The evolution of business communication analytics
Data analytics empowers personalisation of information, to enable the right people to be informed in the right way, at the right time. For analytics to be valuable, access needs to be seamless, easy and fully integrated with the technology ecosystem users already know and use.
Data and statistics are old news – almost a ‘given’ in today’s world. It’s now about insights and meaning, enabling people to learn and make informed decisions. Analytics provides the visibility needed to ensure that best practice is being adhered to, and the right teams and personas have the right tools to do their job. Managers use analytics to encourage effective collaboration, understand wellbeing and optimise resources internally – often remotely, as well as monitoring performance externally.
Microsoft Teams as a catalyst
Communications analytics enables quality of engagement to be evaluated and performance to be monitored in line with service levels. A clear, visual understanding of overall communication both internally and externally is essential to maximising customer experience.
The rise of Microsoft Teams has driven the need for collaboration analytics, which coupled with phone calls through Teams Calling or indeed traditional phone systems provides a full understanding and insights. Although the phone call takes many forms today, it still proves to be critical in customer liaison and relationships.
Developments in AI and machine-learning are facilitating the move towards persona-based analytics. Services like Microsoft Viva are democratising personalised analytics, driving an expectation and familiarity aligned to an individual’s role and responsibilities.
APIs are also key in this new collaborative world, helping to automate, integrate and consolidate relevant sources of data to deliver analytics to those that need it, in the way that they wish to consume it.
The channel has an important role to play
The biggest opportunity is for the channel to add value by helping customers to make better decisions. This means integrating analytics within their own proposition and blending data to deliver rich but simply understood insights in line with the target audience and their business needs. Best practice advice can be built on intelligence to encourage further user adoption.
Sometimes it is not necessary to look for new services, but instead to evolve current offerings to ensure they meet the evolving business needs of each customer. These types of iterations are really important. For example, introducing single sign-on for easy access or identifying ways to leverage the Microsoft ecosystem. There are lots of applications to make things easy and seamless.
It all comes down to knowing your customers and ensuring services are relevant and in context.
Regulations and compliance remain key
From GDPR to HIPAA, the requirement for compliance has a major impact on operational processes and systems for businesses of any size. To be truly effective, compliance policies need to match the business’ regulatory requirements and channel providers need to understand how their customers’ can easily adhere to those policies, with different vertical sectors having varying levels of obligations.
Channel companies should look for software partners that have a track record and make it as easy as possible to adhere to regulations. A strong compliance story can offer a powerful USP to their portfolio.
Self-service and automation are key to making compliance manageable; this means giving customers the tools and ability to configure and manage their own policies. It is also important to enable customers to easily identify areas of non-compliance, understand what has fallen through the gaps and how to deal with exceptions. This requires a strong self-service element if issues are to be dealt with quickly and responsibly.
The next step for analytics and insight
So much will happen in the next 10 years!
Expect greater meshing of various systems and technologies through the use of APIs to bring solutions together and deliver broader and deeper insights.
Analytics will continue to become more automated and personalised through AI and machine-learning technologies. Analytics is the power behind everything, driving and enabling decision-making.