While deployment obviously is a major milestone in the lifecycle of a service, it certainly isn’t the last step. Users calling the service and navigating through the designed dialogs leave an important trail behind them on VoiceObjects Server, providing insight into usage and acceptance patterns.
This chapter provides a first overview of VoiceObjects Analyzer, the component within the VoiceObjects product family that deals with analyzing these data.
The analytic features of VoiceObjects Analyzer are based on the statistics functionality of Infostore, the logging component of VoiceObjects Server.
Infostore provides the capability to gather and refine the statistics data throughout your servers and store the information in a standardized data model. For detailed information about Infostore refer to the Infostore Guide.
VoiceObjects Analyzer is designed to turn these data into information that helps business users to gain insight into factors that influence the profitability of their services.
By leveraging this information to continuously tune and improve the deployed services, developers can rapidly boost acceptance.
The analytics of VoiceObjects Analyzer are designed to provide you with answers to the following questions:
· What is the completion rate of business tasks?
· What are the dominant paths users take?
· What kind of personalization is used?
· What is the (average/minimum/maximum) workload of your servers?
· What are the peak workloads and when do they occur?
· At what time will system maintenance downtime have minimum impact?
· Is the current number of ports sufficient? Are the servers properly sized?
· Is the load on your cluster evenly balanced?
· Are there daily/monthly trends in the use of your service?
· How many of your calls result in an error?
· What are your most actively used services?
· How many unique callers do you have?
· How many repeat callers are there? How often do they call?
· How much time (on average/minimum/maximum) do callers spend in your service?
The pre-defined reports of VoiceObjects Analyzer are categorized into three different areas of interest:
· Administration and Maintenance
The reports in this category are primarily targeted towards administrators of service environments. They help to identify peaks, both highs and lows, in the usage of the deployed services, the average usage, throughput and other useful figures.
· Application Development and Tuning
The reports in this category target application designers. They provide information about the usage of the different services, about the average time that callers spend within the services and give hints on trends in the usage of the dialogs.
· Business and Caller Analysis
The reports in this category are of most interest to marketing people or CRM analysts. They primarily provide information on business tasks and on the callers and their acceptance of the services, i.e. how well the service is addressing caller needs, how many of the callers are coming back, and how often they visit.
i8 Note: The Analyzer Guide describes the reports provided with the VoiceObjects Analyzer for IBM Cognos package. Other packages may contain more or less reports, or the reports may be defined different, may have different filter criteria, layout or functionalities.
VoiceObjects Analyzer is based on market-leading Business Intelligence tools to leverage best-of-breed query and reporting functionality. Those tools most efficiently support to gain insight into the data stored in Infostore.
VoiceObjects Analyzer is currently available for the Business Intelligence tools IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, and SAP BusinessObjects.
For detailed information on working with these tools refer to the respective product documentation provided by its vendors.
In case of SAP BusinessObjects refer to the manual Building Reports Using the Web Intelligence Java Report Panel which is part of the BusinessObjects installation.
In case of IBM Cognos refer to the manual User Guide Report Studio which is part of the Cognos installation.
In case of MicroStrategy refer to the Basic Reporting Guide for an introduction into the work with reports, metrics, filters and prompts within the MicroStrategy environment.
Microstrategy offers a free download of its reporting software at http://www.microstrategy.com/freereportingsoftware/.
VoiceObjects Analyzer provides you with insight into application data by supplying reports, diagrams, and scorecards.
By using standard query and reporting tools, you have access to features such as:
· Formatting
Each report comes with a predefined formatting that may be adapted to accommodate your corporate style guides and to assure a consistent presentation of data. You might, for example, want to add your company logo to the header of the VoiceObjects Analyzer reports.
· Drilling
Starting with a report that gives you a high level overview you can systematically drill down into the data and pinpoint sources of meaningful trends in caller behavior. For instance, you can start with a report that shows the number of calls per month. If you encounter a deviation in call frequency for a particular month you might want to drill down to see the calls per day in that month.
· Slicing and Dicing
You have the flexibility to add or remove dimensional attributes and measures from reports to customize the amount of data that is presented. Imagine a report showing detailed information about all dialogs initiated by one specific ANI. You might want to listen to recordings of the calls that terminated with an error. To do this you would need to add the media platform session ID to the report.
· Filtering
At run time you are prompted to choose filter conditions to adapt the scope of analysis to your needs. Using this feature you can for example exclude servers used for testing purposes from your reports to only see data from the production servers.
For detailed information on all the features available with a certain Business Intelligence tool refer to its product documentation provided by the respective vendor.