Chris Crosby

Some of you know my disdain for the use of massive Excel files and what I call the “shotgun blast” approach to reporting. However, since they are a necessary evil in most environments today, I thought I’d point out how you can leverage Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite (CUIS) to automate them. One of the major challenges to creating “one-size-fits-all” excel workbooks is that they are largely a manual process as someone needs to export data from its source and then copy/paste it into excel, format it and then email. By combining CUIS with an Excel macro, we’ve had customers take this manual effort from a couple  hours a day down to a couple of minutes a day. Here’s how it works:

Every report in CUIS has what’s called a permalink, or distinct URL, that can be directly referenced by other applications or your web browser. Each report actually has four different permalink options that can be accessed depending on how you need to query the data. 

The first step is to create your CUIS report and run it for a filtered and relative date range (usually for a specific set of Skill Groups or Call Types for say “This Month”). Save a copy of this report with the filters intact and then follow the steps below. *Tip- I usually save these reports in their own category folder for easier management.

Step One: Locate the HTML Permalink for the report (make sure that it is a filtered report for a relative date range as mentioned above). Copy it to your clipboard. 

Step Two: Open Excel and find the Data>Import from a Web Query Function. Copy the Report Permalink into the New Web Query Address box. Excel will load a preview of the data. Click “Import”.

Step Three: Highlight the cell that you would like to use as the upper-left starting point for the imported data. Hit “OK”.

Step Four: Your CUIS Report data is now imported into Excel to format as you choose.

It’s truly that easy. I recommend creating an Excel macro to handle the above steps for you. Most customers create a “data” tab that the other formatted tabs reference to get their data and calculations. By using a macro you can have Excel automatically query CUIS and format all the tabs as needed. Then you simply save and email the file to whomever needs it.

Please feel free to reference the Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite End User Guide for additional detail. 

Enjoy.

OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:

A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.

The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,

 http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

returns the following image:

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.

Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.

When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.

Well, WE DID IT!!

As most of you know, on Sept. 27^th Latigent entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc. (Press release here http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/corp_092707.html )

I’m excited to say that last night we executed the final closing documents and officially turned over the keys.

I’ve received a lot of questions over the last week about what happens next. The short answer is that we were able to place almost the entire team with Cisco. I personally will be going into a senior Business Development role inside the Contact Center Business Unit and Jason is taking on a lead role in the engineering team. Cisco will begin integrating our product line into their Contact Center offering and begin transitioning support for our current customers.

It’s a bit wild to think that what started out as an idea scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin (literally) will now be distributed in 17 different languages to virtually every corner of the planet and used by tens of thousands of people. To say that it’s been an amazing journey to get to this point would be both cliché and understated. It’s impossible to sum up in one post what I’ve learned from this experience and how it’s transformed me; so I’ll save all that for the book…

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge and thank the extraordinary people that stuck by our side through all the cheers and jeers: our alliance and channel partners, the customers who hired us and the one who fired us, industry analysts, vendors that didn’t always get paid on time, entrepreneurial mentors, and our friends and family for their daily support and inspiration.

Thank you to Jason for not just buying into the crazy idea of building the seemingly impossible, but actually building it.

Thank you to Gary, for being Gary and engineering us out of database hell; Justin, for saving my neck more times than any other guy on the planet; and Mark for hanging in there through all the uncertainty, even though you’re a SOX AND D-Backs  fan.

Most of all, thank you to the unsung hero of Latigent, my wife and confidant Amy, none of this would have been possible without your unselfish support and sacrifices, uncounted hours of behind the scenes work, and your faith that together we could do it.

Cheers everybody!

Chris Crosby

(Former) President/CEO – Latigent

I was recently asked by Call Center Magazine what I thought the difference between analytics and performance management is so I thought I’d post it here as well.

Latigent defines Analytics as the process and enabling tools for root cause and trend isolation. This can range from call volume drivers, to customer segmentation, to agent performance. You hear a lot about slice and dice and drill-down when it comes to analytics. These are very important; however a well defined analytics product should also let you correlate disparate events together and analyze their impact on each other.

Performance Management ties in broad based metrics to paint a picture of individual performance against company objectives. This is where the idea of the “balanced scorecard” comes into play.

Performance Management and Analytics are often used interchangeable. However, Analytics is more about opportunity and problem identification, where Performance Management is geared towards generating the report card and faciliating the process for improvement.

-Chris

Have you seen the Verizon commercial where the two guys download the 80’s tune “Rock the Casbah”, but instead of singing along to the correct lyrics they misinterpret them into something completely different? Over the course of the commercial they botch the chorus into “lock the cashbox” and “stop the cat box”, which takes a perfectly good rock song and makes it complete gibberish.

The commercial ends with the narrator stating:

“You don’t have to understand your music to understand how to get it all from your PC to your Phone” 

Albeit, I think the commercial is funny and is reminiscent of my grade school days running around the house playing air guitar and trying to belt-out Van Halen tunes (ok, maybe that was last week); it got me thinking about something not so funny: how often I see reports and metrics that end-up getting botched because somebody misinterpreted a few lyrics along the way.

Unfortunately in the contact center, you do have to understand your data to understand how to get it all from it’s source into your reports, dashboards and scorecards.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Average Talk Time is almost always calculated as (Total Talk Time/Calls Answered). Seems simple enough right? We’ll, not always…

Some of you may have noticed in the Avaya CMS tables there are two fields that represent “total talk time”: ACDTIME and I_ACDTIME

According to the CMS documentation:

ACDTIME = The talk time of all ACDCALLS (calls answered) for an interval.

I_ACDTIME = The length of time during the collection interval that agents were on split/skill ACD calls.

What this means is that ACDTIME represents the total talk time for calls that were physically answered in that interval vs. I_ACDTIME which tallies up all of the time for a half-hour interval that agents were actually talking.

In this example, you would use ACDTIME for an average talk time calculation and I_ACDTIME for an occupancy calculation. Interchanging those two fields incorrectly in a report changes the tune completely…

Another common misinterpretation I see is in the Cisco ICM/IPCC Enterprise world. Cisco makes available both Calls Answered and Calls Handled for reporting purposes. These terms are often interchanged in verbal context, however according to the Cisco database schema:

Calls Answered = Number of calls answered by agents associated with this skill group during the half-hour interval.

Calls Handled = The number of inbound ACD calls answered and wrap-up completed by agents associated with this skill group during the half-hour interval.

So, Calls Answered are pegged to the half hour interval when the call is physically answered, and Calls Handled pegs when the call is actually finished. The difference seems subtle, and over the course of a day the grand total should be the same (except for calls running over midnight).

But what happens if you feed your WFM application Calls Handled instead of Calls Answered? You got it, inaccurate call arrival patterns and forecasts. What would seem like a relatively minor botch will end up having a significant impact downstream on your Service Levels and staffing efficiencies.

I remember as a kid cracking open my first cassette tape that actually had the lyrics printed on the inside of the cover. This was a novel concept as I no longer had to decipher them on my own. This same concept applies to your reporting. Most vendors publish a document that explains, like the examples above, the meaning and usage behind their database elements.

When designing a datamart or report, it’s critical that you reference these documents as your lyrical road map. Also review them whenever you upgrade your ACD or WFM system, as often times fields will change with new product releases.

The best way to avoid these types of pitfalls is to consult an expert or somebody that is familiar with each vendors’ nuances and understands your desired end game requirements. (cough, Latigent)

Before you know it, you’ll be Rockin the Casbah…

-Chris

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

It’s that time of year again. The ever present New Year technology predictions are sprouting like spring time weeds in my grandfather’s tomato garden. This seems to have sparked a renewed energy around the topic of RSS. I must say, it’s exciting to see a continually growing surge in discussion and awareness around RSS and it’s various real world uses.

So let’s take a deeper look at these crystal ball gazing predictions that “this is the year for RSS“. I appreciate everyone’s optimism, but if this thing is ever going to happen we need to change our product and go-to-market strategies. Obviously the current one isn’t working.

What do I mean? We’ll for starters we’re asking the wrong questions and making the wrong statements. Instead of asking “when is this going to take off?” As leaders in this industry we owe it to ourselves to ask: “Why hasn’t it?” And “what do we need to do to increase end-user adoption?”

About 18 months ago I stuck “Enterprise RSS” functionality into our Business Intelligence product’s development pipeline and declared that Latigent would leverage a first mover advantage in this new emerging market. BlueVue already had a great deal of the required plumbing done, so it was a logical short jump for us. My notion even seemed validated in Dec 2005 when I received a phone call from one of the nation’s top 100 law firms in NYC to demo our product.

I remember stepping out of my cab onto Madison Ave. that cold December afternoon. I looked-up at the big city high rises with stars and dollar signs in my eyes, ready to trail blaze a path into every law office in America. This was an opportunity to set ourselves apart from competitors and define a new market. Or so I thought…

Unfortunately, despite a laborious effort, about the only person in the company that actually understood Enterprise RSS or how to use it was the Head Librarian. And let’s face it, lawyers are not exactly the type to jump on the cutting-edge technology band wagon. Ultimately, the project died.

From that day forward though, I have mentioned Enterprise RSS in every product demo, seminar, and training class I’ve conducted. Today I still get rooms full of silence and blank stares until someone bravely asks, “What’s RSS?”

What I’ve come to realize is that that little orange icon usually scares the non-developer away. The XML page that pukes out when you click the icon on a website is confusing and sends most people running the other direction. Albeit, there have been major steps by the likes of Feedburner, Google, Firefox and IE7 to alleviate that frustration, my gut says the typical internet user is still in IE6 and a great deal of feeds still don’t route through Feedburner or a similar service.

I believe the new feed icon is a little less intimidating, but it’s still not all that clear to a new user what it does, or what exactly a feed is. Some websites post an RSS 101 section on their site, but even those can further convolute things.

The other issue is there are too many formats. Don’t get me wrong, flexible format choices are great for content syndicates but they suck for the content consumer. Johnny internet user doesn’t know the difference between RSS .93 and RSS 2.0 let alone RSS and ATOM. So when a site displays multiple format icons they may appeal to the savvy, but are providing further fear factor for the rest of the world.

On the upside, I do believe the content hurdle is finally being cleared. This provides greater exposure to the technology and peaks the curiosity of Jonny Internet User to take the first step in the RSS self-education process.

Now we’ve taken a look at the why’s behind why RSS hasn’t taken off. Let’s take a look at what we need to do about it. The solution I believe is three fold:

1. Simplification and accessibility- We need to dumb it down for the average Joe. As I mentioned there are several companies already helping with this. But the real answer lies in “Integrated Readers”. The market for stand alone tools and readers is dead. People don’t want another place to go to get content. They want it in whatever portal they’re using at that moment. Whether it be your Google homepage, or your Company’s ERP system, the content needs to be more accessible and relative. 

   My guess is that if Apple released an i-Feeds reader that was integrated with i-Tunes and the video i-Pod the result would be explosive. Right now some of you are screaming “they already have that for podcasts”. Which is exactly my point. They mask the complexity for the end user.

2. Content Pizzazz – Let’s face it, straight feeds and static HTML are relatively boring. Some feeds incorporate images, etc. in the HTML. But what we really need is more interactivity with the content. Give people a reason to subscribe. Perhaps RSS Widgets or things similar to the banner ad putt-putt games that put Orbitz on the map. I’ll talk more about these later.
3. Marketing – As with any product, technology, or service you have to have a good sales and marketing pitch. What we need is an RSS coalition so to speak. An army of advocates educating the masses on what RSS is and how to use it. Perhaps banner ads on MySpace would do the trick  

   I have a couple initiatives brewing in the background for this that I’ll be announcing shortly.

This will be the first in several posts about bringing RSS mainstream, as this starry-eyed guy still has hope that things can take off. So instead of making a New Year’s prediction that this is the year for RSS, I’m making a New Year’s Resolution to do my part in making sure that it is. Who’s with me?

-Chris

[tags]RSS, Integrated Reader, RSS2, Latigent, Chris Crosby, RSS Reader, Software, Technology, 2007 Predictions, New Years Resolutions[/tags]

Heres one of the first steps in starting your company’s Business Intelligence strategy: Take an Inventory of all of the reports that get distributed throughout your organization, and who they go to. Next to each report put how many man hours are required to generate that report. This should be an eye opening experience.

Look for reports that can be simplified, consolidated, or completely eliminated.

Also go through your vendor’s reporting tools, such as your ACD, WFM, QA, etc. Odds are there is a long list of "Custom" Reports; many of which are redundant and due to their custom nature may render inconsistent data. This can be frustrating and confusing to your end users. Go through and eliminate unnecessary templates. This will ensure everyone has access to consistent data.

By taking these simple steps and streamlining report access, you will save your staff a great deal of time and annoyance.

-Chris

-part of the 60 ideas in 60 days series-