What Does All This Data Mean?

In the last few months, I have been blessed enough to visit and speak with leadership at a number of large companies, specifically leadership in the customer service arena. One of the things that I always make a point of asking them is, "What do you think of all this Analytics talk?". Invariably, they launch into a story, sometimes a story about the great usefulness they are seeing and sometimes a not so good story about how they spent alot of money and didn't see a return that they had planned for. In each case though, the company had done a lot of due diligence in finding the right vendor, finding the right technology and in their eyes picking the right partner. But, in both cases, the good and bad, the determining factor for whether or not their was success had nothing to do with the classic criteria that they were using to choose a partner/product. More on that in a minute.

Lets do a rundown again of the different solutions that are in the market today for customer service groups and "Analyitcs" solutions. I use the term broadly, because as I have said in a post earlier this year, it is hard to tell what company is providing Analytics and what company is just calling their reporting packages Analytics because it is the new buzz word. So a quick rundown. Again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but only meant to highlight the couple that are seeing most traction today in the market.:

1. Speech Analytics- Using technology to analyze what both customers and agents are saying on calls. Or more broadly, using technology to analyze content in any type of voice based interaction (think video)

2. Text Analytics- Using technology to typically parse unstructured text to find trends or spot issues within all types of text sources (community forums, emails, chat sessions, blogs, social networks etc..)

3. IVR Analtyics- Using technology to analyze the IVR to understand why customers are or are not using the IVR in the way that brings the most benefit to the customers and company.

4. Customer Experience Analytics- Using technology to stitch together the customer journey to understand their total experience with a company over time.

5. Performance Analytics- Using technology to better understand and measure the performance of customer service representatives in an organization.

6. Multi Channel Analytics- This is kind of a catch all phrase applied to some companies offerings that typically represents some combination of some or all of these solutions mentioned above.

As I said, there are a number of options in the market today to fulfill any technology desire or wish that you might have. But my conversations again point to the tipping point being less a decision on technology and more of a decision on something else. That something else is the expertise that is needed to know what to look for in the data.

There are three companies in particular that I have spoken with recently that all told me that their projects for analytics all started out rather slowly and without a bang. The had expected so much more from the technology right away and what they all concluded was that if they would have had the knowledge or expertise about what to look for from the beginning, then they would have been much more successful, much faster.

All of these companies and many more are starting to see real returns from different analytical solutions that are on the market. But the lesson learned here for vendors is to do the heavy lifting and work for your clients up front. Put together best practices and lessons learned that can packaged for companies or industry types to help your clients get started quickly. And customers, make sure that when you are looking at these solutions and technologies, put the RFP matrices aside and focus on companies that can help you ask the right questions of your business because that will be the key criteria to whether you succeed in making analytics a

differentiator for your customer service team.

The question isn't who has the right technology. The question needs to be who helps me ask the right questions.