British industry journal "Consumer Strategy" is reporting, on a user group survey from ProtoCall One, that contact center heads say time pressures are blocking progress on integrating business intelligence into their call center systems.


The user group members are senior heads from U.K. businesses, the journal says, and their organizations account for around 25 percent of all GWFM UK users.  According to the study, the members of the group were asked for views concerning their experiences of BI and their plans to pursue BI within their organizations:

 

“Lack of time” was the key blockage to achieving BI for 63 percent of those surveyed. The highest priority for all group members was to use BI to measure call agents based on business-focused objectives instead of standard call metrics.

 

Hear hear. This reporter humbly submits that standard call metrics - that is, how fast you can get the ugly suckers off the phone – are the apotheosis of short-sighted idiocy.

 

CustomerStrategy reported that, according to the study, 75 percent of those surveyed are now looking to integrate customer data for their BI use from their customer relationship management (CRM) systems. One wonders just why the other 25 percent imagine they’re collecting customer data at all?

 

Seventy-five percent of respondents used only historical data, rather than real-time data, to track agent performance, and 37 percent of respondents stated that BI and agent performance reporting was still treated separately.

 

Manual workarounds still prevail, the study found, but “time spent by agents is minimized, with 50 percent stating that less than five percent of agents’ time was spent on manual workarounds such as completing forms and reports, but 25 percent have agents spending 10-20 percent of their time on non-automated processes.”

 

Do the math: CustomerStrategy says that what with call center agent salaries averaging £15,458 per year, agents spending just five percent on manual work-rounds would equate to a total annual cost of £77,290 for a one hundred seat call center.

 

Last October, ProtoCall One announced a marketing initiative into the Business Intelligence market, to develop products for the contact center market based on the Hyperion 9 BI platform.

Company officials at the time said that ProtoCall One’s drive into the BI market “complements its established market with Genesys (News - Alert) Telecommunications developing and implementing products in the contact center market based on the Genesys Customer Interaction Management platform.”

 

Initially, ProtoCall One’s new BI drive will focus on the business intelligence needs of the contact center industry, they said, then “use its knowledge and expertise to expand into wider enterprise initiatives.”