By the time you trained your analytic machine on all your current policies and then figured out how to convert that into “actionable intelligence” for your agents, and then ran a pilot to see if it was working, you would probably have new policies in place.

There are no shortcuts to delivering a good call center experience, no matter how much you spend on analytics equipment. The only answer is an ongoing effort by the company to keep tweaking their policies and then keep agents trained on those policies.

Oh, and hire great agents.

Oh, and don’t ever put people on hold: http://goo.gl/09fsb

Simple, really.

- Shai Berger, Fonolo

This is an example of impractical application of big data analytics. While dashboards showing real-time analytic results is a neat technology, do you actually believe that call-center employees will be able to use the dashboard data to make intelligent decisions and in real-time :) ? Have you ever had a good experience with call-center employees? Most of my conversations with call-center employees (e.g., banks, retail, insurance) have been extremely frustrating – the employees have been unable to answer simple questions and when they do answer (e.g., “we will get back to you”) they generally fail to follow-through.

Big data has tremendous potential, but the users need a level of sophistication and understanding – call-center employees do not fit that profile.