April 25, 2010
By Koa Beck, Editorial Assistant, CRM magazine

Angel.com Thinks Analytics Are Heavenly

Angel.com recently launched Caller First Analytics, a reporting capability designed to allow contact centers to identify and address problems quickly to increase customer satisfaction and achieve revenue optimization. The software promises to provide companies the ability to apply positive changes to call flow and contain common call issues with automation by reducing agent load.

Caller First Analytics, powered by a partnership with business intelligence player MicroStrategy, comprises dashboards, key views, and reports to better analyze and understand customer needs; the company calls the interface very similar to that of Google Analytics. Large enterprises can view call data reports, call volume, performance and voice user analysis reports in customizable dashboards of easy-to-read graphs and charts.

"A couple of key things about Caller First is that it's able to drill down through reports and show you individual calls or a subset of calls — trouble spots," says David Toliver, senior manager of marketing communications at Angel.com. "If you have a good chunk of callers who go through a specific menu and take a pathway and then dial out to the operator, we can change that on the fly and make things better for this subset of callers."

Daniel Hong, lead analyst of customer interaction at Ovum, states that the demand for programs such as Caller First Analytics has been growing due to many companies' reliance on reporting and monitoring their voice channel. "Most enterprises are heavily siloed and the contact center has not heavily adopted sophisticated analytics," Hong says. "However, the overarching concept of business intelligence is slowly permeating across various areas of the enterprise which have traditionally not applied business intelligence to improve processes -- the contact center is one of these areas."

Caller First Analytics is fully integrated into Angel.com and configurable based on access preferences, export, and distribution. "I deal a lot with Google Analytics and what they provide is a funnel view, which voice apps are being used the most and the least. We can do the same with Caller First. Because of the structure of Angel.com, you can see which voice pages are being visited the most and what main options are being chosen. You can see the flow as they move through the site. You can see where someone broke off that path and you get a full context of that call and why that person dropped off. It's a good indication of trouble areas."

Angel.com asserts that companies who have experience using business intelligence to optimize process, such as Financial services, Communications, and Travel & Tourism, have the most to benefit from Caller First Analytics.

"Companies who have the most to gain from Caller Analytics First are those with high traffic and those that use IVR in their system," says Toliver. "What Caller First does is that it narrows down problem areas for IVR. Every one to two percent of these problem areas translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars for these companies, which is the bottom line. Every small improve has a fairly substantial impact."

Beta customers for the new Caller First Analytics include Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, Barnes and Noble, and Hughes. Caller First Analytics is available immediately from Angel starting at $500 a month.

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine.