Chris Crosby

Newsflash: Every report on the planet has one thing in common; TOO MUCH DATA!

As a leader in the Call Center Performance Management and Business Intelligence space, we see A LOT of reports. Some of them are good, and most of them are not so good. In fact, we evaluate and design so many reports that people consider us “Reporting Scientists” (thank you Rory Welper at Cisco for coining that phrase for us).

Before Latigent starts any deployment we ask the customer to send us samples of their current reports and to define what their end goal is. Inevitably we receive a stack of printed ACD reports, screen shots from archaic real-time displays, and excel files with more tabs than Baskin Robins has flavors of Ice Cream.

I touched on this topic a few months ago in Death by Excel (that was actually the original name of the series but I thought the new one made far more sense). In a recent visit with an old colleague of mine this same topic came up, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit the subject.

He mentioned during our conversation that a member of their Client Services team had created her “ultimate report”.

I said, “let me guess, it has every data element (most of it worthless) that she could ever want or ask for; and will never look at most of it”.

“Yep” was his response.

“Burn it, before the rest of them see it”, I said.

Now, before we get the torches and pitchforks out and start chasing our Client Service Managers (CSMs) around the building, lets look at the real root of the issue:

Lack of information accessibility 

But wait, I just said they are asking for too much data now I’m saying they don’t get enough? Yes. And this actually applies to most of us in our day-to-day jobs, but I’ll use the CSM as an example because I like to pick on all my old cronies.

Think about what happens when a client calls their CSM and asks how many hours were billed vs. staffed for the 23rd of last month. In most environments this would require the CSM to track down and rummage through countless ACD & Billing reports to find the right answer. This usually takes hours or days.

So the logical answer in this environment, at least in the CSM’s mind, is to create a “data insurance policy” by having your IT department stick all of the data into one excel file even though you may never need to look at 99% of it. Seems a bit silly, heh? It’s actually more common than you think.

Now, let’s take a look at what happens when the information you do need to see everyday is buried amongst all the other blubber. It makes it nearly impossible to identify issues, and even harder to act on them.

So the solution?

Create reports that tell a story. You should be able to look at a report and know exactly what happened and WHY.

Try this experiment. Open up any of the reports in your inbox and ask yourself two questions:

1. What was our customers’ experience like yesterday?
2. What was my team’s performance yesterday?

Catch my drift? Sifting through countless columns like, Calls Offered, Calls Answered, and Hours Logged On, really doesn’t tell you much.

My challenge to you is to start killing off the data that doesn’t mean anything. Whittle your reports down to the point that you have just the metrics that you can act on. You can’t take action on calls answered, but you CAN take action on Agent Quality information and the Quality of your Call Volume Forecasts.

As for the information like billed hours that your CSM needs once a month or ad hoc, stick those into a web portal that can be accessed on demand. I call these “Reference Reports”. They’re sort of like an encyclopedia or dictionary; not something you read everyday but is available when you need to look something up.

The rest of the meaningful and actionable information can be stuck into “Impact Reports”; reports that empower you with the information you need to impact your world everyday.

Latigent  will conduct a free webinar on “Creating Reports with Impact” on March 21st, at 11:00-12:00 CST. To register go to www.reportswithimpact.com

-Chris Crosby

In case you missed it, Verint made an unexpected play last week to acquire Witness. It’s safe to say that when most of us heard the news we paused for a moment and thought to ourselves,  “HUH?”

Over the course of the last week I’ve had no less than a dozen conversations with industry analysts and vets speculating the why’s and motives behind this unexpected buy.

Although, despite of all the useless speculation, what really matters is how this merger impacts you, me, and this industry we love so much.

So here’s how I see it:

The biggest sector that will be impacted is call recording. As little as two years ago there were a ton of options to choose from when purchasing or replacing these types of solutions, now Verint WILL dominate the field.

How the ‘Verint/Witness’ product integration and end-of-life strategies play out is yet to be told and will certainly cause a great deal of short term customer (and prospect) confusion. My hope is that the rival companies will put the swords away and take a true “best of breed” approach. I can’t tell you which recording product is better, but what I can tell you is that they need to:

• figure out how to take the best of both
• create a new best-of-breed
• offer both sets of legacy customers a smooth migration path

Many other merger kings have fallen short in this arena and lost in the end. (need we mention Aspect with RightForce and eWFM)

My advice to the new combined customer base is to pay close attention to the new product roadmap. Witness spent a great deal of time building the Blue Pumpkin integration into their Impact 360 line, so if you’re being sold this solution today make damn well sure you know what its going to look like 24 months from now. Start asking questions about where and how all the moving parts will integrate. You won’t get answers to all of them now, but get them on your sales reps’ radar screen. And be relentless before you start writing checks.

By all means, if you are in the market for call recording make sure you understand the new landscape prior to purchasing either legacy application. There are other non-monolithic vendors out there that may prove to be more agile alternatives.

On a side and often overlooked note, vendor consolidation has downstream effects on the entire industry. For example, call center exhibit halls are shrinking. Eighteen months ago a demo hall would have had Verint, Opus Group, Mercom, Blue Pumpkin, Witness and Amae Software (and I’m sure I’m missing a couple others). Today these six vendors all fall under the Verint booth. AND this is just one company’s consolidation, for more carnage you only have to look at the Concerto/Aspect acquisition binges, or Cisco or… This impacts everything from conference agendas to the often watered down magazine “articles” you read…

 -Chris

Ok pardon the bad pun in the title, but I couldn’t resist…

As I mentioned in my first post about politics 2.0, this is not a political blog, however I have taken a certain fascination with how the Internet and the “web 2.0 phenomenon” is going to shape the 2008 elections. As such, I will be discussing the non-partisan/platform aspects here:

I was almost finished wrapping-up the 2nd post in this series “from grassroots to netroots” when I received an email from Barack Obama’s PAC that I thought warranted discussion.

The blast was presumably sent to his email base with the goal to build awareness and excitement about his announcement tomorrow to run for the big house in 08. Beyond the “come join us for the rallies” there was a link to a 2 minute video clip (not uncommon for his campaign strategy).

What I find fascinating is that the clip didn’t mention ANY POLITICAL AGENDAS!!! It is merely a discussion about how his campaign will engage the constituent base, many aspects of which I touched on in my last post. It’s arguable whether or not the first 49 seconds of the clip stand for a platform in-and-of-itself, but we’ll save that discussion for another time and place.

I don’t have time to write about it here, but ponder just for a second what Barack’s cost per voter impression (I just made that metric up) is vs. traditional media (compared to say, Rudy Giuliani)… 

-Chris

“Open Source” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS) are big buzzwords these days. And rightfully so. Both are viable approaches to mitigating the often high cost of software and infrastructure. However, to date these two approaches have largely existed separately. There are a few exceptions to this, such as SugarCRM who offers their software with both the ability to download the open source version or pay a small monthly hosting fee.

I won’t go into the advantages of either approach here as a simple Google search on either term yields more than enough information on the topics. I’ve also touched on some of them in a previous post.

However, recently when I was looking at how to set-up a website, email and blog for my wife’s business, I stumbled across a plethora of new options that simply didn’t exist a couple years ago when we set-up Latigent.

With a little research I figured out that the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Joomla would be the easiest way to get something up and running. The software was free and the options for plugins was mind numbing (similar to my theory on salesforce.com’s success).

The next trick was to find someone to host it for me. That’s when I found BuyHTTP. They have several economical plans starting at $4.95 a month, but for only $24.95 a month I get unlimited websites and MySQL databases.

So why would I need unlimited websites and MySQL databases? Good question, let me explain.

My wife is in real estate, so my first inclination was to create individual websites for each of her property listings and interlink them all. Google traffic in the making, I thought.

As I was configuring the first site, I stumbled onto Fantastico, which is an autoinstaller for several open source programs (Joomla included). What I found next was like opening Pandora’s box.

Inside the Fantastico control panel I discovered that I could install any of roughly 30 open source applications directly into the website. These cover everything from blogs and wikis to online chat and e-commerce; so basically most anything I would need to run a small business on the web.

With a little elbow grease I was able to install the core apps and hook them into the main Joomla site. No Consultants, No Developers, No Headaches…

Also during this I migrated my TypePad Blog over to Wordpress on this website. This alone saves me $11.95 a month.

Now, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, check this out. I downloaded SugarCRM, uploaded it to my managed server, and installed it on its own subdomain in less than 15 minutes. I was prepared to cough-up the $65 a month for the basic salesforce.com account but this new solution saves me that cost and I control the domain and database.

I truly feel this model is the best of both worlds for the SMB. It allows me to be in control of my own destiny without having to host everything myself.

I foresee a real market opportunity for someone to stitch together and integrate these open source apps more closely, as well as bundle some baseline consulting around the installation.

So for now, I will enjoy running almost all of my wife’s business on the web for $24.95 a month. Somebody pinch me…

-Chris

Yesterday’s post about MyWorkLight and unlocking enterprise content via RSS generated a great deal of interest. A couple of the emails I received made me take a step back and look at the Latigent product offering with a fresh set of goggles.

As I’ve mentioned before, BlueVue has an integrated RSS Reader in it, not a very good one, but its functional. To be completely honest, it’s actually just more of a way to stick an XSLT on top of an RSS feed’s XML. For obvious reasons we never emphasized this as a core part of our suite.

However about a year ago, at a customer’s request, we stuffed in the ability for our scheduled reports to be syndicated as RSS feeds. No one ever really figured out anything clever to do with this feature (even the customer) because most of the world still doesn’t understand what to do with RSS.

So fast forward to today and let me paint a new picture for you. BlueVue is a Business Intelligence Suite. Which by definition means we consolidate and normalize data from across the enterprise; then push that out to consumers as customized reports, scorecards and dashboards. As I mentioned, these reports can be scheduled to either update dashboards, email HTML, or update an RSS feed.

“Business Intelligence is no longer just data warehouses, reporting, analytics and dashboards; it’s the art of harvesting information from a mass array of sources and distributing what’s relevant to the right people at the right time and in a way that’s tailored to each consumer”

– Chris Crosby,
President/CEO Latigent International

This is a quote from the press release we did in December 2005 when BlueVue II was first released. However, the full magnitude of that vision didn’t hit me until about 1:00 PM yesterday afternoon… This was one of those “aha” moments for me.

All a customer would need to do is take those RSS feeds and plug them into a real Enterprise RSS tool and… wallah! the power of business Intelligence and RSS converge.

Forget “Web 2.0″, we’ve just introduced the next generation of Enterprise Information Distribution. So 18 months from now when the industry analysts and pundits catch-up remember you read it here first…

Ironically enough, the entire time I’ve been ranting about enterprise content needing to be available via RSS it was right under my nose in my own product. Talk about a giant smack to the forehead… doh!

-Chris

I want to share with everyone a press release I read last week about a new RSS tool taking aim at the enterprise.

Typical Enterprise RSS applications, such as Newsgator, specialize in aggregating traditional RSS content and puking it out to different groups of users in an organization. However, MyWorkLight is striving to make content from enterprise applications available for consumption in any RSS reader. Bingo baby.

The product description on their website says:

WorkLight™ is a secure and scalable server-based software product that provides workers and consumers with “Web 2.0-style” access to corporate data stored in enterprise information systems and applications. Timely information is delivered securely using services and technologies such as RSS, Ajax, desktop and web-based gadgets and widgets, personalized homepages, social bookmarks, application mashups, instant messaging and more.

WorkLight uses application “adapters” to extract data from enterprise applications and other data sources. Adapters are provided for various common interfaces, such as SQL and Web Services, as well as for specific applications.

As I said in ”the problem with RSS…“, these types of applications are what’s needed to take RSS to the next level. The more data that is unlocked and made easily accessible to people, the more people will latch on to these technologies.

Albeit I haven’t seen the actual product yet, the concept looks killer on the surface.

-Note to Newsgator, BUY THIS COMPANY! The more content you can unlock and make available- the more of your rss aggregators you will sell…

-Chris

Allow me to preface these posts by stating that this is not a political blog, and this post does not reflect any partisan bias or opinions. The sole intention is to discuss yet another area that technology and social networking are changing the rules of the game.

The 2006 Congressional races generated more buzz and global awareness than any other midterm election I can consciously remember. Clearly there were hot button issues, such as Iraq, that bubbled at the forefront of this attention; however, underneath all of it we saw, what I believe, was the true beginning of the Internet and “Web 2.0″ emerging as a medium for communicating and monitoring the candidates and their platforms.

With the 2006 Elections barely over, we’re already seeing preparation at both the constituent and candidate levels for 2008. The 2008 campaign cycle will be different than any other we’ve seen. The emergence of “netroots” followings and anti-followings will require politicians to adjust their long tried and trued campaigning tactics. From the looks of it, some of these early contenders clearly “get-it”, while others obviously never will.

One of the first to understand the power of leveraging the web to relate and communicate to the masses was Barack Obama. Long before the hysteria around his impending Presidential Race, Obama was one of the first Senators to blog and podcast about his initiatives in Washington. He also makes his speeches available on the official Senate website. As an Illinois resident, I certainly appreciate this forum of information exchange. It’s truly no wonder that he’s become an international sensation.

I also have to note that it was fairly obvious, at least in my opinion, that Obama was gearing up for more than just book sales in late November when web searches on his name started yielding Google Adwords directing you to his website.

The next to demonstrate the importance of netroots engagement in this race was John Edwards when he invited bloggers to his announcement speech in New Orleans. One thing that strikes me as really cool is the “RSS Central” on his website. WOW! Most politicians can’t even spell RSS…

Quickly following suit was Hillary Clinton with her webinar and live chat series. These were advertised on political blogs for a week or so before hand, and in true Internet marketing spirit there was an email capture to register for the event. I signed-up for the first webinar, and despite the fact that I didn’t attend I still received a “Thank You Email”. Ms. Clinton would benefit from a better CRM solution. What I should have received was an email offering me a link to view the archived event. Oh well, she still has time to get the minor details right.

Some other notables on her website include the Guest Blogger contest, the “Build Our Base” link to enter in the email addresses of your friends and family (this one could actually backfire if people feel like they’re getting spammed). Hillary’s 2.0ish site is even complete with a way to sign-up for a fundraiser code and track how much you’ve raised online. Lastly, even her “Let the Conversation Begin” launch theme conjures up images of the social networking craze…

There are even signs that the actual political parties themselves are getting the bigger picture:

-The Republicans’ Official Site has postings to be a volunteer campaign eStrategist. They also give you the ability to create a turnkey fundraising site of your very own. Seems like a novel way to raise money AND drive web traffic.

-The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) Website touts a “DCCC Live!” section, featuring Online Chat sessions with Key Party Players and downloadable speeches. DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen has even committed to hold monthly conference calls with bloggers and DCCC netroots supporters.

Without question, how the 2008 political contenders leverage these new tactics will have a significant impact on their success. Despite all this, the elections will not be won by the Internet alone.There are still far too many voters unreachable by these methods. This means that candidates will still have to maintain their legacy media tactics.

The key element to success in 2008 will be the candidates’ ability to execute two simultaneous campaigns. One by utilizing the Internet and Guerilla 2.0 tactics; the second by executing the old mainstream media (MSM) approach.

Next-up, I’ll discuss how voters are using their online presence to steer the course of the elections. 

-Chris