Analyst Perspectives

The rapid evolution of business on the Internet has dramatically changed many organizations’ strategies for growth and profitability, especially those in the retail sector. I have written about the importance of analytics overall and in retail, but many companies are maturing slowly in using them to analyze electronic business and commerce. Data derived from analytics can enable them to manage the cycle from electronic merchandising and promotions to assessing interactions with sales categories...

The market for operational intelligence (OI) has grown as organizations realize the importance of having information in real time and in the right context. To accomplish this requires that operational data is processed as it happens, commonly by being packaged into what are called events and made available through technologies for complex event processing or event monitoring. Operational intelligence has long been part of our research focus. In benchmark research on it, we found that optimizing...

Activity Based Costing (ABC) is one several popular techniques to apply marginal cost analysis to arrive at a more accurate measure of a product’s true economic cost. It became popular in the United States starting in the 1980s (earlier in Germany) as it became clear to many that traditional cost accounting techniques do not reflect the true, economic cost of production in complex, multi-product environments. Consequently, companies might price items higher than they should and lose market...

In my writing and speaking, I try to avoid “market babble,” which numbs ordinary readers with technology buzzwords and three-letter acronyms. Lately I have been accused of overusing the phrase “interaction-handling processes,” which some people have taken as an instance of market-speak. So I’ll explain what I mean by it. It has to do with contact center agents – or customer service representatives, if you prefer – trying to resolve customers’ issues. When handling a call, for example, this...

My research into Customer Experience Management shows that four of the top five factors that influence a customer’s experience in dealing with a contact center relate to agents: their attitudes, understanding of the customer’s issue, ability to resolve issues the first time and general knowledge (third on the list was average queue times). The research also shows that the largest volumes of actionable interactions are still phone calls to a contact center; social media interactions perhaps...

In a second move indicating its seriousness about competing in the market for marketing software, IBM announced its offer to acquire publicly traded Unica Corp. Unica is one of the larger providers in this space, with more than $100 million in annual revenue and 1,500 customers worldwide. Its success in very large marketing organizations, including brand-name customers Best Buy, Marriott and IBM itself, enabled it to be one of the few that has continued to grow in the challenging economic...

I’ve focused attention of integrated business planning for the past several years as our benchmark research on business planning and other related topics consistently finds companies are not getting enough of a return on the considerable amount of time and effort they spend on budgeting and planning. Moreover, the current economic climate makes substantive contingency planning more important than ever. Our research finds that there is a great deal of planning going on. Most managers and...

The recent turmoil at Hewlett-Packard that went public with news of the resignation of CEO Mark Hurd is only superficially about the facts of the scandal or the question of who will be the new CEO, sexy as those issues may be. What it really shines a light on is the performance of the company itself. I wrote earlier this year (See: “HP Takes Technology Portfolio to the Clouds with New Growth Strategy”) about the challenges HP faces in building its brand credibility and gaining traction to...

My benchmark research into agent performance management (APM) found that the number-one objective of companies trying to improve the handling of customer interactions was to utilize agents more effectively; this also was their top objective in creating agents’ work schedules. In the latter case, the research uncovered a primary reason for difficulties in achieving this objective: Only 36 percent of companies use a dedicated tool to create these schedules; the majority do it manually or with...

Last year I carried out research to discover how companies manage their workforces in handling customer interactions; I investigated their best practices, technologies being used and priorities for the future. The findings led me to define agent performance management (APM) as an extension of what other observers call workforce optimization; APM includes call routing, call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, training and coaching, agent compensation management and agent-focused...