape
The current contact center reporting and analytics space is fragmented but can be broadly split into the following four categories of offerings:
- Vendor products; while there are substantial differences between the different vendors products, generally speaking many vendor-provided tools are limited to a single platform (theirs), disjoint, in some cases dated and require expert knowledge of the underlying system data to develop relevant reports.
- Point solutions; these include useful but generally more specific offerings such as wallboard solutions, call recording and visualization, and even speech analysis to name just a few. While these tools are useful, they tend to address a specific need of a specific group within the operation and provide limited if any analytics capabilities.
- Pure reporting and analytics solutions; solutions focused on reporting and analytics, providing dashboarding, reporting but also analytics from a single platform. There are a range of offerings available each designed with their own audience in mind.
- Enterprise wide offerings; finally, enterprise-wide offerings that aim to provide the single platform that allows monitoring, reporting and analytics of contact center operations across different locations, platforms and channels. Well implemented and used these platforms are very powerful but are in essence contact center “ERP” type solutions that require extensive customization, come at a substantially higher cost and are inherently more complex to adapt to changing environments.
The current market offers a wide range of choice, but few solutions have been designed from the ground up with agility, cost effectiveness and the subject matter expert (SME) or user in mind.
An alternative approach
Here at Axim we have a platform of our own. What makes us different though, is that we are a group of industry experts and veterans that live and breathe contact center and BPO environments and are supporting Fortune-500’s and smaller organizations every day in improving their operation, their technology landscape, their customer experience and ultimately their bottom line.
What we missed in all these years was a simple yet powerful, cost effective and modern reporting and analytics platform that was designed by users for users… So, we built it!
The result, we’ve called Axim Contact Data ViewTM, CDV for short. It’s an innovative business intelligence platform designed specifically for Contact Centers. As a web-based platform it can be accessed anytime from anywhere from anyone whom you want to provide access to. It’s easy to navigate graphical user interface provides you with key operational information in an easy to access dashboard while expert curated customizable reports provide you and your team with all real-time and historical information you may require – without the need of having a PhD in data analytics – and ready to go in minutes.
Figure: Contact Data View Dashboard
We built the platform we wanted, and our customers have been asking for and have now made it available as an Axim product you too can benefit from, we would love to tell you more, get in touch and we can organize a demo so we can share our experience with you.
About Axim Global
Axim is an Enterprise Communications transformation business. We have evaluated, designed, virtualized and rationalized 100’s of Enterprise Communications and adjunct applications systems. We are leading experts in transforming Enterprise Communications, who can draw on a unique blend of Business, Architectural, CX, DB and Security specialists on staff.
Axim is one of the few companies to provide cloud to cloud consolidation with integrated digital application rationalization. We are vendor agnostic, so you can select the right vendor for your specific needs without conflict of interest or preferential selection.
Axim works with clients to evaluate all major CCaaS, CRMaaS providers, SI resellers, and CC Manufactures in the Enterprise Communications industry. We have mapped and migrated them all, so we can help you select the right hosted (cloud) Vendor/ technology package for your business and operational needs.
Axim Global Through our expertise in Enterprise Consulting, Experience Analytics, and Team Extension, Axim’s experienced team of enterprise technology architects and consultants work with some of the most recognized brands in the world to deliver ROI-based transformation, visibility into the key success indicators businesses rely upon, and the modern skills customers need to effectively operate their communications and customer contact technologies. Learn more at https://aximglobal.com.
Through our expertise in Enterprise Consulting, Strategic Staffing, and Custom Software Development, Axim’s experienced team of enterprise technology architects and consultants work with some of the largest organizations in the world. We thoroughly audit their current collaboration & customer contact technologies and cloud applications, help them pick the right options for their specific requirements, and identify opportunities for reduction of cost via carefully planned and executed enterprise-level standardization. Learn more at https://aximglobal.com.
