Category: University of Mumbai BMS Notes

Reference Data

Reference data is data used to classify or categorize other data. Typically, they are static or slowly changing over time.

Examples of reference data include:

• Units of measurement
• Country codes
• Corporate codes
• Fixed conversion rates e.g., weight, temperature, and length
• Calendar structure and constraints

Reference data sets are sometimes alternatively referred to as a “controlled vocabulary” or “lookup” data.

Reference data should be distinguished from master data. While both provide context for business transactions, reference data is concerned with classification and categorisation, while master data is concerned with business entities. A further difference between reference data and master data is that a change to the reference data values may require an associated change in business process to support the change, while a change in master data will always be managed as part of existing business processes. For example, adding a new customer or sales product is part of the standard business process. However, adding a new product classification (e.g. “restricted sales item”) or a new customer type (e.g. “gold level customer”) will result in a modification to the business processes to manage those items.

Reference data management

Curating and managing reference data is key to ensuring its quality and thus fitness for purpose. All aspects of an organisation, operational and analytical, are greatly dependent on the quality of an organization’s reference data. Without consistency across business process or applications, for example, similar things may be described in quite different ways. Reference data gain in value when they are widely re-used and widely referenced.

Examples of good practice in reference data management include:

• Formalize the reference data management
• Use external reference data as much as possible
• Govern the reference data specific to your enterprise
• Manage reference data at enterprise level
• Version control your reference data

Transactional Data

Transactional data are information directly derived as a result of transactions.

Unlike other sorts of data, transactional data contains a time dimension which means that there is timeliness to it and over time, it becomes less relevant.

Rather than being the object of transactions like the product being purchased or the identity of the customer, it is more of a reference data describing the time, place, prices, payment methods, discount values, and quantities related to that particular transaction, usually at the point of sale.

Transactional data describes an internal or external event which takes place as the organization conducts business and can be financial, logistical or any business-related process involving activities such as purchases, requests, insurance claims, deposits, withdraws, etc.

Transactional data support ongoing business operations and are included in the information and application systems that are used to automate an organization’s key business processes such as online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

It is grouped with its associated and references master data such as product information and billing sources.

Transaction data is data describing an event (the change as a result of a transaction) and is usually described with verbs. Transaction data always has a time dimension, a numerical value and refers to one or more objects (i.e. the reference data).

Typical transactions are:

• Financial: orders, invoices, payments
• Work: plans, activity records
• Logistics: deliveries, storage records, travel records, etc.

Typical transaction processing systems (systems generating transactions) are SAP and Oracle Financials.

Warehouse Data

In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis, and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise.

The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems (such as marketing or sales). The data may pass through an operational data store and may require data cleansing for additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting.

Extract, transform, load (ETL) and extract, load, transform (ELT) are the two main approaches used to build a data warehouse system.

Using Data Warehouse Information

There are decision support technologies that help utilize the data available in a data warehouse. These technologies help executives to use the warehouse quickly and effectively. They can gather data, analyze it, and take decisions based on the information present in the warehouse. The information gathered in a warehouse can be used in any of the following domains:

• Tuning Production Strategies: The product strategies can be well tuned by repositioning the products and managing the product portfolios by comparing the sales quarterly or yearly.
• Customer Analysis: Customer analysis is done by analyzing the customer’s buying preferences, buying time, budget cycles, etc.
• Operations Analysis: Data warehousing also helps in customer relationship management, and making environmental corrections. The information also allows us to analyze business operations.

Functions of Data Warehouse Tools and Utilities

• Data Extraction: Involves gathering data from multiple heterogeneous sources.
• Data Cleaning: Involves finding and correcting the errors in data.
• Data Transformation: Involves converting the data from legacy format to warehouse format.
• Data Loading: Involves sorting, summarizing, consolidating, checking integrity, and building indices and partitions.
• Refreshing: Involves updating from data sources to warehouse.

Business View Data

Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. BI technologies can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop, and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities. They aim to allow for the easy interpretation of these big data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.

Business intelligence can be used by enterprises to support a wide range of business decisions ranging from operational to strategic. Basic operating decisions include product positioning or pricing. Strategic business decisions involve priorities, goals, and directions at the broadest level. In all cases, BI is most effective when it combines data derived from the market in which a company operates (external data) with data from company sources internal to the business such as financial and operations data (internal data). When combined, external and internal data can provide a complete picture which, in effect, creates an “intelligence” that cannot be derived from any singular set of data. Among myriad uses, business intelligence tools empower organizations to gain insight into new markets, to assess demand and suitability of products and services for different market segments, and to gauge the impact of marketing efforts.

BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse (DW) or from a data mart, and the concepts of BI and DW combine as “BI/DW” or as “BIDW”. A data warehouse contains a copy of analytical data that facilitate decision support.

Applications

Business intelligence can be applied to the following business purposes:

• Performance metrics and benchmarking inform business leaders of progress towards business goals (business process management).
• Analytics quantify processes for a business to arrive at optimal decisions, and to perform business knowledge discovery. Analytics may variously involve data mining, process mining, statistical analysis, predictive analytics, predictive modeling, business process modeling, data lineage, complex event processing, and prescriptive analytics.
• Business reporting can use BI data to inform strategy. Business reporting may involve dashboards, data visualization, executive information system, and/or OLAP
• BI can facilitate collaboration both inside and outside the business by enabling data sharing and electronic data interchange
• Knowledge management is concerned with the creation, distribution, use, and management of business intelligence, and of business knowledge in general. Knowledge management leads to learning management and regulatory compliance.

Common Causes of Data Quality Issues

Data Conversion

Most often your data came from somewhere else before it was in your database. During transfers, data can get lost or modified in ways that make it unusable. If databases are mapped using old data structures or conversions, the data in the new database will be incorrect. Often users do not see what is what is actually being stored, so the data structure and mapping between the old and new databases are often the culprit for errors in the data.

Merging Databases and Other System Consolidations

When you phase out or combine an old system, a poorly planned merge can leave you with little time to plan or prevent errors. As the data is moving into a non-empty database, there is little flexibility for changes in the data structure. Often data will not fit in with the new structure, and duplicates and conflicts will result.

Manual Data Entry

Much data is typed into databases by people, and mistakes are inevitable. People misspell entries, use the wrong format for a field, enter data into the wrong box, or input the wrong value. Because these errors are not systematic, they can be difficult to trace or correct.

Batch Feeds

A batch feed carries large volumes of data, and any problem in it can cause issues magnified by future feeds. The problems may accumulate and become difficult to track down and fix. If an error finds its way into the source system, it can flow through the batch feeds and go unnoticed.

Real Time Interfaces

The problem with data exchanged through real-time interfaces is that there is little time to verify that the data is accurate. There are typically multiple points in the capture process where real time data can be corrupted or lost. The data comes in small packets, and can be incorrect, leaving you with unreliable data.

Disconnect Between Data Priorities with Business Priorities

Data priorities and business priorities should be in alignment. Avoid collecting and managing data that is not important to your business and which can corrupt other data elements. Prioritize data that is important to the business, and keeping the quality of that data high.

Before You Start a Data Cleaning Process, Make a Plan

Audit and Organize the Data

Understanding your data before cleaning improves the efficiency of your project and reduces the time and cost of data cleaning. Understand the purpose, location, flow, and workflows of your data before you start.

Document Data Quality Requirements and Define Rules for Measuring Quality

Create a reference for success, and targets to keep the project in check along the way. Set statistical checks on the data, and set a standard of quality control and completeness.

Create a Strategy

Outline a plan for your data quality that supports ongoing operations and data management. Identify the data sets that meet your quality standard, and the data sets that need to be cleaned. Identify possible solutions with a plan for implementation. Your general plan should be to define, identify, correct, and document data errors, and modify procedures to avoid errors in the future.

Identify and Correct Errors in Data The method to error detection will depend on the database and the dataset you are using. Depending on your team and the issues you have encountered, there are a variety of free or open source tools or services and enterprise solutions for cleaning your data. The pandas python library is an open-source software library for data manipulation and analysis. You can use CSVKit for converting and working with CSV files. R is a popular system for data cleaning, and features such as R plyr, Reshape2 or ggplot2 can be used for cleaning data. Trifacta Data Wrangler, Informatica and Trillium Software are among a few of the companies that offer data cleaning services.

Data is one of the most important part of any marketing platform. Without accurate, complete, consistent and current data marketers will have a hard time emailing different segments, improving marketing performance, optimizing campaigns and analysing past performances. But how do you identify data quality issues inside your own Marketing Automation Tool?

The first step is to talk to your sales and marketing teams. Chances are they are already struggling with data problems. The second step is to run analysis on your data to identify if you are due for a cleaning. And the third stay is to stop bad data from happening in the first place.

Here are some data quality issues that you should look out for and some ways of fixing them:

1. Inability to segment. Think of all the different creative and messages that you want to tailor to your prospects and clients. For example, do you want to deploy an email to all Vis of Marketing only to find out that titles are not standardized and include thousands of variations.

   Solution: Standardize your data into different buckets. In the example of VP of Marketing, any titles that are VP of Digital Marketing, VP of Product Development or VP of Marketing would all be classified into VP of Marketing.

2. Bounce Rate is on the rise. You should monitor your email marketing bounce rate as it is a key indicator of the quality of your data. Analysing the source of high bounce rates will help you eliminate bad data providers while, looking at the date create will help identifying outdated leads and the need to refresh your leads.

   Solution: Either perform email validation prior to deploying a new list or clean out historical emails by nurturing them.

3. While most marketing automation tools will not allow to duplicate email address, you may uncover different emails for the same person. It is not easy to find out if you have duplicate issues. One way is to perform a simple test and check what percentage of your leads have personal domains such as Gmail, Yahoo and so on. If the percentage is greater than 5%, you should look at de duping especially if you are sending different offers to different segments.

   Solution:De dupe your data using automatic de duplication tools or hiring a data cleaning company to do it for you.
    

4. Incomplete Data: You may be sitting on MQLs that you cannot pass to sales due to a few missing fields that are required to reach the desired score.

   Solution: Data appending using third party data providers can help fill in missing data such as industry, address, phone number, revenue information and number of Employees. Alternatively, you can use dynamic forms to fill in your missing data.

5. Missing Deadlines. The final indicator that there are data quality issues are missed deadlines. It could be that your team is so busy dealing with issues with campaign naming that they cannot find the right campaign to attach to the latest emails. There could also be too many custom lists to identify a key segment or they are too busy trying to figure out why the latest email did not perform well. Their daily tasks take longer and longer time to complete.
   Solution: Audit your data and processes inside your marketing automation tool to identify ways to streamline activities and make work more efficient for your marketing team.

But data is only useful if it’s high-quality. Bad data is at best inconsequential. In the worst case scenario, it can lead companies to make costly mistakes. IBM estimates that bad data costs the U.S. economy $3.1 trillion per year. Those costs come from the time employees must spend correcting bad data and errors that cause mistakes with customers.

Several factors contribute to the quality of data, including:

1. Accuracy

Among marketers who purchase demographic data, 84 percent say that accuracy is very important to their purchasing decisions. Accuracy refers to how well the data describes the real-world conditions it aims to describe. Inaccurate data creates clear problems, as it can cause you to come to incorrect conclusions. The actions you take based on those conclusions might not have the effects you expect because they’re based on inaccurate data. For example, data might lead a marketer to believe that their customers are mostly females in their 20s. If that data is inaccurate and their customers are actually primarily men in their 40s, then they will end up targeting the wrong group with their advertisements.

2. Completeness

Data Completeness

If data is complete, there are no gaps in it. Everything that was supposed to be collected was successfully collected. If a customer skipped several questions on a survey, for example, the data they submitted would not be complete. If your data is incomplete, you might have trouble gathering accurate insights from it. If someone skips some of the questions on a survey, it may make the rest of the information they provide less useful. For instance, if a respondent doesn’t include their age, it will be harder to target content to people based on their age.

3. Relevancy

The data you collect should also be useful for the campaigns and initiatives you plan to use it for. Even if the information you collect has all the other characteristics of quality data, if it’s not relevant to your goals, it’s not useful to you. It’s important to set goals for your data collection so that you know what kind of data to collect.

4. Validity

Data Validity

Validity refers to how the data is collected rather than the data itself. Data is valid if it is in the right format, of the correct type and falls within the right range. If data does not meet these criteria, you might run into trouble organizing and analyzing it. Some software can help you convert data to the correct format. For example, if you are collecting data about the time of day users visit your site, you must decide on the format you will use. You might choose to use 24-hour time and use two digits for minutes and two for hours. Examples of this data format would include 14:34, 17:05 and 08:42. Data that doesn’t follow this format would be invalid.

5. Timeliness

Timeliness refers to how recently the event the data represents occurred. Generally, data should be recorded as soon after the real world event as possible. Data typically becomes less useful and less accurate as time goes on. Data that reflects events that happened more recently are more likely to reflect the current reality. Using outdated data can lead to inaccurate results and taking actions that don’t reflect the current reality.

6. Consistency

When comparing a data item or its counterpart across multiple data sets or databases, it should be the same. This lack of difference between multiple versions of a single data item is referred to as consistency. A data item should be consistent both in its content and its format. If your data isn’t consistent, different groups may be operating under different assumptions about what is true. This can mean that the different departments within your company will not be well coordinated and may even unknowingly be working against one another.

An Example of Good Data Quality

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a marketer, and you’re crafting a campaign to promote a brand of organic dog food. You want to determine the best times of day to run online ads to promote the brand’s web store. To figure this out, you can collect data from the brand’s website about when people typically purchase dog food on it. Here’s how you can ensure your data is high-quality:

• Accuracy: Since you’re collecting the data directly right from your client’s website, you can be confident in its accuracy.
• Completeness: To make sure your data is complete, collect the same information about every customer. For example, you may want to know what items they purchased, their order total, how they paid and the times they started and completed the transactions.
• Relevancy: Only the data related to dog food purchases will be relevant to your campaign.
• Validity: Ensure that you collect all of your time data in the same format.
• Timeliness: Import your data as soon as you can and only use data from within a pre-determined timeframe.
• Consistency: If you store your data in multiple places, make sure it is consistent across all of them.

If your data meets all of these criteria, you can be confident that your data is high-quality.

Data Quality

As data management techniques and technologies improve, data continues to become increasingly important for businesses. Growing numbers of companies are using data to make decisions about marketing, product development, finance and more. As more firms reap the benefits of data, using it is increasingly becoming a matter of keeping up with the competition. Companies that don’t take advantage of data and related technologies risk falling behind.

For data to be beneficial though, it needs to be of high quality. The better your data’s quality, the more you can get out of it. If your information is low-quality, it can even be harmful. If you base a decision on bad data, you’re likely to make the wrong choice.

New technologies are also increasing the importance of data and its quality. Technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation have enormous potential, but success with these technologies depends heavily on data quality. Machine learning, for example, requires large volumes of accurate data. The more good data a machine learning algorithm has, the faster it can produce results, and the better those results will be. In a recent survey of senior executives by New Vantage Partners, more than three-fourths of respondents said that the increase in data volumes and sources is driving increased investments in AI and cognitive learning.

Data is becoming increasingly integral to business’ operations. Rather than treating data as separate from their other functions, some of today’s most successful companies integrate it into everything they do. This increased integration means that data quality can impact many aspects of a business from marketing to sales to content creation.

Data quality is also critical because of compliance-related issues. As regulations regarding data continue to evolve, it’s become increasingly important that companies manage their data properly. It’s harder to demonstrate compliance if your data is disorganized or poorly maintained. This is especially vital for financial data and sensitive personal data but can apply to other types of information as well.

Benefits of Good Data Quality

Ensure You’re Using Quality Data

Good data management is crucial for keeping up with the competition and taking advantage of opportunities. High-quality data can also provide various concrete benefits for businesses. Some of the potential benefits of good data quality include:

1. More Informed Decision-Making

Improved data quality leads to better decision-making across an organization. The more high-quality data you have, the more confidence you can have in your decisions. Good data decreases risk and can result in consistent improvements in results.

2. Better Audience Targeting

Data quality also leads to improved audience targeting. Without high-quality data, marketers are forced to try to apply to a broad audience, which is not efficient. Worse, they may have to guess at who their target audience should be. When you have high-quality data, you can more accurately determine who your target audience should be. You can do so by collecting data about your current audience and then finding potential new customers with similar attributes. You can use this knowledge to more accurately target advertising campaigns and develop products or content that appeal to the right people.

3. More Effective Content and Marketing Campaigns

In addition to improving targeting, data quality can also help to improve your content and marketing campaigns themselves. The more you know about your audience, the more reliably you can create content or ads that appeal to them. For instance, if you’re a publisher of a sports website, you can gather data that tells you which sports your website users are most interested in. If you discover that golf is one of your most popular categories, you can direct your content team to create more golf-related articles and videos. If you find that golf is especially popular among visitors to your site who are men between the ages of 45 and 64, you can show golf content to users in this age range when they visit your site. A similar technique can be applied to content used as part of a marketing campaign.

4. Improved Relationships With Customers

High-quality data can also help you improve your relationships with customers, which is crucial for success in any industry. Gathering data about your customers helps you get to know them better. You can use information about your customers’ preferences, interests and needs to provide them with content that appeals to them and even anticipates their needs. This can help you build strong relationships with them. Proper data management also helps prevent you from delivering duplicate content to customers, which can become annoying to your audience and damage your reputation.

5. Easier Implementation of Data

High-quality data is also much easier to use than poor-quality data. Having quality data at your fingertips increases your company’s efficiency as well. If your information is not complete or consistent, you have to spend significant amounts of time fixing that data to make it useable. This takes time away from other activities and means it takes longer for you to implement the insights your data uncovered. Quality data also helps to keep your company’s various departments on the same page so that they can work together more effectively.

6. Competitive Advantage

If you have better quality data than your competitors or use your data more effectively than they do, you gain a competitive advantage. Data is one of the most valuable resources that today’s companies have, as long as it’s high-quality. Better data quality means that you can discover opportunities before your competitors do. You can better anticipate prospects’ needs and, therefore, beat competitors to sales. A lack of good data means missed opportunities and falling behind the competition.

7. Increased Profitability

Ultimately, high-quality data can lead to increased profitability. It can help you to craft more effective marketing campaigns and increase sales numbers. It also decreases ad waste, making your marketing campaigns more cost-effective. Similarly, if you’re a publisher, data can show which types of content are the most popular on your site and which bring in the most revenue. Having this information enables you to focus more of your time and resources on these kinds of content.

How to Collect High-Quality Data

Collecting high-quality data can be challenging. Problems with data quality may occur when a company is attempting to integrate data systems across different departments or applications, implementing new software or manually entering data. They may also occur because a company does not have the proper tools or processes in place. There are things that companies can do, however, to help improve data quality. Taking the following steps can help ensure the collection of quality data.

• Implement a data collection plan: To ensure that the data you’re collecting is high-quality, you need to have a data collection plan in place. Determine the kind of data you need to meet your goals and the methods you’ll use to collect and manage it. You plan should also define the roles of all personnel involved in collecting the data and establish processes for how you’ll communicate between departments on matters related to data. Be specific in your plan to avoid confusion and ensure that you can measure your progress.
• Set data quality standards: Create data quality standards that you’ll use to determine which data to keep, which to get rid of and which to correct. Everyone involved in managing your data should agree on and understand these standards. This ensures consistency across your organization.
• Create a plan for data correction: You’ll need to create rules for correcting data. These rules should define who is responsible for correcting data and the methods they should use to fix it. This is also important for ensuring consistency in your data.
• Plan for data integration and distribution across departments: Additionally, you should create a plan for integrating and distributing your data across the various departments within your organization. Data quality issues often occur at this step, because copying data, manually editing it or sending it to different software platforms creates opportunities to alter it. Creating concrete plans for this step can help avoid these issues.
• Set goals for ongoing data collection: It’s important to remember that improving data quality isn’t a one-time task. Ensuring data quality requires ongoing effort. Documenting data quality issues can help with this ongoing effort by ensuring that mistakes aren’t repeated. The focus should be on continuous improvement of your data collection plan.

Review of the Most Popular Data Analysis Tools for Your Business:

Data analysis is the process of working on data with the purpose of arranging it correctly, explaining it, making it presentable, and finding a conclusion from that data.

It is done for finding useful information from data to make rational decisions.

As it is done for decision making, it is important to understand the sole purpose of data analysis. The main purpose of data analysis is interpretation, evaluation & organization of data and to make the data presentable.

Data Analysis Methods

There are two methods of data analysis:

• Qualitative Analysis
• Quantitative Analysis

Qualitative Analysis: Qualitative Analysis is done through interviews and observations.

Quantitative Analysis: Quantitative Analysis is done through surveys and experiments.

Data Analytics Process

Data Analytics Process includes:

1. Data Collection
2. Working on data quality
3. Building the model
4. Training model
5. Running the model with full data.

Some tips to analyze the data are:

• Remove unnecessary data before the analysis.
• You should not perform the analysis on a master copy of data.

Data analysis is done with the purpose of finding answers to specific questions. Data analytics techniques are similar to business analytics and business intelligence.

Data Mining is about finding the different patterns in data. For this, various mathematical and computational algorithms are applied to data and new data will get generated.

Data Modeling is about how companies organize or manage the data. Here, various methodologies and techniques are applied to data. Data analysis is required for data modeling.

A click path or clickstream is the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site, presented in the order viewed. A visitor’s click path may start within the website or at a separate third-party website, often a search engine results page, and it continues as a sequence of successive webpages visited by the user. Click paths take call data and can match it to ad sources, keywords, and/or referring domains, in order to capture data.

Clickstream analysis is useful for web activity analysis, software testing, market research, and for analyzing employee productivity.

two key problems that these data mining techniques solve:

• Predicting customer clicks to create data-driven customer personas, based on their behavior
• Segmenting clickstream data based on user profiles and the actions performed by these users.

Clickstream Data Clustering

Because of the complex nature of the websites and applications these days, it can be difficult to obtain similar clickstreams. Any given user can follow multiple different paths and click sequences. Thus, it can prove to be quite a task to analyze these large numbers of monitored clickstreams.

An easier option in such a scenario would be to group these clickstreams based on their similarity and user profiles. In this way, you can:

• Find customer segments, and
• Identify visitors that exhibit similar interests

Applications

Clickstreams can be used to allow the user to see where they have been and allow them to easily return to a page they have already visited, a function that is already incorporated in most browsers. Clickstream can display the specific time and position that individuals browsed and closed the website, all the web pages they viewed, the duration they spent on each page and it can also show which pages are viewed most frequently. There is abundant information to be analyzed, individuals can check visitors clickstream in association with other statistical information, such as: visiting length, retrieval words, ISP, countries, explorers, etc. This process enables individuals to know their visitors deeply.

Webmasters can gain insight into what visitors on their site are doing by using the clickstream. This data itself is “neutral” in the sense that any dataset is neutral. The data can be used in various scenarios, one of which is marketing. Additionally, any webmaster, researcher, blogger or person with a website can learn about how to improve their site.

The growing e-commerce industry has made it necessary to tailor to the needs and preferences of consumers. Click path data can be used to personalize product offerings. By using previous click path data, websites can predict what products the user is likely to purchase. Click path data can contain information about the user’s goals, interests, and knowledge and therefore can be used to predict their future actions and decisions. By using statistical models, websites can potentially increase their operating profits by streamlining results based on what the user is most likely to purchase.

Analyzing the data of clients that visit a company website can be important in order to remain competitive. This analysis can be used to generate two findings for the company, the first being an analysis of a user’s clickstream while using a website to reveal usage patterns, which in turn gives a heightened understanding of customer behaviour. This use of the analysis creates a user profile that aids in understanding the types of people that visit a company’s website. As discussed in Van den Poel & Buckinx (2005), clickstream analysis can be used to predict whether a customer is likely to purchase from an e-commerce website. Clickstream analysis can also be used to improve customer satisfaction with the website and with the company itself. This can generate a business advantage, and be used to assess the effectiveness of advertising on a web page or site.

Implications

Most websites store data about visitors to the site through click path. The information is typically used to improve the website and deliver personalized and more relevant content. In addition, the data results can not only be used by a designer to review, improve or redesign their website, but can also be used to model a user’s browsing behaviour. In the online world of e-commerce, information collected through click path allows advertisers to construct personal profiles and use them to individually target consumers much more effectively than ever before; as a result, advertisers create more relevant advertising and efficiently spend advertising dollars. Meanwhile, in the wrong hands click path data poses a serious threat to personal privacy.

Unauthorized clickstream data collection is considered to be spyware. However, authorized clickstream data collection comes from organizations that use opt-in panels to generate market research using panelists who agree to share their clickstream data with other companies by downloading and installing specialized clickstream collection agents.

Data reporting is the process of collecting and submitting data which gives rise to accurate analyses of the facts on the ground; inaccurate data reporting can lead to vastly uninformed decision-making based on erroneous evidence. Different from data analysis that transforms data and information into insights, data reporting is the previous step that translates raw data into information. When data is not reported, the problem is known as underreporting; the opposite problem leads to false positives.

Data reporting can be an incredibly difficult endeavor. Census bureaus may hire even hundreds of thousands of workers to achieve the task of counting all of the residents of a country. Teachers use data from student assessments to determine grades; cellphone manufacturers rely on sales data from retailers to point the way to which models to increase production of. The effective management of nearly any company relies on accurate data.

The manner in which reliability data is analyzed and reported will largely have to be tailored to the specific circumstance or organization. However, it is possible to break down the general methods of analysis/reporting into two categories: non-parametric analysis and parametric analysis. Overall, it will be necessary to tailor the analysis and reporting methods by the type of data as well as to the intended audience. Managers will generally be more interested in actual data and non-parametric analysis results, while engineers will be more concerned with parametric analysis. Of course this is a rather broad generalization and if the proper training has instilled the organization with an appreciation of the importance of reliability engineering, there should be an interest in all types of reliability reports at all levels of the organization. Nevertheless, managers are usually more interested in the “big picture” information that non-parametric analyses generally tend to provide, while not being particularly interested in the level of technical detail that parametric analyses provide. On the other hand, engineers and technicians are usually more concerned with the close-up details and technical information that parametric analyses provide. Both of these types of data analysis have a great deal of importance to any given organization, and it is merely necessary to apply the different types in the proper places.

Non-Parametric Analysis

Data conducive to non-parametric analysis includes information that has not or cannot be rigorously processed or analyzed. Usually, it is simply straight reporting of information, or if it has been manipulated, it is usually by simple mathematics, with no complex statistical analysis. In this respect, many types of field data lend themselves to the non-parametric type of analysis and reporting. In general, this type of information will be of most interest to managers as it usually requires no special technical know-how to interpret. Another reason it is of particular interest to managers is that most financial data falls into this category. Despite its relative simplicity, the importance of non-parametric data analysis should not be underestimated. Most of the important decisions that are made concerning the business are based on non-parametric analysis of financial data.

As mentioned in last month’s issue of the HotWire (“Data Collection”), ReliaSoft’s Dashboard system is a powerful tool for collecting and reporting data. It especially lends itself to non-parametric data analysis and reporting, as it can be quickly processed and manipulated in accordance with the user’s wishes.

Non-Parametric Reliability Analysis

Although many of the non-parametric analyses that can be performed based on field data are very useful for providing a picture of how the products are behaving in the field, not all of this information can be considered “hard-core” reliability data. As was mentioned earlier, many such data types and analyses are just straight reporting of the facts. However, it is possible to develop standard reliability metrics, such as product reliability and failure rates, from the non-parametric analysis of field data. A common example of this is the “diagonal table” type of analysis that combines shipping and field failure data in order to produce empirical measures of defect rates.

Call center customer relationship management (CRM) refers to a software tool that call center agents use to enhance the customer experience and increase efficiency. Call center CRM systems store records about customers, such as account information and contact history. Because they store history, they may be viewed as a case management tool. Agents use the information in CRM systems to personalize customer contacts and understand a customer’s history with the organization.

The call centre industry is a relatively new phenomenon. As many organisations are now providing customer service and support via call centres, due to the lower cost of operating, issues addressing the service quality are being raised. Call centres do not exist for the customer to physically interact with, apart from via the telephone, and are in effect virtual organizations. The nature of the service encounter between the call centre and customer is predominantly undertaken using enabling technology; the conventional speech telephone. Few organisations today really know who among their customers are the ones to focus on Customers are not created equal, yet the systems and services provided by many organisations seem to make exactly this assumption.

Call center CRM applications become more powerful in the contact center when integrated with call center technology. This allows, for example, a CRM screen to automatically pop up for the agent when a call is sent to them. This improves efficiency and allows the agent to focus less on data entry and more on helping customers with their issues. Other possible features of integration include automatically adding contact records (from multiple channels) to the CRM system and producing tie backs to call recordings so they can be listened to from within the call center CRM application.

The proliferation of cloud technology has made integration between call center CRM applications and call center software much easier than it was in the past. Companies such as SalesForce offer cloud-based CRM solutions that integrate seamlessly and painlessly with call center technology, such as NICE inContact CXone. Integration is key to driving customer experience success in the contact center.

Omnichannel Routing: routing and interaction management. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.

Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI): Leading-edge, intuitive technology. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.

Open Cloud Foundation: Enables rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly and serves customers of all sizes globally. We guarantee an industry-best 99.99% availability and offer easy customization through RESTful APIs and DEVone developer program.

Providing a high quality of service to all customers is simply not economically logical, especially when you really don’t know the individuals value to your company. CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a worthwhile endeavor to ensure good returns on investment. In a CRM call center, customers communicate in multiple ways that include phone, e-mail, Web chat, personal sales representative, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and a host of others. This paper reviews the area in which CR functions could be outsourced, legal issues affecting enterprise customers for call center operations, new role of BPO and using BPO successfully in Customer Relationship Management.

CRM call centers help companies realign their entire organization around customers. And thus, is a strategic business initiative. Sales, Marketing and Service as well as other groups are connected and coordinated through the CRM applications. Before a call is made to the customer, all recent activity for that customer should reviewed to be informed of recent events. Then a sales strategy needs to plan based upon observed opportunities. The use of CRM software in the call center allows the assignment of a value to each customer if the culture supports that philosophy. With that feature, one can choose how to interact with that customer.

CRM helps the company identify most valuable customers and understanding their lifetime values. Using CRM, the call centers design the organization systems and service to best meet the needs of customers and maximize their value. CRM is intended for long-term relationship building. Besides capturing the different forms of customer interaction, CRM allows you to capture and store all available customer information in the central history database. This allows agents the ability to pull up a customer’s entire history while the two interact. Communication and service are more effective and efficient. Most CRM products also track trends in purchasing and customer feedback.

Outsourcing CRM Function

Call centers connect your enterprise, its goodwill and operations, to your prospects and customers and, if you wish, even influencers of consumer behavior. Any high-volume consumer industry can benefit by outsourcing call center functions. These might include, for example:

• Health care
• Automotive
• Retailing
• Services to the household, such as oil and gas deliveries, electrical utilities and telecom providers
• Consumer electronics
• Wireless communications
• Financial services, including banking and brokerage
• Insurance
• Travel and hospitality
• Media

Scope of Services

Since a call center can deliver any type of services that are capable of being done by telephone, enterprise customers need to classify the possible scope of services. This classification will suggest the key parameters for defining and achieving the intended goals of the call center. The following list is only an indication of some basic classes of outsourced call center services.

Customer Service and Support: This type of service can be as simple as advising your customer about the information he needs from your data base, such as account balance, unpaid amounts, deadlines and credit balances. Or customer service can involve a complex decision tree involving a script that you prepare to determine your customer’s needs, complete an application or request for change of information, and execute your customer’s orders.

Technical Support / Warranty: In helping your customers solve problems relating to your products or services, you want to be able to resolve all problems in the first call. Achieving high first-call resolution rates with lower per-call handle times can make a significant cost difference. To some degree, you remain responsible for success because of the way in which you plan the interaction based on manuals, scripts and decision trees. Technical support (or “telephone help desk”) can provide invaluable in retaining customer loyalty and avoiding costly product returns or service cancellations.

Sales, Bookings (travel reservations) and Customer Retention: Your telesales department needs to convert inquiries into sales, and to retain customers upon expiration of subscriptions or upon other termination events in your customer relationship. Telesales are useful both at the beginning and the end of your customer relationship life cycle. As a tool for proactive outreach, customer retention programs can help sustain your bottom line.

Marketing Surveys and Research: Outbound calling can identify potential customers, identify an existing customer’s interest in possible new products or services from your company and conduct inquiries about consumer preferences as to pricing and features of existing and new products. This can help your market positioning, promotional campaigns, product design, pricing and sales approaches. Outbound calling can also be used to clean up duplicates or stale information in your “old” databases, validate existing information, for “data base scrubbing.”

Customer care departments take care of different functionalities, whether the task is servicing customers or providing information on some small subject matter. With so much of work available in hand, it becomes difficult to manage call traffic during peak hours. Assuring that each time the call lands at the right party is a way to manage difficult tasks and in order to reach the optimum level of customer satisfaction, it becomes mandatory for call centers to manage their call routing strategies.

Routing strategies have led to a lot of intriguing questions like, How do you transfer your customers’ call to the right person as quickly as possible? How do you take care of the long hold time, customer frustration or defection of your customers to competition? How do you ensure first call resolution?

Call routing is an important part of any efficient customer service strategy. By directing calls to the right department on the first go, the level of customer satisfaction increases with overall reduction in the operating cost. However, call routing is considered as a strategic tool in the business environment, if done properly and efficiently.

Call Routing Strategies to Improve Customer Experience

Routing By IVR: Call routing by IVR is among the most common and the most famous routing methods followed by organizations. IVR allows customers to interact with the organization through telephone keypad or speech interaction. The IVR systems can respond with prerecorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed for their query. Routing through IVR is most demanded in lead generation businesses and contact centers. This strategy is especially good for lead generation businesses and call centers.

Direct Routing: Organizations looking towards building direct relationship with customers or having a basic approach to customer service are mostly involved in direct routing strategies. Customers are provided with the direct number of the particular department they intend to call. For example: If a customer wants to speak to the sales department, there is a direct number for the sales department. Likewise, there are different numbers for different departments. This ensures that the first connect is to the right department, thereby welcoming more sales closure and higher success rate. But usually the wait time in this strategy is longer if the agent or the rep is busy on another call.

Skill-Based Routing: Selecting this strategy for your organization may save customers from long wait time or frustration during service calls. The customer experience can be improved by matching the highest skilled agent available to handle each call. A successful skills-based routing strategy increases agents’ efficiency by allowing them to use personal knowledge and experience to answer customer’s query. This reduces the average call handling time per agent, leading to higher first call resolution with improved customer satisfaction rate.

Routing by Caller ID: This routing strategy allows you to put some intelligence in the routing system. The phone numbers of certain customers can be recorded as per the urgency of their subject matter. Each customer can be allotted a unique caller ID. Whenever the customer calls, the call gets automatically routed to the most appropriate agent depending on the last conversation or recorded information in the CRM. For instance, if the contract of a certain customer is expiring; the next time the customer rings the department, the call can will directly land to the agent who specializes in retention of existing customers.

Database Integration Routing: Service calls are very crucial when it comes to retaining customers. By integrating the call routing with the customer database, agents can easily look up at the history of the previous conversations and can accordingly take smart and useful decisions. For example: if the caller is an existing customer, route the call to the support department. If the caller is a new customer, route the call to the inquiry or sales department.

Business Rules Routing: Keeping specific business objectives in mind, organizations can align their routing strategies with their business goals. Once the ACD and other applications are in place, organizations can use their routing strategy to their specific business needs. For instance, customers with higher value can be routed to a premier agent. Accordingly, a frustrated or an angry customer attempting to discontinue the usage of a particular service can be transferred to the retention department. Obviously, the strategy being used overe here depends on the specific business goals.

Multimedia and multimodal routing: Being consumers, we interact through various channels with our different suppliers. Some suppliers respond perfectly at a particular channel and some do not. The critical routing challenge many organizations now face is how to route multimedia transactions across multiple customer contact channels. The situation gets worse when  multimedia extends its capabilities to multi-modal routing, where a consumer might be calling or texting from a particular device or from a remote location. For eg: Suppose a customer is calling from his ABC phone, the solution has to be process oriented and at the same time the customer ID should be able to map the CRM history of the customer giving each and every detail about the ABC phone helping in the real time decision making. Here, for sure the technology plays an important role but an organization must keep their resources intact to support such new generation of multimedia and multi modal customer transactions taking place.

Percentage Based Routing: An efficient call center manager ensures that the workload is fairly distributed among all the agents. The manager can see on his dashboard the total percentage of calls received per agent and then can accordingly design the routing strategy to minimize the long wait times.

Service and Sales are two very diverse organizational functions. Traditionally, each function needs a different set of core competencies.

The new-age contact center breaks this convention. It has the unique ability to equip and empower a contact center agent with selling skills and techniques that enables him to cross- sell and up-sell products in addition to handling a service call efficiently.

This article underlines some key tips and techniques that can convert the contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence.

There is a rising need across businesses to convert the regular order-taking contact center to revenue-generating profit centers within the next few years. The customer contact center is thus, evolving from being a plain vanilla customer service center to the more advanced, more valuable revenue generating center. The service call, which is the lifeline of the customer contact center, provides immense potential to initiate a sales cycle. Companies are, therefore, making efforts to leverage this channel to provide a next level lift in revenue generation.

In a customer contact center, every customer call is an opportunity which can be effectively leveraged to initiate a sale. The call center agent has the full attention of the customer when he calls in for resolving a problem or a query. It is, therefore, obvious that leveraging inbound calls is a far effective and efficient medium to initiate a sale rather than an outbound sales call.

Consider this: The largest generation today, Generation ‘Y’ with a population of 100 million represents an annual buying power of $1 trillion.

Buyers within this segment of buyers are tech-savvy, indulge in online research before buying and expect expert help when they are ready to buy.

One can thus imagine the potential buying traffic that for various reasons could get diverted to the contact center and generate sales opportunities. However, converting these opportunities into sources of real revenue is where the real challenge lies.

Transforming the regular contact center into a revenue generating Sales Center of Excellence (CoE) requires a methodical and a well-planned approach. The WNS approach to building a Sales Center of Excellence involves:

Understanding the customer life-cycle

Helping the client identify the sales maturity model of the contact center

Suggesting ways and means and charting out a well-defined roadmap to convert the contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership considerably.

Here are 10 tips that can transform the regular contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence:

1. Revamping Your Hiring Engine: Your employee recruitment process should be focused on identifying, selecting and hiring candidates who share a good number of behavioral traits with current strong performers within your contact center. Some of the traits could be:

Interpersonal skills: It is important that a sales person feels natural interacting with people with an ability to adapt to a variety of situations and different personalities

Resilience: The power to pursue objectives with self-motivation and patience

• Capacity to inspire trust
• Ability to quickly identify the critical issues during a conversation
• Ability to negotiate confidently
• Passion and enthusiasm
• Integrity and honesty
• An interest in learning new things

2. Training Contact Center Agents to Sell Effectively: Sales people are not born, they are trained. Training must become a priority to reinforce the sales culture in your contact center. Your contact center agents must be sensitized about being able to effectively use up-selling and cross-selling techniques, for example, offering a new product / service while providing support for an earlier version, or cross-selling an additional product or service. A great service call can become a good sales call, if the contact center agent can put forth a sales-closing question. Introduction of industry / domain interface in training is also an important facet to build a confident pool of resources who could sell better. Training should not be restricted to contact center agents only and must be extended to team managers too.

3.Power Scheduling and Prioritizing: The best agents in your contact center should be earmarked and deployed to attend calls during sales peak times to effectively handle customer queries and at the same time make a sale. Introduction of advanced workforce management solutions is a must to be able to forecast sales peak times and schedule call-handling by the best agents in the call center. In addition, contact centers must also deploy an intelligent call-routing technology with the ability to ‘power prioritize’ calls basis agent and customer profile. Planning and scheduling not only enhances the chances of cross-selling and up-selling, but also bolsters the ability of the contact center’s ability to take care of customer enquiries in a timely manner.

4. Intelligent Incentivization: Sales incentive compensation management is increasingly becoming the key decisive and motivating factor in influencing the contact center sales force to sell and make an impact on business performance. WNS recommends an outcome-based incentive structure with incentives for sales on high margin products, cross-selling of bundled products and revenue generated per transaction.
5. Valuing Feedback: Your contact center agent is your strongest link with your customer; and it pays to inculcate a practiced and sustained behavior of collecting, respecting and valuing the agent’s ideas and feedback.
6. Monetizing Customer Wait Times: Customer wait times on IVR can be effectively utilized by running special promotion announcements when putting the customer on hold. This can be supplemented by fast-tracking customers for ‘deals of the day’ on Websites.
7. Integrating Customer Contact Center with Your Website: Integrating the customer contact center with your website with proactive Web chat options is a great way to improve online customer acquisition and retention. With an advanced Web chat option, one can expect approximately 50 percent reduction in shopping cart abandonment rates.

8.Integrating Social Media with Contact Center: Monitoring your brand on social media and integrating yourcontact center to support customers over social channels and helping key buying decisions of your customers is emerging as a great strategy to ensure better ROI on your social media investments.

9. Ensuring Better Insights with Analytics: There is a growing need to drill out actionable insights from data collected from contact centers. Analytics has the power to fuel sales by providing actionable insights for better customer recovery, loyalty management, product improvement, campaign management and so forth. Speech Analytics platforms are increasingly being seen as a ‘game changer’ for the contact center-sales center segment of business. New approaches in analyzing CSAT and NPS could also be deployed to improve quality of the feedback mechanism.
10. Continuous Benchmarking & Improvement: While, continuous benchmarking should be a contact process to acquire / develop technology that complements and supplements sales within the contact center; use of Six Sigma methodology should be used effectively to improve quality of query handling and enhancing sales.

Web self-service is a type of electronic support (e-support) that allows customers and employees to access information and perform routine tasks over the Internet, without requiring any interaction with a representative of an enterprise. Web self-service is widely used in customer relationship management (CRM) and employee relationship management (ERM).

Web self-service is an online facility that allows users to perform routine tasks over the Internet without the assistance of a support agent such as accessing information like bills, changing profile information or even doing basic troubleshooting for devices and services. When the specific users of a Web self-service portal are employees, this facility is called an employee self-service (ESS) portal, and they can often do things like check their own attendance, request resources, request vacation leaves and even file complaints without the need to contact the manager or an HR representative. If the Web self-service portal is meant to serve customers of a product or service, then this service is called a customer self-service (CSS) portal. Depending on the kind of product or service, customers can do things like checking the remaining balance of their data or mobile plan, paying bills, editing profiles and even accessing knowledge bases for troubleshooting and usage of a device or service.

The definitive feature of a Web self-service portal is the lack of a human agent who interacts with the user. This usually eliminates confusion and frustration on the user’s end as he/she does not need to interact with someone. It can even help an organization save money and retain customers, depending on the quality of the portal.

When the support is specific to online employee interactions, the practice is known as employee self-service (ESS). When it is specific to customers on the Internet, it is called customer self-service (CSS).

For employees and customers, self-service offers 24 hour-a-day support, and immediate access to information without having to wait for an email response or a returned telephone call. Ultimately, the success of Web self-service depends upon the quality and quantity of information available and the ease with which it can be accessed.

Deploying Web self-service applications benefits a company in a variety of ways. The most prominent motivation is the lower cost, as compared with telephone or email service delivered by a company representative.

A more controversial enterprise benefit of self-service is the ability it affords the company to gather personal information about the people who use it. Tracking and analysis software may be used to create a pseudonymous profile of the user for research and targeted marketing purposes.

Benefits of Web-Based Self-Service

When you empower your customers to resolve their pain points, you improve your chances of boosting customer loyalty and advocacy. Additionally, there are a number of benefits that result from web-based self-service which positively impact your business’s bottom line.

1. Save your customer service and support reps valuable time.

When you readily provide answers to your customers’ frequently asked questions and information about how to resolve their own, your reps will have fewer calls, tickets, and emails to respond to.

This saves them valuable time by allowing them to focus on the customers with complex problems instead of those with issues that could be solved with the help of some type of self-service support (e.g. knowledge base article or automated chatbot).

2. Reduce your customer service and support costs.

Web self-service helps you drive customer service and support costs down, too. When you provide the answers and support your customers seek in a way that teaches them, they will be able to solve their problems without the help of reps. Additionally, they’ll learn how to consistently mitigate their challenges on their own time and in turn, you’ll avoid managing a large team of service and support reps that you need to hire and pay.

3. Drive traffic to your website.

Whether you have a self-service portal, help center web page, or both, your business’s web-based self-service will be connected to your website. That means, when someone wants to access your self-service, you gain traffic on your website. This increases the chances of them learning about your products, buying the latest version of your service, contributing to your customer-based community, clicking your CTAs, and following links to your social media sites.

4. Empower and educate your customers.

Empowering and educating your customers will naturally happen when you provide them with web-based self-service this is because you’re allowing them to find the answers and support they need, on their time, without having to speak to a rep. By doing so, you show your customers that you’re their advocates, which helps you build strong relationships and a sense of trust between your brand and customers.

5. Allow for account personalization.

Customers can personalize their account settings in their portals via your website (if you offer self-service portals to customers). Whether it’s their account details, payment method, or overall plan, this information is customizable and viewable within their self-service portal. And depending on the type of self-service portal you offer customers, it might even welcome each customer by their first name when they login to their account.

Account personalization helps self-service systems understand how they can best help specific individuals based on their preferences. For example, a portal may pull up a customer’s previously viewed, or most frequently viewed, resources upon login for quick access to relevant support materials.

Now you might be thinking, “This sounds great, but how do I actually implement web-based self-service for my customers?”. We’ll review the answer to that next.