real-time high-performance dashboards
The Challenge
Our client, one of the leading providers of cable television in the United States, employs over 4000 customer service reps across their multiple call centers in a single major metropolitan area. They receive over 150,000 calls per day. Just four reasons account for the bulk of the calls placed to the call centers: storm-related outages, product issues (e.g., digital on-demand), special events (e.g., pay-per-view sporting events), and network/hardware issues. Both the high-volume of calls and the peak demand created by weather and special events make forecasting call center staffing requirements essential to a well-functioning business.
Executives and call center managers desired a way to view high-level call metrics through a high-performance real-time operational dashboard, which would meet the following requirements:
- Intuitive and as easy-to-use as an iPhone
- Visualize thousands of data points while retaining a simple look and feel
- Navigate with just one or two clicks
- Provide early warning signs of a major problem
- Provide cumulative statistics for both the past half hour and day
- Switch between views within two seconds
- The ability to go backward in time to any date or half hour period
- Be able to compare any two trends side-by-side, as well as the supporting actionable detail associated with them
- Enable users to save their preferences with a single click
- Launch from the start-up menu and be resizable based on any screen configuration
The Approach
Prior to Chateaux’s engagement, two other attempts had been made to meet all of the client’s requirements; neither attempt succeeded. The key to Chateaux’s success was two-fold: the experience of our architects and technologists and SAP BusinessObjects’ -Xcelsius.
Chateaux has been developing complex visualizations for over a decade - using techniques developed by Edward Tufte and other notable experts - and leveraging our extensive experience of working with top executives. The team at Chateaux understands that your leaders have a limited time to view and digest information; therefore, they need instantaneous responses from supporting systems, presentation of the most actionable information cross-referenced with supporting data, and the ability to link disparate sets of information in a clear manner. Having a thorough understanding of these principles helped Chateaux to create a dashboard that displayed both the spoken and unspoken needs of the client.
SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius provides a proprietary mechanism developed over the last few years, which enables the user to query the information for any and all sets of data on an instantaneous basis. This capability, as employed by Chateaux, allows the user to make well-informed decisions based on real-time data.
The Result
Our client has been extremely pleased with their ability to visualize, understand and respond to the most pressing needs, and improve their cost-to-customer satisfaction profile. With the new dashboard created by Chateaux, the client can view the answers to the important questions around call volume without having to resort to extensive analytics or utilizing the man-power related to uncovering these variances. All of the requirements and expectations set forth by the client were met and exceeded.
“Thanks for your continued leadership and successes. We deeply value working with you (Ken Zimmerman) and the Chatsoft team”, stated a senior executive on the client team.
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