ChrisR's blog

Abstract: As the contact center landscape changes, so too must the reporting and analysis solutions that drive decision-making and performance management. But the roadmap to better reporting and analysis isn't in every contact center's glove compartment; each will need a different roadmap to their destination. Contact center leaders are often at a loss on how to start down the road to better contact center reporting and analysis.

In the movie The Matrix (1999), a character named Cypher whiles away the hours staring at a torrent of raw data scrolling vertically down an old-fashioned video screen. While others see an indecipherable waterfall of symbols, he sees a coherent pattern that makes up the artificial reality known as the Matrix. (He also eventually goes insane.)

There are days when contact center analysts, supervisors and managers must feel like they’re staring at the same indecipherable waterfall of data — “staring at the Metrix,” if you’ll forgive the pun. The many, various and complex systems that make up the modern contact center form a fount of data that never runs dry; they collect information on virtually every measurable aspect of a customer interaction, how it was handled, and by whom. Typically, the number of database records rises into the millions in short order.

Once upon a time, there was a grief-crazed millionaire widow who consulted a psychic medium for advice on how to get past her sorrow. The medium consulted the spirits and proclaimed that the widow was under a curse – her departed husband’s livelihood had indirectly caused the deaths of thousands of souls, and she would have no rest until she not only built these tortured spirits a new home, but also kept ceaselessly adding rooms to make space for the ever-expanding legions of the dead. Thenceforth and until the day she died 38 years later, the penitent widow kept her mansion under constant construction, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

From the moment the first call rang through at the first agent’s desk, your call center systems started logging data that told the story of how your new organization was performing. The story was relatively simple in those early days, and the standard reports generated by these operational systems answered your basic questions. If they didn’t, you simply fired up a spreadsheet and did a little cutting and pasting of data from various sources to answer more complex questions as they sprang up.