Sometimes at Aceyus, we do make stuff up.
Brief case in point: a large U.S. cable company needed contact center analytics to monitor, track, and report on specific IVA call center metrics in various, numerous combinations.
The customer’s IVA structure, provided by CISCO and Nuance, is familiar to anyone who has called a cable company: “Press or Say 1 for….” “Press or Say 2 for…” “Press or Say 3 for…,” etc. Among the specific choices (intents) that callers can state include: “technical support,” “upgrade service,” “order Pay Per View,” “check balance,” and “pay bill,” among others.
This customer didn’t require real-time visualization of data from disparate sources. Even though that’s our bread and butter, it’s not the only provision we stock in our data-management pantry.
In fact, we hadn’t yet invented the contact center analytics solution this customer needed—and what we ultimately provided—a custom-configured metatable, built from SQL (Structured Query Language). It turned out we created a lot of dynamic SQL ifs/thens. Hundreds, if not thousands, in fact.
However, the customer already had a lot of ingredients in place.
The IVA, all the customer voice prompts, the call flow, the customer intents with appropriate labels, and the events (or what it calls milestones) of interest.
But the customer lacked an easy and flexible way to map and report these milestones in near-real time.
The customer needed to count the number of times a caller “crossed” a single milestone, or combinations of milestones, or both—some are reflective of these listed IVA prompts. The combinations are numerous and varied to the degree that no out-of-the-box solution would work.
Adding to that, the company expected the call volumes and paths of variation to expand and contract organically—with no way to predict when or why.
Therefore, the customer needed specific contact center analytics in up to 15-minute intervals.
This one-off, metatable solution offers choices of what milestones to map, what tables to target, and what fields to populate with a simple “peg” (count) that accumulates the number of times the IVR meets a certain milestone, or a certain combination of them.
For example: Credit Card Authorization. A critical milestone to this customer, including numerous variations. The customer wanted to count all of them—the successes and the failures—and report a running ratio tally at intervals of its choosing.
So, rather than saying “sorry, that’s not something we do,” we clearly embraced the challenge. Which is not surprising, since one of our eight core values is very close to that exact phrase – “We embrace the challenge.”
May we jump to the end of the story?
The solution we made from scratch for the customer was so successful that we haven’t heard from them in 18 months. That was also part of the plan that the customer envisioned: “give us something we can work with, and we’ll contact you if we need assistance.”
In full disclosure, this customer is a bit of an outlier: It probably had personnel with the chops to build our ultimate solution, but it didn’t have the time, inclination, or the special insights about contact center data that we at Aceyus possess. So, it was actually a masterclass in collaboration: The customer brought the technology and we designed and developed the solution that adapts as needed.
The alternative was untenable: A complete regeneration of a new table with updated code for every shift in any milestone. Each iteration would have taken weeks to complete. In short—no contact center analytics.
With our solution, the customer can add a row, column, change a target table, build a new query, add a new milestone—or alter one—in a matter of minutes. With the volume of calls that this company handles on an hourly basis, this brand of flexibility is the only way to keep pace with the milestones and take appropriate action.
As of this writing, this specific recipe for contact center analytics has yet to be duplicated.
How do we know that it works? By now, our customer would have told us otherwise.
