Firms slow to adopt customer analytics tools

The use of customer analytics is still in its infancy when it comes to customer-related and contact centre performance management, with the majority of companies continuing to use spreadsheets and one-off reports (typically from their infrastructure suppliers) to produce most of their reports and analysis. This is according to the results of a five-year study by Ventana Research, which monitored the use of reporting, business intelligence, analytics and performance management tools, and what products vendors are bringing to market. It soon became apparent that while there are some sophisticated tools out there, the use of products is lagging considerably behind what is available.

A small minority of firms have approached their IT departments to develop special reports using the company’s enterprise intelligence tool, while only the top 20% have recognised the benefits a specialist tool can deliver. The research identified several key reasons why this situation prevails: lack of awareness of available products, difficulty accessing certain types of data sources and a low appreciation of the business benefits deploying a specialist product can deliver.

For many years, companies have relied on reports provided by their infrastructure suppliers (vendors such as ACD, IVR, CTI etc.) and/or their main application vendors (CRM, ERP vendors). Typically, these are bundled in with the main system, so come free. However, most provide straightforward reports in very basic formats that are not always easy to interpret or, at the very best, only provide information based on data from the originating system. We see this has lead to the proliferation of end-users using spreadsheets. Unable to get the view they required, they went down the only 'cheap' and simple route open to them, which was to expend considerable manual effort by cutting and pasting data from multiple systems into spreadsheets and then using basic analysis tools to produce reports and graphs to meet their business need.

While this approach satisfied the many users we surveyed, more senior managers and executives wanted to see aggregated information in more graphical styles, such as dashboards and scorecards. This led to many companies turning to their IT departments, who in turn used their enterprise reporting products such as Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to build a solution. These had the advantage that once programmed to access the required data and configured to show the results in formats more suited to high-level decision making, they didn’t require manual effort to run.