Analytics is one of the hottest subjects in enterprises because they turn data—and interactions--into meaningful and actionable intelligence. The more you know the sooner you know the quicker you can identify and capitalize on sales and cost reduction opportunities and get on top of customer service and support issues to ensure customer loyalty.

Coordinated Systems, Inc (CSI) has long been a leading call recording and quality monitoring (QM) solutions firm. Its new Virtual Observer 4.0 features speech and enhanced dashboard analytics, integrated scoring, screen capture, performance and trending reports, e-learning and VO Live for real-time agent monitoring and assistance. All of the robust QM features in its client-server version are now available via the web in Virtual Observer 4.0, in a user-friendly browser environment.

TMCnet recently interviewed Rich Marcia, CSI’s (News - Alert) marketing director on analytics issues. Here is the discussion:

TMCnet:         What business needs deliverable via contact centers are you seeing a growing demand for i.e. (a) knowledge management, (b) operational efficiencies, (c) multichannel management, (d) increasing self-service success rates, (e) customer retention and (f) sales/collections performance that you are seeing more of and why?RM:     All of the above are important, but the one I've seen emerging as an in-demand request are for tools which focus on the customer experience (retention). It’s more and more vital to retain your current base versus spending tremendous monies chasing new business…there's an old adage there somewhere.

Multichannel especially social media has gotten a lot of press these days. We haven’t really seen any requests for incorporating Twitter or Facebook (News - Alert) streams as scorable, recordable data points. On the other hand web chat has really seen an uptick. One of our customers, a large expo producer, has noticed a large percentage (20 percent) of customer traffic now flowing through that channel. I also surveyed our customers and a good number of them can see a point where web chats will exist alongside recorded calls, screens and e-mails.

TMCnet:         Customer interaction channels: such as contact center live agents, self-service, social media and others such as retail have been housed in silos, making difficult to obtain 360-degree insights from via the information they collect on which to perform analytics. Are these channels beginning to break down or are they still locked in? Are firms getting it that they must rip apart these walls?  What strategies do you recommend in response?

RM:     It's becoming more and more apparent that the applications we use today and in the future will be required to offer an API for easy access to data. Even beyond that, the app engineers will need to make it WYSIWYG so the data becomes accessible to any business analyst or application who needs it. With strict privacy controls in place, this should be fairly simple to pull off, no? It's kind of like when Facebook asks you to give permission to an app – you’re essentially a user who is allowing an app to have access to your data (and your friends’ data - yikes!). I can envision a social network of business applications...apps that are pre-authorized to access each other's data.

TMCnet:         Firms appear to be more so in an "I-want-it-yesterday" mode when it comes to information, intelligence and insight. Are you seeing this and what are the drivers?

RM:     This is most definitely the case. We're now fashioning our performance reporting data as real-time, multi-level widgets which can be inserted into any users’ custom dashboard environment. The main drivers for this would be a need for speed in all areas of business analytics. The faster you get your data, the faster you can analyze it and make decisions based on it. We’ve equipped Virtual Observer version 4 to offer a wide range of dashboard analytics to meet this demand.

Here is a screenshot of our "Evaluations at a glance" dashboard, which shows evaluation performance at multiple levels: