The average business today generates enormous amount of data, whether they want to or not. It’s in the contact center, it’s from the sales teams, and it’s from the marketing department. It comes from help desks, advertising, brick-and-mortar floors and even from manufacturing facilities. For many companies, it’s a burden. It’s a mish-mash of disjointed, disconnected and unstructured data that sits on networks and databanks, in recording solutions and in e-mail systems.
More forward-thinking companies are treating these heaps of data as diamonds in the rough. The information is valuable IF a company can make sense of it all. It can reflect a company’s performance historically as well as today – in this moment – and it can help make predictions for the future. It can also help companies adjust their business processes to improve efficiency and boost bottom lines.
While the contact center is one of the places that first began using analytics, the need for “big data” solutions are enterprise-wide today, particularly in customer-facing functions. Every business is actively engaging with their customers every day, whether in the form of helping choose and appropriate product or in a less active capacity, such as hosting a Facebook fan page. But, because of this constant engagement, every business should also consider itself as a contact center, which means they should also understand how they can improve their customers’ experiences.
There are many options when it comes to managing, manipulating and using “big data” today. Some are very targeted, others are very multichannel, and there are an almost unlimited number of ways companies can deploy them. Not every company’s business need is the same, and organizations should be very careful how they purchase an analytics solution to help them use this raw data and turn it into valuable intelligence. The data is valuable, but businesses need to understand how to extract that value in a way that works best for their organization.
At the upcoming ITEXPO to be held in Miami, Fla., a session entitled, “The Relationship Between Big Data and Customer Experience,” will be held on Thurs. Jan. 30 at 12:30 p.m. EST featuring speaker Brian Sadowski of Apriva and moderator Jon Arnold – who will help attendees understand what data is available from existing customer interactions and experiences, how to best decipher it, and how to relate it to real business objectives and processes to improve the customer experience. The.