Building a Business Intelligence Hub in a Customer Centric Organization

In today’s massively competitive world, we know that the customer is key to profitability and an organization’s overall success. As a result, being able to analyze and measure customer interactions is critical to the success of any corporation and business intelligence hubs are rapidly gaining in popularity among customer-centric organizations.

Building a business intelligence hub makes sense in the data-driven world of customer service, but it can be a challenging and confusing process. Big data is all the rage these days, but why start a big data project if you cannot do anything with “small” data? How do you build an effective business intelligence hub? How do you build it so it contributes to your strategic goals of retaining and growing customers through a world-class customer experience?

Today’s analytics landscape – especially in the customer experience industry – is vast. As the frontline to the customer, the contact center is one of the most metric-driven parts of an enterprise, and there is a rich ecosystem of analytics solutions in the market. But how do you know what analytics solutions you should use and how will that data make your business more successful? Here are a few considerations to help you formulate a winning strategy for building a business intelligence hub for your service organization:

1. Your Organization – I am not just talking about the contact center, but rather the entire enterprise. Think about all the points of contact you have with customer… your back office, your brick-and-mortar retail stores, etc. Be sure to take all of these points of contact into account when measuring customer interactions. You will probably find that you need intelligence across the enterprise to accurately capture all customer contact.
   
2. Technology Solutions – There are many excellent products out there... speech analytics, desktop analytics, web analytics, marketing analytics, activity intelligence, etc. Each of these tools offers its unique data points and insights. It is important to invest in solutions that will aggregate data from multiple sources, integrate with other technologies and scale with your company as it grows.
   
3. Implementation Plan – When planning a business intelligence project, choose the path that ensures success. Many times, when senior executives decide to implement a new business intelligence strategy, they mistakenly try to answer every question they have all at once. The resulting projects are so big and cumbersome that they are destined to fail. Instead, it is better to start with the top three questions, answer them, and then build on that success. 
   
4. Vendors – There is a wealth of thought leaders out there – business analysts, management consultants, data scientists. All of these people bring outside perspectives, deployment options and proven best practices to improve your project’s chances of success.

These are just a few thoughts to consider when you embark on a business intelligence journey. The most important thing to remember is to focus less on the analytics solution and more on the business goal. How can the intelligence you are capturing and analyzing be a catalyst for transforming your business? What does success look like? What are your organization’s top strategic goals and how can analytics support those initiatives? Once you start to answer those questions, then you will have a more definitive path for success.