What Does Business Intelligence Really Mean?

By TMCnet Special Guest

Jim Shirazi, Senior Director of Business Intelligence Solutions, Convergys Corporation

 

Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, widely introduced in the 1990s, are often long on promise, but short on results.  While well designed and well intentioned, these solutions can be extremely difficult to implement, even more difficult from which to extract meaningful and actionable information, and generally blind to a prime source of “Business Intelligence” data, the contact center.

 

Convergys’ (News - Alert) position is that BI is not about installing expensive monolithic systems to gather data from disparate sources throughout the company.   Rather, BI is about focusing on the data that resides in a company’s contact center, effectively listening to what customers are really saying and using that data to help management make better decisions to make the entire company more customer-centric.

 

Many executives may think, “Don’t we already do this via call dispositioning and Quality Assurance?”  Call dispositioning and QA represent a basic operational contact center capability, capturing “one level deep” of information -- for example, a customer is upset about his or her bill.  These do not capture what the customer is telling you – for example, why the customer is upset and confused about surcharges.  That’s a big difference when you are looking at BI to help you improve your billing processes for all customers, not just to solve one isolated complaint or inquiry.

 

Real Business Intelligence derived from the contact center is about gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer data that puts you on a focused path to becoming a customer-centric organization. 

 

Convergys’ premise is that the game has changed: contact center efficiency is the requirement, and contact center effectiveness, using the voice of the customer, will set apart the business winners from the also-rans.

 

The first question to ask is “why are customers contacting us?”  The answer is usually one of two things: either something is broken in the organization (not just the contact center), or someone wants to buy something.  (For this discussion we will concentrate on the former, although many of the same principles can be applied to the latter.)

 

The key to understanding if something is broken in the organization and thus causing customers to contact the company is to find the root cause.  By using the voice of the customer (in statistically significant samples), and analyzing what they are telling you, a root cause analysis can be performed on the entire business, as defined by your customers, not just the contact center.

 

Convergys assists many of the world’s leading and largest organizations with such contact center-based Business Intelligence using the following proprietary four-stage methodology: (1) define, (2) analyze, (3) categorize, and (4) recommend.

 

The Define Stage’s objective is to understand the strategic objectives of the program, map the high-level / end-to-end business processes, and identify what metrics will be collected through the contact center. An additional objective is to understand the goals of the organization. The organization must then determine how the goals will be measured, which will dictate the metrics to track. These metrics will then be used to configure internal disposition tools, which break down contact center interactions at a granular level and map the calls back to the core business processes.

The Discover Stage’s objective is to collect the necessary metrics to confirm or reject transformation hypotheses set during the Define Stage. The organization will capture the detailed disposition of a statistically significant sample of customer contacts through transaction monitoring.  Having this information will enable the organization to perform root cause analysis.

The Analyze Stage’s objective is to analyze the collected data to identify trends, quantify confirmed hypotheses, and determine the root cause(s) of identified issues. The organization can then use the collected data to quantify the value of solving a particular issue. In addition, the organization should determine the complexity of delivering the solution. This will lead to a transformation roadmap articulating what recommended changes should be and when they should be completed. The findings and recommendations should be laid out during formal checkpoints, where organization stakeholders can gain a detailed understanding of the findings and summarized contributing data.

The Recommend Stage’s objective is to set in motion a roadmap for change. Recommendations identified in the Analyze Stage should be organized according to value and complexity. The organization should articulate which solution is required to prevent the identified issue from reoccurring. Recommendations normally fall into three categories: broken business processes upstream from the contact center, broken operations within the contact center, and lastly, sub-optimal channel utilization. 

 

Typically, a nominal investment leads to recommendations worth exponential returns.  Not saying that all the fixes will be inexpensive, but you will find low-hanging fruit.  Your customers are trying to tell you how to do this every day.