It was bound to happen eventually. Given the direction of travel in business communications over the past decade and a half, there was always going to be a point where call analytics and reporting moved beyond, well, calls.
And if anyone was going to take the plunge into omnichannel communications analysis, you would have got good odds on it being BroadSoft. The US multinational has been at the forefront of recent disruptions in the business telecoms market, establishing itself as a leading global player in the emergence of UCaaS and, more recently, hosted cloud collaboration services too.
However, it is not the company’s flagship UC-One business communications service which this review focuses on. Instead, BroadSoft’s innovation in taking analytics beyond telephony has happened as part of its contact centre solution, CC-One.
In its marketing of the product, BroadSoft positions CC-One as a solution aimed at helping businesses optimise performance in the contact centre. It talks about the various challenges facing businesses as they try to drive performance in often dispersed, siloed contact centre set ups, with a web of multiple customer contact points.
But ultimately, it focuses in on one key thing it sees businesses as lacking – the right tools to track and measure performance. CC-One is described as an analytics-driven contact centre solution, designed not only to coordinate and manage omnichannel customer interactions, but to actually give end users the visibility and insight to help them optimise performance as they go. As a result, the CC-One Analyzer platform is central to what the whole service suite sets out to achieve.
In this review, we will seek to explain how the CC-One Analyzer achieves omnichannel contact reporting, and what benefits this offers over traditional call analytics platforms. Please remember, the views contained in this review are those of the author only, and that UC Today plays no role in the selling of any particular brands or products.
How Does It Look?
CC-One Analyzer is built around a browser-based interface accessed as part of a CC-One subscription. The main management or ‘visualisation’ screen is designed in line with a traditional Windows layout, with a large variety of different menus, lists, scroll bars and windows. The live dashboards and reporting screens are much more visual, with tables, charts and graphs displayed according to the required metrics.
What Can It Do?
The main function of the CC-One Analyzer is to gather, sort and interpret data from the multiple customer contact channels that can exist within a business, and process that data into intelligible business insight which can be used to improve performance.
It works because of something BroadSoft has named its Customer Engagement Analytics Repository. This is essentially a cloud-based data store which collects from all of a business’s contact points – ACD, IVR, chat, email, CRM – and then applies some very clever Big Data analysis techniques to make sense of it all.
For example, the Customer Engagement Analytics Repository uses something called a Universal Data Dictionary so it can translate all of the data coming from different communications channels into comparable forms. This allows it to ‘stitch together’ in depth pictures of customer journeys across multiple contact points – if they logged onto a website initially, then sent an email, then made a phone call, and then had a follow up IM chat, the data from each can be analysed using the same consistent set of performance metrics.
Moreover, it separates out customer interaction from agent activity data, so businesses can get very clear pictures of agent performance versus expected service levels right across the contact channels.
All of this is then fed into the CC-One Analyzer interface, ready for contact centre managers, supervisors or agents to use. The wide variety of options within the browser-based interface gives users the power to configure the available data in numerous different ways, such as:
- Create new performance metrics to apply across the system
- Build up a library of cross-system KPIs
- Map system performance measures against business outcomes
- Identify the key variables which affect business outcomes
- Group and sort data to find out what delivers the best results, and where improvements can be made.
From there, the user can manage one of three types of output:
- Live dashboards, which display real time performance stats for the chosen cross-system metrics using graphics, charts and visual models.
- Scheduled reports, set up daily, weekly, monthly or at any chosen interval to automatically generate concise, intelligible overviews of performance against chosen KPIs.
- Interactive trend analyses, which allow users to mix and match different inputs and outputs, cross correlate agent activity with customer experience, compare and contrast KPIs and identify patterns through visual data, all with the aim of exploring new possibilities for process optimisation.
What do we like?
Firstly, the conceptualisation and execution of the cross-channel data analysis is hugely impressive. The Customer Engagement Analytics Repository is an extremely powerful tool, breaking new ground in the way it standardises data interpretation for different modes of communication. This takes communications analysis well beyond the realms of call reporting – you get the same insight, and can set the same standards, for how long it takes an agent to answer an email as a call, or how long they spend on an IM with a customer.
Aside from that, we also liked the interactive trend analysis tools built into the interface. Often the only way to spot trends and patterns is to literally play around with the numbers a little, and the way you can drag and drop data to compare and contrast with graphical support is very helpful.
Who is it for?
As part of BroadSoft’s CC-One hosted contact centre solution, it goes without saying that CC-One Analyzer is for CC-One subscribers. CC-One is itself a very flexible, very scalable contact centre solution, offering all of the cost value and deployment benefits of a hosted service, and is a popular solution for businesses with less than 100 staff right up to large multinational enterprises.
What is it compatible with?
Through the CC-One platform, CC-One Analyzer can plug into any operational system and collect data from any communications channel. CC-One is available in a dedicated Salesforce edition for deployment within Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds.
Where to buy and for how much?
CC-One is available in a number of different editions. For subscription pricing info, contact your nearest BroadSoft reseller.
UC Today Opinion
It is a well-established principle in business that the more intelligence you can gather about your processes, the better placed you are to make decisions to improve performance. Performance in contact centres has long come under scrutiny as part of a wider concern with customer service – the more responsive and efficient your contact handling is, the more satisfied customers you are likely to keep.
However, the focus on this contact centre analysis has largely been on calls – understandable given the historic dominance telephony has had on all forms of communication, not just B2C. But that is all changing – now, customers are increasingly interacting with businesses via channels such as IM and social media, not to mention stalwarts like email. Platforms which can extend call analytics to the whole range of channels by which customers can engage with a business have huge potential value. Instead of gaining insight on, say, 75 per cent of contact communications, solutions like BroadSoft’s CC-One Analyzer gives the full 360 degree picture.
Big Data is talked about as one of the next major trends in business tech. In the way it provides robust, comparable analysis of performance across channels, both real time and historic, CC-One Analyzer gives a clear indication of one very powerful application of its methods in telecoms.
Are you a CC-One subscriber or reseller? What do you make of the Analyzer solution? Just how powerful and useful are the insights it can provide? Please feel free to add your thoughts to the comments section below, and if you know someone else who might have an opinion, share this article with them and invite them to join in the conversation.
If you’re thinking of buying Call Reporting & Analytics, or still deciding whether your business needs it, please take a look at our comprehensive, independent buyer’s guide.
