Business Intelligence has become a buzz phase in the customer service industry. In fact, often through no fault of their own, managers and senior executives are operating under the impression that their contact centre infrastructure already provides Business Intelligence.

In fact tools like ACDs and IVRs provide reams of powerful statistics, but turning that data into something useful requires something else - Business Intelligence tools.

In our industry, essential Business Intelligence tools include a Workforce Management system, a Quality Management system, and a Customer Experience Measurement system, amongst others. We use the word ‘essential’ for the specific reason that contact centres cannot possibly hope to serve customers effectively and efficiently without these critical Business Intelligence tools.

There are three things managers need when they start to investigate these tools.

1. Open access to your data. When evaluating a system, find out if you can connect it with an existing database, and if so, is there a cost? There shouldn’t be.

2. Free access to all the information in the tool. Users of system need be able to reach in whenever they want and pull out the information that they need.

3. Strong local support. Call centre operations need access to engineers who are in their time zone – in their country – who know the tools intimately and are able to provide any assistance required to turn the data that has been gathered into actionable Business Intelligence.

At Customer Service Engineering, our strategy is to offer solutions that fit these first two criteria, and we ourselves carry out the third by hiring highly skilled engineers and mathematicians.

We ensure that we are the partners to our clients who provide very strong support - operationally and technically – so they get the Business Intelligence required to serve customers efficiently and effectively at the lowest possible cost per served customer.