Bringing Meaning to Results

Real-time KPIs with Celfocus' Analytics solution

The importance of treating information and knowledge as a real asset, and having a systematic procedure in place to measure and control data has real impact on a business.

An omnichannel platform is a crucial aspect of any telecom operator. In reality, it is where it all (almost) happens. Minor deviations or failures can cause significant and direct impacts on critical business drivers, like revenue and customer satisfaction.

It is also known that agents in stores, call-centers or in any other point of sales, are always struggling with time pressures, handling difficulties, and problematic customers. All of these problems have great impact on the efficiency, efficacy and overall performance of agents, which may in the end lead to potential burnout, and consequently to an increase in employee turnover rate.

Additionally, agent’s performance is many times evaluated without a full understanding of the surrounding context. A minor delay during a system response can have a great impact on the handling time of a particular agent or store average time. These solutions support a significant number of processes, through different channels, that are heavily used by a large number of dealers, agents and customers on a daily basis. Furthermore, this is enabled by a large number of supporting interconnected systems, from the BSS platform to every system on the backend environment.

It becomes very difficult to manage, diagnose and optimize business, agents, processes, and systems’ performance without a comprehensive view of what is happening, not only by top managers, but also by giving relevant information to every agent on the company, in a way that is on-demand, in real time, and seamlessly embedded into their business applications. That way agents become more empowered to assess and improve their own performance.

Challenges

A few years ago, Celfocus successfully deployed an online BSS solution for a telecommunications operator in the United Arab Emirates. The purpose of this solution was to provide agents the ability to simplify, integrate and streamline all their daily business activities.

Although the company had an idea of how many activations were being made, how long it usually took to complete an activation, and how to identify potential errors and anomalies in the system, they couldn’t properly correlate and integrate all this information to get a comprehensive understanding of the big picture in terms of operational performance.

In this sense, it became clear that one of their biggest challenges was to gain awareness and be able to measure the impact that any agent, store, transaction or system could have in the business as a whole.

Furthermore, they needed to identify problems as they occur in real time in order to immediately reduce the negative impact in the business. Not just being reactive, but being proactive by foreseeing potential anomalies.

Agents don’t have much time to analyze all this information, so it becomes even more critical that they only get the most relevant KPIs that are appropriate to their context – pre-calculated and processed information that is right to the point and can be quickly used in a way that is easy to act upon it.

They needed a solution that created awareness, provided a comprehensive understanding of operational performance, and most of all gave the necessary control over what was really happening in the business in real time:

Figure 1: Key Benefits that address the main challenges of the company

Recently Celfocus deployed its Analytics solution to address these concerns. Shortly after the deployment, we helped the company analyze the information provided by the Analytics solution. That's how our client found about a single backend system which was taking too much time to respond during peak hours, and that's how they could act on the problem and optimize their efficiency by avoiding the bottleneck, making the handling times much more efficient, and customers happier.

How we do it

More than creating a tool, Celfocus developed a cross-cut solution that promotes an actionable improvement cycle capable of motivating the capacity of agents to self-develop and improve their own performance:

Figure 2: Celfocus Analytics – The Actionable Improvement Cycle

When managers and agents start using Celfocus' Analytics solution in their daily business routines they are feel their performance improve. This solution makes it easy to spot anomalies, weaknesses and improvement opportunities, while reinforcing strengths and traits of good performance.

In general Celfocus Analytics solution addresses the following concerns:

• It allows full awareness and control on the entire BSS platform by answering:
  
  • What is happening in my business? Activations? Sales?
  • What is happening in my teams? How they are selling? How much time does it take?
  • What is happening in my processes? In what step and system am I losing time?
  • What is happening in my systems? What impact are they having on my business?
  • What else can I know about the customer being handled?
• It measures and provides clear and intuitive performance metrics not only for managers and supervisors, but also for agents and other operational levels.
• It provides simple and actionable analytical information that enables each stakeholder to be aware of his performance.
• It is seamlessly embedded in BSS applications, providing information in operational context.
• It provides information in a simple and appealing format, easily understandable, adapted to each stakeholder, with comparative and expected values that help to decide what to do or not.
• It proactively helps spot outlier’s behaviours and prioritizes them to focus stakeholder’s attention.
• It allows to define alarms and thresholds that can anticipate undesirable situations.
• It can provide all this information for the existing Data Warehouse to enrich its analysis.

By capturing all the necessary information from the agent’s business activities, customer interactions, systems performance, and by supporting all information requirements of the different platform stakeholders, Celfocus’ Analytics solution is able to address all monitoring and reporting requirements for the BSS platform across two strategic domains – Back Office and Front Office:

Figure 3: Celfocus Analytics – Main Business Domains

The Solution

Every time a customer interacts with the company to request a product or service, this solution collects considerable amounts of customer interaction data, business processes information, and back office system calls.

Most of this data is stored in log files that provide error and root cause analysis. However, when correlated, this same data holds valuable information that has the potential to generate knowledge and to gain awareness about the performance and efficiency of processes and systems.

Figure 4: Source Data collected by the BSS logging system

The idea is to be able to know what is happening in the front end, the store and the process and correlate it with everything that is happening in systems, providing a comprehensive view of the BSS platform.

In order to get all this information it is necessary to monitor different entry points of the BSS platform and store this data in logging systems. The LogViewer schemas are optimized for operational efficiency and quick insertion, but not for a comprehensive and integrated analysis of the impact that each component has in the business. Therefore, Celfocus Analytics is composed by a set of ETL processes that extract and transform this data from various sources in order to create centralized data marts that are ready for analytical requirements. This information is required to support and feed all the Visualizations, Dashboards and Reports that are built into the business application.

Figure 5: Celfocus Analytics: High-Level Architecture

In Celfocus’ Analytics solution any Visualization is built in accordance with a set of key functionalities that are responsible for enhancing the added-value by delivering simplified KPIs, comparable metrics, and actionable visualizations that give meaning to the numbers – Findings, Outliers and Target Achievements or SLAs:

Benefits & Advantages

1. Insightful & Actionable KPIs

"I can act on this information!"

Celfocus Analytics avoids vanity metrics by presenting only the most relevant KPIs that combined are capable of creating awareness, control and allow to act upon it.

These kind of actionable metrics are complemented with comparative values in order to give a meaning about each stakeholder’s performance when compared to other peers, stores, targets / objectives, or past results.

To identify the need for action, this information is also complemented with scorecards, semaphores and alerts that highlight problems and other crucial information that require some kind of urgent action.

Celfocus Analytics is also capable of providing “First Explanations” or drill-down capability that give more information to stakeholders who want to know why this is happening. This system can also access historical / past performance in order to extrapolate trends and project near future performance.

2. Process and System correlated Analysis

“I can know the impact of each agent and each front and backend system in each handled customer!”

Celfocus Analytics has the ability to measure process and system usage, durations, load level, calls, events and anomalies, and correlate them. In this sense, the system can measure the agent’s performance from the moment the clients start an interaction until the end of that interaction and link this process’ perspective (processes and steps executed) with the corresponding system and backend events.

3. Proactive Personal advisor

“The system helps me focus and prioritize my attention!”

Celfocus Analytics proactively identify anomalies, outliers, unexpected behaviour, odd situations, and other kind of patterns that each stakeholder must be aware of.

It has an Outlier detection system to identify odd values. It is also capable of complementing visual and graphical data with “findings” and conclusions that are expressed in simple textual messages. These findings are calculated and “digested” data that are previously computed and translated into regular sentences in order to simplify and direct the communication of data while creating a familiar language with stakeholders.

4. Tailored Embedded Visualization

“The information is simple, organized, accessible, and appealing!”

Celfocus Analytics displays information in a short and simple way, which is tailored and customized for different focus levels, by providing an increasing level of detail.

It implements a Visualization Strategy with two major levels:

1. At a Glance: personalized “dashboard wall” that provides a general overview of the most important KPIs and areas that need attention, in less than 30 seconds. It’s a Top level view.

2. First Explanation: Intended to support immediate questions that result from “At a Glance” analysis. This First Explanation allows to have a better understanding of the data, and it’s crucial to clarify Top Level doubts that may arise, before assuming there’s a major issue to handle.

It’s also embedded in BSS channels to cut the gap between operational and analytical tools, by being easily accessible to the entire operational staff. It reduces the time required, by providing at the right time and place.

5. Performance Optimization

“I can see what needs improvement and I can act to optimize it!”

Celfocus Analytics promotes an actionable improvement cycle that allows every stakeholder to be an active agent of performance optimization.

All stakeholders have access to fresh, digested information about themselves, teams, processes, systems, all presented in an actionable manner, mostly embedded in their daily operational applications that allows them to be aware of what’s happening and where they can improve.

By Actionable, we mean that the information displayed is sufficient to know if there is a problem, and where is it: it’s not just numbers.

Later, when they start executing improvement and optimization efforts, they can check the results, right on the same spot, leading to a new cycle of optimization.

Key Takeaways

In the end, Celfocus helped this operator discover that a single backend system was taking too much time to respond during peak hours. This revealed to have a great impact in the business and was then considered a priority and an opportunity to improve the efficiency of activations and consequently the business turnover and customer satisfaction.

For this operator, our solution provided an enormous value just by making sense of the right numbers, at the right time, in the right context, because it allowed them to answer these simple but powerful questions:

1. Do you know how much time it takes to register and activate your customers?

The answer can help you optimize your Average Handling Time.

• Measuring as key to improve and evolve
• Calculate overall journey interaction time
• Detect journey / step optimization
• Provide holistic feedback to stakeholders

2. Do you know the time breakdown between human interactions and the system processing time?

The answer can help you provide actionable input from multiple perspectives.

• Balance human interaction time
• Predict peak utilization hours
• Optimize system resources
• Ensure system performance and stability

3. Can you spot anomalies before they start to hinder your business?

The answer can help you identify and fix anomalies before they reach critical levels.

• Unresponsive system detection
• Anomaly linkage to specific journey step
• Journey abortion recovery
• Corrective actions before anomalies are detected

4. Can you benchmark activation processes between your stores?

The answer can help you balance your business landscape.

• Capture differences between stores
• Analyze behavior and introduce corrective actions
• Promote healthy competitive behaviors
• Fraudulent activity detection

5. Can you gamify your business to bring the best out of your sales assistants?

The answer can help you improve your operational productivity.

• Make players out of your users
• Capture sales assistant interest and motivation
• Leverage people’s desires for mastery and achievement
• Improve work process productivity

Celfocus’ Analytics solution can add value to other Telecom Operators by leveraging their knowledge and consequently addressing their main concerns:

Figure 6: Celfocus Analytics – Main Added Value Benefits

In conclusion, this project showed how important it is to treat information and knowledge as a real asset and have a systematic procedure in place to measure and control data that has impact on the business. Doing so allows operators to take control, make informed decisions that will hopefully leverage business performance and revenue.