Companies need more customer insight to make timely business decisions. Although contact centers are a major hub for customer interactions, companies do not analyze customer phone conversations, emails, and chats for the customer's experience or attitude. Because voice recordings consist of unstructured conversations that have been historically difficult to analyze and report, organizations lose valuable customer information. Contact centers typically use quality monitoring applications for compliance purposes and to monitor agent performance, but these applications can also mine valuable business intelligence from captured interactions. Leading quality monitoring vendors now offer analytical tools that interpret structured and unstructured data to build a visual overview of contact attributes from customer conversations. By understanding the context and root cause of each customer interaction, companies can do more to reach goals on increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.

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Business Objects' planned acquisition of First Logic makes technology sense, but does it make customer sense?

Business Intelligence mainstay Business Objects announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Firstlogic, a long-time provider of data quality solutions.

As more and more IT organizations improve their service delivery, they are turning their focus to presenting their business value more positively. These organizations are beginning to develop true business service management (BSM) systems by doing two things: understanding the metrics their business users employ to decide if IT is providing value, and linking these metrics and associated business services to IT infrastructure components. Vendors have been using — and abusing — the term BSM for a couple of years now, so clients are understandably confused about the inconsistent messages they receive from vendors. To cut through the confusion, Forrester now proposes a definition of BSM based on observations of many of our clients' BSM projects.

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The interaction platform began as an architecture pattern enabled by service-oriented architecture (SOA), a common way to factor an application front end from the back-end services it uses, supported by frameworks and infrastructure. During 2005 a number of events moved packaged applications and services, application infrastructure, frameworks, and tools into closer alignment with this pattern. However, only a few major vendors are explicitly positioning products as interaction platforms, with the rest embedding those capabilities in broader application platform suites. Despite this low-key market status, organizations with requirements for rich clients, multichannel business processes, composite applications, collaboration, and other capabilities of interaction platforms should align architecture and purchasing plans with this trend to ensure the best fit of platform and tool strategy to meet these needs.

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