If you run a business, you are probably acutely familiar with the utilization of a spreadsheet software. A prevalent data tool for businesses in the past several decades, these applications allow you to digitally organize, calculate, and analyze your data.
However pivotal the advent of spreadsheets have been in the role of helping businesses run a tight ship, there has been little done to improve upon the fundamental purpose of the software. Some iterations, such as Google Sheets, have stepped in to compete against top names, but the functionality has remained largely the same over the years.
Despite its prolific use, the utilization of spreadsheet software has a host of inefficiencies that place organizational and operational strain on your business. In this blog, we will address the risks and disadvantages of manually recording and analyzing data, such as call scoring, as well as discuss the advantages of integrating a business intelligence tool to augment your data storage, management, and analysis. Coupled with a speech analytics API solution like VoiceBase, you will discover all of the powerful insights you can gain from your call center as a result of adopting a BI solution.
Risks of Manual Spreadsheets
With enough diligence and attention to detail, the use of spreadsheets, in theory, have the capability to be 100% accurate. Unfortunately, spreadsheet integrity is marred by inevitable user error. These inaccuracies add up over time and can have dire ramifications for your business. On top of that, there are many other disadvantages of spreadsheets:
- Multiple users and documents: When you have multiple people working in the same static spreadsheet, things can get messy fast. Depending on which software you are using, only one user can access and edit the document at a time, which can be incredibly slow and frustrating. Some solutions, such as Excel Online, have become available in recent years, but they are a stripped down, web-based version that is very limited in its capabilities. You also undoubtedly have dozens and dozens of document to keep track of, creating an organizational nightmare that is a hassle to share between teams or departments.
- Differing formatting: Spreadsheet software are robust, powerful, and highly customizable tools with no real standardized means of operation. Much like spoken language, performing operations in a spreadsheet is highly interpretable by each user, and trying to understand each person’s thought process within an operation can be frustrating. You can try to enforce formatting best practices, but this still doesn’t ensure uniformity across the organization.
- Poor visualization of results: The data housed across the multitude of spreadsheets in your business is likely siloed and disparate. This means that you have to manually aggregate, analyze, and develop your insights. Spreadsheet platforms available today do not offer automated data insights or a single source of truth for your data, meaning that crucial, business-driving information can fall through the cracks.
- Lost productivity in data entry: On top of spreadsheets being error-prone, messy, and hard to analyze, the task of data entry is time-consuming and monotonous. The hundreds of hours spent manually documenting data will end up costing you a fortune.
All of these risks can affect the success of your call center operations, too. Most companies manually score calls, and those results are typically tracked in spreadsheets. Then, it’s likely you double track data in your legacy call center platform, and again in spreadsheets so the rest of your business can see the results. This is inefficient, prone to error, and speaks to a greater problem for data management. This is where speech analytics and VoiceBase can help ramp up your productivity and insights in your call center.
Benefits of Integrating a Business Intelligence Tool
While there have been little advances in spreadsheet software, a new type of solution has stepped into the market in recent years. Business Intelligence (BI) software has opened a new door in a business’ ability to gather insights from data. This is accomplished primarily through the use of artificial intelligence, intuitive visualizations, and automation.
BI tools are gaining ground as a predominant tactic for gathering insights—a Tech Target survey found that 85% of businesses have adopted at least one piece of BI software. BI tools are the answer to the dilemma for big data management. Now, with APIs like VoiceBase, your speech analytics data can be put into the context of all of your other data sources such as CRM, help desk solutions, POS systems, and social media, website traffic, amongst others.
Here are just a few of the benefits you can realize through the integration of a BI tool:
- Make data discoverable: In Bridget Cogley’s guide to Tableau, she describes “The Question” dilemma. In a spreadsheet software such as Excel, you are tasked with knowing which question you want to ask. With a BI tool like Tableau, the data is presented in a easily-digestible way so you are able to reverse engineer the question. With BI tools, you are able to discover insights from information you didn’t even know existed.
- Make data-driven decisions: As a result of unearthing valuable insights with ease, you are able to make more informed business decisions. You can easily monitor trends and revise and tweak management strategies accordingly.
- More cost-effective: Between the tenuous logging of information and manual analyzation of data, spreadsheets can become costly. BI tools are able to aggregate and process all of this information instantaneously for up-to-the-second insights. So, in the long run, it is more affordable to invest in the integration of a BI solution instead of manual processes.
Automated Insights For Your Call Center
Your call center arguably sees more consumer and product data on a daily basis than any other department in your organization. As such, you need to have the proper tools in place to take advantage of all that raw data. Through leveraging APIs, your speech analytics data can now be integrated into a BI tool to track and visualize the spoken information your business needs.
This job is too big to record and analyze in spreadsheets.
BI tools are the best way to automate your call center data collection, analysis, and trends. And coupling your BI tool with a speech analytics API such as VoiceBase will ensure that you are capturing every bit of information that comes through your call center and presents the data in an actionable way. Utilizing features such as competitive mentions, sentiment, product feedback and churn detection, all conversations with customers are caught at the source, allowing you to keep an ear on the Voice of the Customer.
Gone are the days of toiling over endless static spreadsheets to fruitless results. With business intelligence tools, you are empowered to capture any and all information automatically and cost-effectively, which in turn enables you to make the best business decisions possible.
