Combining Business Analytics with Unified Communications Completes the Circle of Business

Summary: The definition of business analytics is the continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive future business processes and planning. What does that mean in basic terms? Business analytics completes the circle of unified communications. With business analytics, you can set up triggerable performance metrics that are automatically monitored and send alerts to supervisors and managers for them to interpret and act upon. For example, let's say you have an inbound-sales contact center with agents who take sales calls. You have determined that if agents are on the phone with a prospect for longer than five minutes, returns diminish, as does agents' overall productivity and revenue. With business analytics, the company can set up a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that triggers when any agent is on an inbound call for longer than five minutes. This instant notification of an exceeded KPI is what business analytics is all about. Unfortunately, this is really only half the story! What do supervisors do once they are notified of an exceeded KPI? And what tools do supervisors have at their disposal to take action regarding the exceeded KPI? This is where unified communications comes in.

The benefits of Cloud Unified Communications are well known. UC's ability to seamlessly connect people using multiple media channels (voice, video, messaging, web meeting) across any end device (desktop, smartphone, tablet) brings lower operating costs, more consistent global service delivery, higher productivity, and a reduction in IT resources.

But the real power of UC is when it "enables" other cloud services to make businesses more responsive and competitive. The industry term for this is "Communications-Enabled Business Process," or CEBP. A perfect example of CEBP is using UC to enable Business Analytics. Business Analytics (BA) is the continuous monitoring and review of historical business performance to gain insight and drive iterative changes in business processes and planning to improve overall business performance. The mechanics of BA involve identifying the specific business metrics to be monitored, triggering when those metrics exceed a pre-defined value, and notifying the appropriate people to review the metric and take appropriate corrective action. An example of a performance metric might be the number of calls a contact center agent fields per hour or per day. The trigger might be a lower watermark of say six calls per hour. Thus if any agent fields fewer than six calls per hour, an alert would be sent to the supervisor with the relevant information so the agent could take appropriate action.

Most BA solutions focus on the "monitor->trigger->notify" portion of the process, and many do a good job. However, that really is only half of the process. Once the metric has triggered and the supervisor is notified, there is a whole process for taking corrective action. The supervisor needs to connect with the agent, show the agent how to take corrective action, and if necessary, adjust any business practices or processes to reduce the chance that the metric will be exceeded again. It is this half of the process that is communications intensive and where UC can play a starring role.

When you combine business analytics (BA) with unified communications (UC) you complete the "circle of business." BA brings the monitoring, triggering, and notification of a key performance metric for the company, while UC allows the company/supervisor to instantly connect with the source of the offending metric, take corrective action, and collaborate with the rest of the company to convey the corrective action so that business adjustments can be made in real-time, thus improving the efficiency of the business.

Let's take a look at a real-life example of UC and BA working together to improve contact center productivity in real time. In this particular example, the company has determined that a key performance indicator is the length of time an agent is on the phone with a prospect. Management has pre-determined that any call over 10 minutes may possibly need help/attention.

① Prospect calls into the company's contact center.

② The company's Cloud UC Contact Center automatically routes the prospect to the next available agent using intelligent routing algorithms. Agent starts conversation with prospect, has some trouble closing the prospect, and exceeds 10 minutes on the call (pre-defined KPI).

③ Customized real-time business analytics rule triggers when the call exceeds 10 minutes and notifies agent's supervisor in real-time.

④ Supervisor uses integrated cloud UC contact center tools to "whisper" into the agent's ear to coach them thru the sale. For example, the supervisor might suggest that the agent access some company product literature or report.

⑤ Agent accesses the corporate content/documents to convince the prospect.

⑥ Agent is happy as he/she is coached through a sales challenge in real-time.

⑦ Prospect is happy with responsiveness of agent and purchases the product.

⑧ IT is happy to deliver revenue-enhancing IT services.

⑨ Supervisors are happy as they are able to derive higher productivity from their agents.

⑩ Management is happy to see higher revenue and productivity at lower cost.

As can be seen, combining business analytics with unified communications is a perfect example of a Communications-Enabled Business Process. BA-UC clearly presents a more effective and efficient means for enterprises to tune their businesses in real-time, drive more revenue, be more responsive, and maximize the productivity and efficiency of the workforce.

Arthur G. Chang is CEO of PanTerra Networks.