Teradata has introduced a business product called Teradata Contact Center Intelligence for Telecommunications based on Microsoft's (News - Alert) business intelligence technologies.

It's designed to bring together "the Microsoft family of business intelligence products" with direct connectivity to the Teradata (News - Alert) enterprise data warehouse system, Teradata officials say, to provide "access to customer experience information and query response."

This new product lets contact center managers and business analysts examine company data from all service channels, outside vendors and other enterprise data sources to "understand both current operations and trends over time," according to company officials, who say it's designed to run on the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance, Teradata Extreme Data Appliance or the Teradata Data Mart Appliance.

"As customers continue to use more communications channels, carriers need help in integrating service information across those channels in order improve the customer experience. Of course, they have to reduce contact center costs at the same time," notes Sheryl Kingstone, senior analyst, Yankee Group (News - Alert).

The cost of operating a telecommunications contact center environment can be significant, ranging from $100,000 to a more than a billion dollars annually. This being the case, company officials say, "even small performance improvements can have a multi-million dollar impact, resulting in a rapid payback on a carrier's investment."

"Contact center reporting has traditionally been provided by the operational systems in the call center. However, traditional methods of analysis are becoming obsolete as customers may try three or more channels before reaching an agent," says David Grant, vice president of industry solutions for communications, media, entertainment and utilities, Teradata Corporation.

In late September TMC's Brendan Read reported on Teradata's list of ten practices recommended to tighten data security, including:

1. Develop and publish a security policy for enterprise database systems and ensure that all users understand the policy.

2. Create separate security and database administration roles and assign responsibilities and tasks accordingly.

3. Identify and classify data based upon sensitivity and risk of compromise; implement safeguards based upon the classification of the data.

4. Ensure that all users are uniquely identified so that activities can be effectively monitored; regularly review all security logs to detect unauthorized activities.