by Richard Snow |
8/1/2008 | Article ID: M08-26 | Article Type: VentanaMonitor
Summary
Whether it is called an integrated view, a complete view or a 360-degree view, companies continue to long for a fuller picture of how their contact centers are working and of their customers, their interactions with the company and how much business they generate. For several years many have maintained that available technology and products are not capable of providing such a view. The challenge in the contact center is especially acute because there are so many sources of potential customer data and events such as customer calls happen in real time. Informiam has been one of the forerunners in providing products that address these challenges, and since it was acquired by Genesys late last year, the company has continued to develop enhancements that fill out the view of how interactions are being handled and the view Informiam’s customers get of their own customers. Ventana Research finds that companies lack operational intelligence about their customers and how interactions with them are being handled, so we encourage companies to evaluate the new Informiam products.
Assessment
There are three main challenges in producing an operational view of the contact center and a 360-degree view of customers. The greatest of these is the sheer number and variety of systems that contain customer data. Benchmark research by Ventana Research shows that companies often have data about customers and their interactions in more than 20 different types of systems, including business systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), business-specific applications such as billing, and sales order processing, and complex contact center systems such as automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer/telephony integration (CTI) and agent workforce management (WFM). To deal with this multiplicity, Informiam offers products that include prebuilt extractors that allow connection to and data extraction from common systems such as the Cisco and Genesys core platforms, workforce management products such as those from Aspect and IEX, and some of the more common business applications. Its products include a tool set that companies can use to build their own extractors; over time, Informiam says, it also will provide more integration with the products of its parent company Genesys. Different extractors work in real-time or batch mode depending on the nature of the system, allowing companies to choose which operational model best suits their requirements. Once extracted, the data is loaded into a central database, where it can be consolidated, aggregated and made available to the reporting and analysis products of choice.
The next challenge is the different views required by different people who use customer and contact center information. This ranges from business executives who want an overall business view, to operational workers who need to see what is happening in real time, to business users who want to know why customers are calling, to front-line supervisors and agents who want to know how well they are performing. The Informiam products include a number of standard report and analysis options that can also be configured to meet the requirements of each user.
The third challenge is that people in the contact center need much of this information delivered in real time – to answer a customer query during a call, or to allow supervisors to change the profile of the teams answering calls if they see an increase in customer wait times. The Informiam products can produce real-time reports, analysis and alerts as well as batch reports and analytics that can identify trends and root causes. This combination allows companies to learn what happened in the past, what is happening now and why events happened, so they can be better prepared for what happens in the future.
The full Informiam product suite is available as an on-premises or a hosted solution, allowing companies to choose the model that suits their business and operational models.
Market Impact
Our benchmark research shows that many companies striving to gain a comprehensive view of their customers resort to pulling limited amounts of data into Excel spreadsheets, with the result that different people have different limited views. Products from specialist vendors such as HardMetrics, Informiam, Inova, Latigent and Symmetrics, plus new releases from established business intelligence vendors such as Business Objects and Teradata, make the task of creating a more comprehensive customer view easier, less expensive, less open to manipulation, and as a consequence much more reliable. Each of these products has strengths and weaknesses related to the number and type of data sources they can work with, whether they work in real time, and the variety of reports and analysis they can produce for different types of users. Informiam has strong functionality to support all three requirements, and so it should continue to capture a significant share of what has become a competitive market.
Recommendation
Companies should be taking fuller advantage of one of their key assets – their customer base –and ensuring that each customer interaction is as good as possible. To do this they need a more comprehensive view of and better insights into how their customers behave and what business they are transacting; only in this way will they be able to make more informed plans and decisions at the point when and where they interact with them. Ventana Research insists that companies must make customers the focus of their performance management efforts. Vendors such as Informiam can help them by supplying products that will produce a more complete view of customers and the operational performance of interaction handling. As companies work to enhance their view about customers, they should consider Informiam’s products.
Related Research Notes:
Customer Performance Management Research Agenda for 2008
Customer Experience Management Can Refocus Contact Centers
Customer Experience Management Technology
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