MARKET REPORT Big Data
“Again, the first job is to motivate the customer to demand this sort of data to achieve their ultimate goal of
reducing operation costs and increasing productivity returns, as opposed to making the phone bill smaller”
Iain Sinnott, Head of Sales, VanillaIP
I need’. This admittedly can
bring its own challenges, as
customers quite often don’t
know what information they
want, let alone how to start
looking for it. Even in relatively
inexperienced hands, building
a report in Akixi can take
seconds, however, knowing how
to configure reports if you don’t
know what information you
need is challenging.”
John McKindland, Head
of Solutions Sales at Nimans
says there is a lot of varied
information that can be
productively used.
What we get asked the most
for at an SMB level is in terms
of call volumes in and out - and
what was the average time to
answer. Others will want live
stats about how many calls are
in a queue and what are the
busiest periods so that enough
staff resource is available.
Unreturned calls is another big
factor where a caller has hung
up and not rung back as that’s
possibly a missed opportunity
to clinch a sale.”
What about some real-world
examples of how business is
benefitting from Big Data and
Analytics?
Carl Boraman at Tollring
says the biggest benefit for
businesses comes from involving
their channel partner’s expertise
in specific verticals.
“For example, GP surgeries
are using wide datasets to
directly influence customer
experience and their resellers
know that key metrics like
caller tolerance needs to
be the starting point for
improvements.”
Colin Gill says that despite
what the name implies, Big
Data doesn’t have to be all that
big.
“It can be as simple as
looking for call trends on a
weekly basis over a number of
months, to see which days of
the week or even which times
of the day over a week are the
busy call periods. We have
many end user customers who
have been using our product
to define such insights to help
them efficiently staff their call
centres, or even just make
sure the phones are covered at
the right time. One specific
example is with a company that
plans staff lunch times around
information gleaned from
historic calls on the half hour
plus day reports.”
ED SAYS…
Big data is the new age technology that has
made ground-breaking insights available in
real-time. Business and organisations of all
sizes can benefit by leveraging the insights
offered by data analysis and with time the
access to data has also increased multi-fold.
Today, data is in fact everywhere so let’s
use it.
What do you say to a
customer if they ask you
‘What information do I get
from your communications
platform and how can I
productively use it?
Iain Sinnott at VanillaIP, “I say
let’s sit down for 30 minutes,
walk through the reporting
options related to your services
and the core objective of those
services, select the reports that
are of most value, schedule the
periodic ones and put a hot
button on the portal front page
for the on-demand ones.
If we have queue monitoring/
management or live hunt group
monitoring via Kakapo, or
Akixi, then make sure they
are set up to deliver the live
information and dashboard
required.
Again, the first job is to
motivate the customer to
demand this sort of data to
achieve their ultimate goal of
reducing operation costs and
increasing productivity returns,
as opposed to making the phone
bill smaller.
Carl Boraman says that by
embedding its technology at a
platform level, Tollring ensures
that all customer data from the
system can be considered for
analysis.
“This presents a big
opportunity for the channel to
offer margin-rich consultative
selling, highlighting the most
valuable metrics for specific
verticals.
For most SMEs, scientific
certainty is near impossible. The
recommendation is to focus on
metrics that support pragmatic
decision making, with the
aim of reducing risk and
uncertainty. Big data is helpful
in this regard since increasing
the number of data-points
reduces risk.
However, it’s important
for SMEs to not obsess over
demanding absolute certainty
from their data. The quest for
the optimal is never ending
because there are just too many
variables. The most productive
use of analytics is to choose
which analytic levers to pull in
order to exact the most effective
result at any given time.
Embedding our technology
at a platform level presents a big
opportunity for the channel to
offer margin-rich consultative
selling, highlighting the most
valuable metrics for specific
verticals.”
“This can be a tough
question to answer and one we
face time after time,” says Colin
Gill at Akixi.
“If we listed to a customer
all the information that our
platform could provide, we
would be talking to them for
a very long time and in all
honesty, a lot of that time might
be wasted as not everything we
can do is relevant to every single
business.
We have specifically
designed our platform not to
be a ‘you get what you’re given’
type of analytics and reporting
platform, but have designed it
to be highly configurable and
flexible as well as accurate,
providing customers with a
powerful analytics tool to
help run their businesses
efficiently. However, I have
often ended up in the neverending
discussion of Customer:
‘What information can you
give me?’… Me: ‘What do
you need?’… Customer: ‘Tell
me what information you can
give me and I’ll tell you what
24 | Comms Business Magazine | June 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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