Analyst Perspectives

Among the important findings of our latest benchmark research on contact center analytics were these two: 88 percent of companies said they can use analytics to improve the performance of the contact center (41% said they could make significant improvement), and the main issue holding them back from doing that is an excessive reliance on spreadsheets (90% indicated they use spreadsheets on a regular or universal basis).

Many companies are challenged to find an alternative to spreadsheets that supports their business requirements. Beneath the marketing hype the actual problem is to access all the data needed to produce the required analysis. Enkata is one of a few vendors that address this issue. It has a suite of products focused on contact center agent performance, including quality monitoring, managing performance against defined metrics, and managing coaching. To those it added products to help manage first-call resolution, understand customer issues and discover the root causes of why customers are contacting the company.

Now, not content with the success of these products, Enkata has become active in contact center performance management, upgrading some products and introducing new ones. Over the last nine months it has made five major product announcements. The first announcement was on the release of Activity Tracker, took it into the previously uncharted waters of unstructured data. It allows companies to learn what agents do at their desktops as they try to resolve customer interactions, such as the applications they access and the data they capture. Knowing this can lead to improvements to interaction-handling and agent training and coaching. The second new product, Automated Contact Reasoning, moves away from the agent to help companies understand how customers react to operational events such as a new marketing campaign and identify emerging trends by customer segment, such as how often different segments call the center. The third announcement is a major upgrade, Coach 3.0, an on-demand version of the coaching product that allows companies to manage, track and measure coaching activities through workflow of steps. The next announcement is Customer Segment Analytics that is part of Enkata Discoverer 8.0 that provides powerful analytics for root cause analysis can now group together customers bases on their responses to enable comparative analysis through impact level analytics.  The latest announcement is Cross Channel Analytics allows companies to track customers as they try to resolve their issues across multiple touch point such as Web-based self-service and calls to the contact center. It builds on Enkata’s experience in accessing different sources and types of data and bringing them together to provide new insights on customer experience.

These new developments add further weight to the rating Enkata achieved in our recent Agent Performance Management Value Index, which compares vendors that provide solutions to support Agent Performance Management. It was rated a “Warm” vendor, which is admirable for a vendor with a suite of products mostly focused on agent-related analytics and performance management without functions such as call recording and agent workforce management. Companies looking to improve the performance of their contact center through better use of analytics and metrics would do well to include Enkata on the list of vendors they evaluate especially since they are easily made available through its cloud computing based software as a service approach.

As our research shows, companies recognize that they need to improve their use of analytics, and deploying specialist systems rather than continuing to rely on spreadsheets is a step in that direction. This can be a way not only to improve operational efficiency but to improve customer satisfaction, first-contact-resolution rates and agent performance through better training and coaching. These are all things that the latest developments from Enkata address. How do you rate the metrics you use to assess contact center and agent performance? Do your executives and managers recognize the need to change and contribute to an improved customer experience?

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director