How can Channel Partners Gain an Edge with Analytics?

Why are analytics solutions so valuable for businesses? 

Analytics is one of the few value-adds that can be promoted even in tough times like COVID-19. Businesses that use analytics to monitor individuals and teams can clearly see the impact of performance on customer experience and focus on KPIs that matter right now. Ongoing measurement makes it easy to implement the right business changes at the right time, to ramp resources up and down, change the focus of internal teams and manage call flows into the business during periods of remote working.

Cloud-based analytics solutions are built for scale so the key is how effectively the solution can make the data not only manageable, but actionable. It’s important that businesses buy into analytics solutions that are flexible enough to give them what they need. The needs of a 2000 seat contact centre are completely different from a 50-user informal contact centre within an SME. Indeed, a business that wants to understand customer experience across every customer touch point needs a very different set of capabilities and reports to one that only wants to manage a busy support queue. The ability to flex down to deliver analytics to individual users and managers means everyone contributes to business objectives.

What is the role of the channel in helping end users to make sense of their data?

There is no question that data is valuable. The right data in the right hands at the right time drives critical business decisions.

And although a deluge of data may seem daunting, scalable cloud-based analytics tools translate real-time data en-masse into visual representation and reporting that is actionable.

For example, applying business service levels and performance targets to call data turns ‘unmanageable data’ into critical business insights, relevant to specific individuals, teams, departments and indeed across the whole business.

Informed decisions not only facilitate agility in uncertain economic times, but also enables businesses to prepare for the next stage-whether it be returning back to ‘business as usual’ or moving forward as a leaner but stronger business-with more of a competitive edge.

The biggest challenge with this is analysing what data you have, understanding which data is important and how it can be leveraged, and presenting it visually to make informed decisions. Rsellers that work collaboratively with their customers to determine what’s most important to them, and can relate analytics to business performance, and indeed business strategy, will find it much easier to profit. The skills that resellers need in order to do this are the same as they’ve always been: know your customer, and work collaboratively. Relevant data, presented in the right way, can transform a business almost overnight.

The channel has been monetising telecoms analytics for many years, and a cloud-first, standards-based approach means that it’s very accessible across all levels of the supply chain. Deep integration at platform level for the likes of BroadSoft, Mitel and many more means that the technical overheads of deployment are near-zero for the average channel partner, shifting the value-add towards results and actionability.