Let’s look here for a call center dashboard for a moment. These are our call center calls. This is what’s coming into our operators. We look at metrics like how many calls were unanswered, what our totals were. What is pretty amazing is when you start looking at these totals, and you think, “oh gosh, these people were answering 5,000 calls a day.”
And these are typically very short calls. These are ones like “I need a phone number for x, ” or “can you connect me with whomever?” You can see here that those are down, too, from this time last year. So everything is a little calmer, a little bit better.
Let’s look at our knowledgebase contacts. This dashboard shows you how many documents we have in the knowledgebase that are active. 12,623 are active at this point. These are total hits to our knowledgebase. We get 40,000 hits a day. We also break out just what external people are looking at vs. internal people. We even look at applications. This is our course management system.
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Increasing Self-Service Analytics
What is the difference between our support this year and last year? You can see it’s pretty consistent. These are contacts. It’s less than last year by 700 at this point. What is the scale of data collection? How many individual metrics are we tracking? There are 64 different KPIs. Some of them come out of our call tracking systems.
We are looking at an enterprise dashboard to be able to look at information from our data warehouse. I would like to have that information there, too, because even though it doesn’t have anything to do with information technology, it may affect our services. So it would be nice to have that. We are looking at expanding that at this point. We haven’t made a commitment, yet.
How much staff does it take to build and maintain this dashboard system? To maintain it takes 5 to 10% of one FTE. It took half an FTE three weeks to get it going.
"The trend long term for performance management, even business intelligence, for that matter, is allowing us to do more. It’s allowing users to do more for themselves. Nowadays there's a buzzword for it: self-service BI. Certainly we’re a big proponent of that. But a key is to spend less time within the solution, and get more value. That ends up being the perennial challenge.
That’s why there is so much left to be done. With other BI solutions, they still require a fair amount of training to get up to speed on them. Therefore companies using them have needed fairly skilled individuals. They have had to invest in training programs to give them the skills. So that is changing somewhat with easier-to-use solutions like ours.
Instead of forcing user to adapt to the technology, we’re trying to make it as intuitive as possible, using point-and-click controls, going heavy with visualization as a means to explore the data, et cetera.