My mother always told me “key performance indicators are the answer to understanding your business and maintaining efficient applications and systems” or was she the one that used to tell me “always wash behind your ears”? Hmmm, not sure which but both are excellent advice.
So what is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? Well, if you sell books, then you will want to know how many book orders were placed. But is that good enough? You probably need to know how many orders were placed in the past week, month, and quarter, who are your best customers, how much of the business comes from repeat customers, and why is “Do It Yourself Nuclear Fusion” the most popular book again this month? Answers we all want to know indeed. OK, you already know the set of KPI that is meaningful to you… how do you currently capture that information? You have enterprise systems doing a lot of automation work for your business – but are those systems telling you “what” they are doing for your business or how often they do not meet your business targets? This is where Envoy® Reporting and Analytics comes to the rescue! The Envoy® Framework has components pre-built for you that let you concentrate on getting the data – not worrying about code integration, deployment, and scalability. Now each of those items are a big piece of the puzzle not to be overlooked – so we will address each of those considerations in a separate article – for now, let’s stay focused on the importance of understanding your captured data points.
Customizable Views of Data – Everyone needs some of the same “facts” about their business, but let’s face it, we all consume or understand data in different ways. After all, just because there is “a lot of numbers” on the chart or spreadsheet does not mean it is as impactful to everyone that views it – we want to see the data in a way that visually means the most to us. Take for example the summary KPI data (picture) above – maybe you want all the same data, but you like it “grouped” according to the criteria you specify, and then “drill down” for details.
Or perhaps you like to manipulate all the variables and are a hardcore numbers type – so you like a pivot grid.
Goal Tracking – To this point, everything we have seen is good – for those that know all the details of the voice response system or web application. Give all this great data to the techies and let them use the information to maintain their applications in tip top shape. You want to know high level business oriented information. Hey – you are a goal driven person, not a gear head! Good, because the Envoy® Reporting plugin is built from the ground up to gather and report on the business objectives (goals) that you want to see. Perhaps you already know how many book orders you received; but do you know how many attempts the callers made to place an order – and how many failed because they just gave up? Yikes! Maybe that old voice response application is losing business because it has old menu choices, drops call transfers, or just has poorly tuned speech recognition. Maybe it is transferring almost every call to your agents and the dang thing is not doing any work for you at all. If only you knew…
Goal tracking! No application details! Great stuff but maybe the contact center supervisors need this data real time. Maybe they really wish they could be alerted to goals not meeting service level agreements…
Terrific, now we are getting somewhere! And by the way – not to show off or anything – but did you notice the cool theme support in the reporting user interface? Pick the colors that make your reports and charts stand out. Yes, you can chart your data if you prefer.
Data Filtering – Ok, the data views and printed reports are really helping you understand strengths and weaknesses within the applications and back end systems (Envoy® Server has plugins that can monitor just about anything you want to keep an eye on) but capturing all that data makes it tough to find your best customers or those that call in with specific complaints. Envoy® Reporting and Analytics has many standard reports for the most common data points of interest, but it also supports multiple mechanisms for retrieving limited data sets you are interested in at any given time. From ad-hoc query tools / searchable data fields…
… to allowing you to dynamically “customize” the screen with only the data fields you care about…
… you can find the data you need fast. And then export the data to the format that is best for your business needs.
There are still many more advanced features of Envoy® Reporting and Analytics not listed here that your enterprise can put to use immediately. VEXIS wants to help you get the most from the applications that we deploy for you and with you. And VEXIS can also help you use Envoy® Reporting and Analytics to instrument the applications that you have running right now in your enterprise that your mother warned you about – those that are “lacking supervision”. Hey, if your friend runs with scissors, crosses the street without looking, or operates his/her contact center blindly without knowing anything about the automated systems and applications – does that mean you are going to do the same thing also?
Hang on to your seats for the next VEXIS Voice “Envoy® Updates” article or contact your VEXIS Territory Manager to get an up close look at what Envoy® Reporting and Analytics can do for your contact center!
Richard Wolff, Director of Software R&D