IVR

Business intelligence solutions are vital tools to help organizations identify and respond to opportunities and issues. Yet according Amir Dekel, who is director of marketing communications for customer experience analytics firm ClickFox, there is a marketplace perception that BI products are too complex, require a tremendous amount of time to setup properly and are usually very hard to use.

Certain surveys have even found that only 13 percent of companies implementing BI tools will ever achieve their original business objectives. Market research has shown that of surveyed executives in Fortune 500 companies:

In a recent survey, Dekel said, a leading industry research firm found that over 40 percent of enterprise IT decision makers use three to five BI solutions on a regular basis.

“There is a growing problem in the marketplace where enterprises have a lot of data, but they lack the ability to extract the right information from this data in order to make smart, timely decisions,” Dekel said. “How have corporations arrived at this point of confusion? Do we collect too much data and have no easy way to organize it? Are we just lacking the right tools?”

In today’s complex customer interaction environment, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate through the data jungle in order to find what you’re really looking for, Dekel said. While companies have invested heavily in building multiple customer interaction touch-points, they have neglected to understand that their customers will ultimately decide how they want to interact with them in the first place. Instead of focusing on cross-channel customer behavior patterns, customer tendencies and the ability to understand customer intent, they have been focusing on analyzing customer interactions in silos and using BI tools to generate limited insight.

A new breed of tools has emerged to address this knowledge gap, Dekel said. Customer Experience Analytics solutions focus on the customer rather on the data collected from various systems. These new solutions go beyond the capabilities of traditional BI tools and allow companies to understand the real motivations of their customers, helping them make more informed and timely business decisions. Instead of gathering data and then trying to figure out what to look for, CEA tools aggregate behavior patterns and present them to the analyst in a visual way.

Dekel offer a closer look at some of the ways that CEA products can help companies overcome the shortcomings of their BI solutions:

Let’s face it, there’s just too much data to sift through, Dekel said. Corporations are storing more data about their customers and customers’ interactions than ever before. Customers have multiple ways to interact with a company and new ways are being invented all the time. BI tools need to create an integration point to each one of these new interaction channels and then normalize the data received into a structured database. That’s the fairly easy part, however now the real problem begins: What do you look for in this mountain of data?

With CEA, companies eliminate this painful step. Instead of a senior manager telling an army of analysts to go out and find what he thinks he needs, CEA solutions look for data patterns based on actual customer actions. Dominant paths are automatically extracted and compared to the ideal path that you want your customers to follow.

“Now the analysts (and you’ll need a lot less of them) can start from this point and dig deeper into the root cause of these issues by slicing up the behavior patterns based on segmentation information, historical behavior patterns, satisfaction scores or any other meta data that is available,” Dekel said.

BI tools have traditionally been used to aggregate information about products and transactions in an attempt to give analysts one place to go search for answers. In some ways they are the next step up from antiquated complex Excel sheets and difficult-to-use pivot tables (although even in the 21st century there are still some people who prefer to use these methods). But in the end these tools can only show you how much of something happened. They answer simple questions like: How many times did customers call your contact center? How many product returns occurred at your retail point of sale?

Powerful dashboard applications have evolved to mask this deficiency, but the truth is these dashboards are just another way to visualize the underlying data. If the data doesn’t tell you what you need to know, neither will the dashboards.

If this is all you’re looking for, then BI is all you really need, Dekel said. But these kinds of results don’t help you solve problems, increase customer satisfaction and reduce customer churn. These tools can’t answer the more complex questions like: How many website visitors called your contact center after attempting to pay their bill three times online in the last week? How many of these frustrated customers called within four hours of their third Web site visit? What did they do during these website visits and what caused them not to be able to complete their bill pay transaction? When they finally got to an agent, what did they say? Does this happen every time they need to pay their bill?

Understanding what exactly happened and why customers behaved the way they did is crucial to the enterprise. This can affect several departments and impact operations, sales, marketing and customer service. CEA solutions can scan a broad range of customer interactions, but also lets firms narrow down their research and focus on specific events to understand them better and help improve the overall customer experience.

“The ability to see how interaction channels are impacting each other and what specific events trigger cross-channel customer transitions is becoming a must-have for today’s organizations,” Dekel said. “Without this unique capability that CEA delivers, companies must rely on traditional BI tools that keep them in the dark.”

Most companies analyze their data in operational and organizational silos because no solutions previously existed that could easily handle multiple interaction channels at once. A look at most large companies reveals a Web analytics tool, contact center performance management applications, call recording systems, workforce management solutions, CSAT survey systems, CRM suites and several other databases in one or several data warehouses.

“Most of these systems can’t talk to one another and are analyzed on their own as a separate data silo,” Dekel said.  “If you think about it, they are actually a data vacuum because not only are they unable to share information with the other systems, but they keep their proprietary reporting to themselves.”

Traditional BI tools cannot gather the right information from all these different data sources, in different formats, link them all together and deliver a simple query interface to the end user. But this is what CEA systems were built to do.

CEA solutions were designed to ingest any kind of data that the organization may already be collecting. There is no integration required, so any platform and any format can be analyzed. This opens the door to analysis of data that has never been used before in cross-channel analytics, such as statistics from speech-enabled IVR systems, handheld device information, retail interaction data and many other sources. Data can be extracted from existing structured databases or parsed from unstructured file formats. And since these internal system files are already being generated by most systems, it’s just a matter of pointing them to the right repository and using them correctly.

“Although the shortcomings of BI tools mentioned above can be easily overcome by using new CEA solutions, this does not mean that the time and money invested in BI has gone to waste,” Dekel said. “On the contrary, a well-designed BI solution with a powerful schema can be used as one of the data feeds into a new CEA system. By combining the capabilities of both systems, working in unison, results will be achieved much faster and with greater ease.”