Guiding Call Center Workers to Data Quality

Data Governance and data quality are often the domain of data quality vendors, but any technology that can help your quest to achieve better data is worth exploring. Rather than fixing up data after it has been corrupted, it’s a good idea to use preventative technologies to stop poor data quality in the first place.

I recently met with some folks from Panviva Software to talk about how the company’s technologies do just that. Panviva is considered the leader in Business Process Guidance, an emerging set of technologies that could help your company improve data quality and lower training costs on your call centers.

The technology is powerful, particularly in situations where the call center environment is complex – multiple environments mixed together. IT departments in the banking, insurance, telecommunication and high-tech industries have particularly been rattled with many mergers and acquisitions. Call center workers at those companies must be trained where to navigate and which application to use to get a customer service process accomplished. On top of that, processes may change often due to change in regulation, change in corporate policy, or the next corporate merger.

To use a metaphor, business process guidance is a GPS for your complicated call center apps.

If you think about it, the way we drive our cars has really improved over the years because of the GPS. We no longer need buy a current road map at Texaco and follow the map as far as it’ll take us. Instead, GPS technology knows where we are, what potential construction and traffic issues we may face – we simply need to tell it where we want to go. Business Process Guidance provides that same paradigm improvement for enterprise applications. Rather than forcing training on your Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) with all of its unabridged training manuals, business process guidance provides a GPS-like function that sits on top of those systems, providing context-sensitive information on where you need to go. When a customer calls into the call center, the technology combines the context of the CSR’s screens with knowledge of the company’s business processes to guide the CSR to much faster call times and lower error rates.

A case study at BT leverages Panviva technology to reduce the error rate in BT's order entry system from 30% down to 6%, an amazing 80% reduction. That’s powerful technology on the front-end of your data stream.

Next Week’s Can’t-Miss Webinars

Presenters can either make or break a webinar. Simply put, good webinars are given by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about their topic. In order to give give up an hour of a busy day, I have to believe that it will impart some knowledge beyond product demos and brochure-ware. In looking ahead to next week, I see a couple of high points:

Data Governance: Strategies for Building Business Value
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 11 a.m. Eastern
Trillium Software will host a Web seminar that includes featured guest speaker Rob Karel of Forrester Research presenting a discussion titled: Data Governance: Strategies for Building Business Value. If you’ve never seen Rob Karel speak, I can tell you from experience that it’s a real treat. I played emcee to a 2008 webinar with Rob on data governance. It was very well attended and very positively reviewed. At that time, the webinar concluded with a lot of great questions on selling the business case for data governance. In this session, Rob plans to tackle that topic a bit more - outlining the best practices and skills needed to obtain executive buy-in for data governance projects.

How to Boost Service, Cut Costs and Deliver Great Customer Experiences - Even in an Economic Downturn
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11 a.m. Eastern
Teradata and the SmartData Collective will co-sponsor a webinar on dealing with a down economy. We’ve seen a couple of companies cover this topic, but the panel looks very strong. Judging from the panel and the description, this webinar looks to have a CRM-focus - how technology can help you a) provide an experience that customers will love, and; b) cut costs and help you differentiate your communications strategies from your competition. Curtis Rapp from Air2Web will be in on the discussion, so I’m guessing there will be some talk about Teradata Relationship Manager Mobile and using text messaging in your Teradata apps.

The panel of experts will include:

• Dave Schrader, Teradata - published author and long time Teradata employee
• Lisa Loftis, CRM and BI Expert - author on CRM topics
• Curtis Rapp, Air2Web – the partner responsible for some of Teradata’s mobile solution (CRM on your cell phone)
• Rebecca Bucnis, Teradata - another long-time and experienced Teradata employee

For attending, you’ll also get a white paper by Lisa Loftis called Ringing in the Customers: Harnessing the power of Mobile Marketing.