‘Actionable Insight’ in the Contact Centre

The Differences between Data, Information and Insight

• Data by itself is in abundance, but tells you very little because it is one dimensional, meaning there is no perspective. For example, if you just look at a single data point, like yesterday’s Calls Offered volume was 1,225, a new manager coming into the business won’t know whether that number is good, bad, or how it has been trending. This level of detail can be useful when you know exactly what you are looking for, but generally speaking, raw data like this would come at the very end of the analytics spectrum
• Information is the output of Data that has had business rules and logic applied to it, so it begins to take on some meaning and context, and starts to point you in the right direction.  For example, a report whereby you can see colour thresholds on your KPIs, or a Dashboard showing a trending chart so you know where you’ve been and if you’re tracking in the right direction or not. In a Contact Centre, it might be useful to aggregate individual skills together to form totals for Groups or Departments from a reporting perspective, to profile performance or help align similarly skilled teams more effectively to support your support strategy. This is a good example of deriving Information from Data.
• Insight is what is typically lacking or difficult to discern from the Information that you have, the X Factor if you like. You can only make decisions when you have peeled the layers back, and the lower level data sets have been analysed, and this is where the pain usually kicks in for managers. It takes significant time and bandwidth of experienced analysts or managers, who know where to look for additional relevant data and can deep dive, to be able to derive Insight with accuracy.

When Data becomes Information

To summarise with the above Calls Offered volume example, what happens when the manager is suddenly exposed to some new visualization? Now, instead of just seeing 1,225 as a static number and probably ignoring it completely, they can now see it is clearly an irregular spike on a chart with a red marker next to it.

This should naturally raise the manager’s curiosity. Now they know there is something unusual going on. The call volume is outside of acceptable range, and they can then start the process of problem identification and resolution.

It is understandable how managers may look upon this as insight, because compared to before, this new information is revolutionary indeed; and this so-called ‘Insight’ is largely what is being positioned by mainstream BI solution providers, or other software platforms bundling a reporting element or Dashboard into their solution.

But is this ‘Insight’ in the true sense, or is it simply an indicator or outcome of a problem somewhere else in the environment?

When Information becomes Insight

Now, imagine if on that same KPI marker on that same chart, when you click it, the manager can see that the Voice Bot or IVR resolution is down 55% for the Week to Date, and with another click, can see that the type of call traffic coming into the Contact Centre has shifted back heavily towards manual processes.

This means that until the system fix is applied, the support team are being hammered with unnecessary call traffic due to a broken system process. This is very wasteful, and every hour that goes by, is damaging not just to the support team, but also for the customers involved.

When Insight becomes ‘Actionable’

With this sudden awareness, the manager jumps up off thier chair, and directly engages the relevant system owner to fix the problem asap.

And this is what ‘Actionable Insight’ truly is, because not only does the manager know what the problem is, the root cause has also been exposed, and they can directly influence the fix, without any further dependency or delay.

So instead of Managers or Business Analysts needing extensive experience and skills to be able to deep dive manually into raw data sets on a per-instance basis, even new and junior managers can benefit by having ‘Actionable Insight’ coming through about their own departments or teams automatically, all of the time, and can access it within seconds. This acts as an early warning mechanism, and bypasses the need for years of experiences to effectively diagnose problems. Managers at all levels can identify and isolate any negative Customer Experiences or efficiency bottlenecks. This protects the Contact Centre and Customers alike, from potentially harmful long term impact.

BI mechanisms that can deliver ‘Actionable Insights’ in this way are certainly well worth the investment, as they provide comprehensive coverage, and remove the guesswork and delays associated with manual reporting, putting managers back in control of their Contact Centres.