Chris Crosby

One of the relatively new challenges to companies today is wrapping their arms around the explosion of data and information that exists outside the data warehouse and their four walls. With the “Big Bang Blogosphere” and syndicated websites growing by the minute it only takes one sour customer to wreck havoc on your PR image (just ask Microsoft).

For the Enterprise folks that have Enterprise budgets there are companies peddling software to monitor the www for keywords that could damage your brand. However for the rest of us, here is a quick and free tool you can use to get started.

1. Go to Google News
2. Locate the News Alert Icon
3. You will be asked to input your keywords, whether you want Google to monitor the web, news, blogs or all of the above; and your email address.

Take five minutes and set-up alerts for your company, you, key members of your executive team, key customers, and your competitors. 

1. You will immediately start to receive emails with hyper-links to sites that contain any of those keywords.

Want to know what your competitors are up to? You will know almost immediately after they issue a press release.

Now its not always 100% efficient. For example, there is an NHL player name Sidney Crosby and anytime he makes a play against a player named Chris I get an alert for “Chris Crosby”. Buts its well worth the occasional extraneous email to have Google monitor the entire web for me.

-Chris

It is mission critical you evaluate the impact that a move to Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) will have on your Call Center Reporting prior to making the leap. Whether you are simply upgrading your existing infrastructure and adding some IP phones, or completely replacing your legacy ACD with a new system, a well thought out migration plan will ensure minimal impact to your report users. Here are three things to consider:

1) “Sites” no longer exist – If you are accustomed to generating reports based on call center location or site, it is important to know that in the world of VOIP you become one virtual call center. Your ACD essentially acts as one large site, so location specific information has to be treated differently. There are ways around this mountain by creating different Agent Groups for reporting purposes (not to be confused with certain Agent Groups for routing). This works well for agent information, however some DNIS and Skill Group data simply will not be available by site. If site reporting is important to you, make sure to ask your vendor how they can help you with this transition.

2) Terminology and Routing Rule Changes – If you are migrating to a different ACD vendor all together you will need to familiarize yourself with the new terminology. For example, some ACDs have “applications” others have “VDNs” and still others have “Services” and “Call Types”. Call routing functionality changes as well, so get familiar with the routing flows and lingo of your new platform. Sometimes this can be a night and day difference, ask your vendor for a simplified diagram of your new environment that you can share with all levels of our team.

3) Metrics and Calculations change – There is a difference between Calls Answered and Calls Handled: a Call Answered is flagged in the interval it was physically answered by an agent or device, a Call Handled is usually pegged in the interval the call was completed. This difference can skew everything from Service Level to AHT. Some vendors use one or the other and some offer both. As further example, there are several ways to calculate Service Level and AHT. Some Service Level calculations include calls abandoned, some do not. Sometimes “Hold Time” is included in “Talk Time” and sometimes its not. Understand what field definitions and calculations your current ACD uses and line them up to your new system. It is very common for metrics you are accustomed to seeing simply not to exist in your new environment. So be prepared.

If you are adding VOIP to your Call Center(s) or have already embarked on the journey and have questions Latigent has vendor mapping charts that can assist; and I am also available to help. Email me at ccrosby@latigent.com if you have questions or would like more details.

-Chris

I had the opportunity this last week to participate in the Key Note Panel “60 Ideas in 60 Minutes” moderated by Paul Stockford, Chief Analyst with Saddletree Research, at the ICCM Canada Conference. The format of the panel was created by Paul several years ago and has been mimicked and replicated by other conferences since. There were six panelists and each of us was given one minute to present an idea to the audience, and then Paul would move on to the next panelist. We continued this round robin for an hour. The panelists all had diverse backgrounds so the premise was to not just present based on what our company’s expertise is, but rather on unique topics that the audience would find useful and be able to apply in their call centers. Not only did the participants generate a lot of great ideas and discussion, it was just darn right fun for both the panelists and audience.

After the session, a number of people commented on the creativity and usefulness of ideas that were presented during the session. There were several that also remarked on the format of the panel itself and mentioned they were going to take the idea back to their call center to put together a panel from various people in their company. One in particular mentioned she was going to create a panel with a member from each of her seven call centers. Having worked in similar environments for years, I thought this would be a phenomenal team building event and a great way to get her team’s creative juices flowing.

This actually got me thinking that it would also be a cool and useful format for my blog. But instead of 60 quick ideas in 60 minutes, I’d do 60 brief ideas in 60 days. Seems like a bit of a stretch goal, but let’s face it I always like a challenge. So, for the next 60 days I’ll be generating a new post everyday with a new tip, idea, suggestion or thought that’s relevant to the Contact Center or Business Intelligence disciplines. A “Blogothon”, so to speak.

This means that by the end of the year, this site will be chalked full of quick and easy tips that anyone can easily use and apply to their contact center.
So let the fun begin…

-Chris

As a kid growing up I was a bit of a space junky (I know, who wasn’t right?). I did a great deal of reading and research into all sorts of things about Space and Space Exploration. But one of the things to this day that has been near impossible for me to wrap my head around is the Big Bang Theory.

I could never quite grasp the idea of a massive juggernaut creating matter out of nothing. If the universe is expanding from the center at light speed every second, what is on the other side? Surely there is something that it has to be swallowing up, right? Well no, not according to Science anyway.

Then it struck me today. Isn’t that the same thing as the Blogoshere? This giant growing organism that is creating content out of nothing. Websites that weren’t there a couple hours ago are now chalked full of matter such as this blog. And there wasn’t anything here for my blog to swallow to make room for it, other than the time it took me to create it.

Sort of a random rambling, but perhaps the laws of science and physics are governing us in more ways than we thought…

With the list of software solutions being offered as a hosted service growing daily and the innovation behind them spawning some very killer applications, it can be all too tempting to either migrate some of your legacy applications off premise, or perhaps take use of some new service that was not previously available to your company.

Denis Pombriant raises some interesting points in his post Keeping Up with On Demand about disruptive technology ushering in a new set of leaders. I agree, and think that the tide is shifting.

We need to be mindful that as the water turns over and companies like Microsoft loose market share to guys like salesforce.com the lake is getting murky and a new set of challenges is bubbling to the top.

Utilizing hosted software can be extremely cost effective and rewarding (my company uses several hosted applications to run our day-to-day operations). However, before you sign-up for that next 30-day free trial for that new application that is going to reinvent your business you need to ask some critical questions:

1. What data is the application storing?
2. Where will it be housed?
3. How do I access it?
4. How can I integrate it with the rest of my enterprise’s data?

Each vendor seems to have their own answer to those questions. Now, I personally think Salesforce has the right idea with app exchange. By utilizing their platform for all of your hosted applications it makes the integration piece far easier. They also rely heavily on their 3rd party partners to provide the data access and synchronization (synchronization is a huge pitfall which I will address in a future post).

This model works well if you are standardizing all of your applications to their platform. However, this doesn’t play well in an environment where you need your customer data integrated with the rest of the enterprise; or even worse if you are using different service providers for different applications. Imagine using one provider for your CRM, another one for you ACD, and yet another for ERP. As you can see the data web that you spent years trying to unravel with your legacy systems can very quickly get re-spun.

Therefore, for any provider to survive in the hosted space they will have to extend solutions to their customers that solve the data fragmentation issue.

Unfortunately, not all software hosting providers have figured this out yet so it can be difficult, if not impossible, to access your data that’s off-premise. Some vendors offer Web Service based APIs to move information back and forth, yet others rely heavily on the old fashion flat file to ftp post, or manual csv exports. This process takes us back about 10 years and will no doubt take you off the Christmas Card list from your DBAs.

Now, at first blush you would think there is a play for guys like Cognos and Business Objects to host their Business Intelligence platforms and help address this; but when you strip it down all that will do is move the problem from your data center to the "cloud". I would look for niche BI players like Latigent to drive innovation and solutions in this area.

-Chris

For those of you who have been audience to one of my seminars or live presentations, you know that the one thing I absolutely despise in the reporting and BI space is massive, over-sized, multi-tabbed excel spreadsheets. Yep, I hate Excel. Well, I don’t really HATE Excel per say, I just consider cumbersome spreadsheets the “Used Car Salesmen” of information distribution. They both just push a lot of data at you without taking into account what you really want to see.

What started out as a novel and flexible way to consolidate statistics and distribute it in an easy to manuever format has turned into a resource hemorrhage and data-lockup of near catastrophic proportions. Now this may seem a bit brash to some of you; especially those of you who knew me 5 or 6 years ago when I had entire departments centered around generating consolidated spreadsheets for multiple call centers. But let me also remind you how the concept for BlueVue originally came about.

Not only is manually inputing numbers into a spreadsheet an incredible waste of human capital, it’s also an incredibly inefficient way to absorb information. Outside of conditional formatting and static charts there is no way to quickly and effectively illustrate to an information consumer what elements they need to pull out and act on; more often than not mission critical data is lost in a sea of useless statistics.

So why then has Excel, and other spreadsheet applications, become the de facto standard for data delivery in almost every company in every corner of the planet? I suppose for starters, it is somewhat easy to use, has an all too familiar interface, and can be used to distribute a large amount of data to a mass of people. Let’s face it, its easy to attach a file to an email and hit send.

I actually conducted a poll a few months ago and roughly 75% of people that recieve a report via email as part of a daily distribution list knew less than 45% of the other people on the distribution list. My point? Not only is 55% of that report data getting in the way of you finding what you need, the part that does pertain to you is getting in everyone elses way as it isn’t relevant to them.

Ok, so enough on why Excel is the crux of all BI evil. In the next posts of this series, I’ll take a serious look at how we can retire the shotgun approach of information delivery and find a good sniper for the job.

-Chris

Ok, so we’ve all been immersed this last year with buzzwords like AJAX and overstated speculations of Web 2.0 becoming the tidal wave that the original Internet gold rush was in the late 90’s. I admit that I approached this buzz with far more caution than last time around; and waded gently into the waters until there was enough understanding of the technology to make it actually gain viable traction. In other words, I didn’t want to be AJAX to be AJAX, I wanted to figure out how to leverage the functionality beyond just cool bells and whistles.

The dust is far from settling on the 2.0 uprising, but I thought it time to take off the water wings and dive into the deep end. As some of you know, I’m the CEO/Owner of the Business Intelligence Software company Latigent. We provide ETL and Reporting/Analytics/Dashboard software primarily to the Call Center space. I spend a great deal of time watching market trends and understanding what things like AJAX and Open Source mean to our ever changing industry.

But as importantly, I spend a lot of time with our customers and prospective customers understanding not only how they currently use our software, but how they WILL use our software but don’t know it yet. I then try to forecast the point in time when the two intersect and back that into our product development road maps.

It’s not a crystal ball by any means, but the basic premise is to figure out when people will start asking to see "AJAX" or "Web 2.0" functionality in our software. Furthermore I have to predict what pieces they will want to see, how they will use them, and how much they will be willing to pay for them.

Now, most people won’t actually ask for AJAX or Web 2.0 by name; they probably won’t ask for open source directly either, but they may ask about open source or our support for open source platforms such as Linux and MySQL.

What they will ask for, however, are the capabilities afforded by Web 2.0; things like better ways to collaborate and share information, richer interfaces and open standards.

Latigent has actually been leveraging AJAX for almost a year now to provide a richer interface to our customers. Our customers love it, and our prospects love the look of it. Interesting enough, not one of them ever has asked how we do it, or asked "hey are you using AJAX?" My point you ask?

If we truly want to speed-up the adoption rate of Web 2.0 we have start translating the cloud into tangible benefits that the rest of the world can understand and identify with, and in some cases slide it in subtly.

In future posts, I will discuss how all of this ties into the Business Intelligence space. I’ll also dissect what most people refer to as the "BI Stack" and frame-up what  Business Intelligence 2.0 will look like, how it will take form, and how we sell it to the Enterprise.