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The Power of Operational Intelligence to Improve Customer Care Processes

S o l u t i o n O v e r v i e w

1V I T R I A T E C H N O LO G Y, I N C . > T H E P O W E R O F O P E R AT I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E TO I M P R O V E C U S TO M E R C A R E P R O C E S S E S

Executive OverviewCompanies often get only one chance to deliver excellent customer service before that customer switches to an alternate provider, especially since the traditional barriers to exit are nearly extinct. We are also in a time when a single unacceptable customer service experience can easily eliminate any previously earned loyalty, and loyal customers are the most profitable customers – they buy more, recommend the service more, and leave less frequently. Consequently, the level of customer service provided can directly increase costs associated with customer churn, or reduce revenue by eliminating loyal customers. While every company understands this, many still have a difficult time delivering a seamless and efficient customer service experience due to the complexity of their customer care processes.

Providing the optimal customer experience involves managing business processes across multiple, complex systems that often span numerous business applications, from customer service (CRM) to service provisioning, to billing. These processes are long running and are traditionally supported by siloed applications that are dependent on data from a variety of internal and external sources. The sheer volume of data generated by the supporting systems introduces the potential for compromised customer service via dropped orders, customer communication issues, and billing errors for example. However, if the data is properly leveraged, companies can create a competitive advantage by proactively eliminating problems and identifying opportunities to improve critical customer care processes.

The key to achieving this advantage lies within transforming the data into actionable insight that empowers real-time action. To do this, companies must gain visibility into the complete, end-to-end process across all systems, applications, and divisions; then analyze the data in context to recognize important events, and then take meaningful action in time to make a difference to the customer. Achieving a lifecycle of visibility, insight, and action is easier said than done and companies are increasingly turning to Operational Intelligence to solve this complex challenge.

Operational Intelligence is a new approach that connects business intelligence-like analysis to operational processes enabling optimal responsiveness at the right time. Vitria M3O Operational Intelligence suite provides the power to improve customer care processes by delivering:

• Visibility of end-to-end processes and data across applications and corporate boundaries via easily accessible and understandable role-based operational dashboards • Insight into key performance metrics leveraging real-time analytics that can make sense of high-volume data streams • Action in the form of alerts and/or required responses, executed automatically or manually based on scenario-specific policies

Table of Contents

1 Executive Overview

2 The Value of Operational Intelligence for Customer

Care

4 The Result: Improved Customer Care Driving

Greater Business Value

5 Vitria M3O® Operational Intelligence Suite

Components

6 Partnering with Vitria to Improve Customer Care

2V I T R I A T E C H N O LO G Y, I N C . > T H E P O W E R O F O P E R AT I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E TO I M P R O V E C U S TO M E R C A R E P R O C E S S E S

Now, with Operational Intelligence, service companies can identify and eliminate gaps in customer care processes and thereby save money by reducing manual process interventions, in-bound customer calls, and service level agreement violations as well as any associated penalties. At the same time, companies that improve customer satisfaction can increase revenue by creating more loyal customers and acting on up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

The Value of Operational Intelligence for Customer CareManaging the customer experience from an end-to-end view enables companies to see issues and take corrective action before the customer experience is negatively impacted. Barriers to providing superior customer service fall into three categories: lack of visibility, insufficient insight, and inability to take action.

Lack of Visibility occurs when users are unable to follow all the steps of the customer care process due to application silos, incompatible applications and technologies, and/or organizational barriers. These issues can create gaps in the process information that prevent executives, managers, and the customer service agents themselves from knowing what they need to know about customer issues, service level achievement, and service quality. Thus, exceptions (i.e., breakdowns in the customer care process) are often not identified until a customer complains or a report is generated.

With Operational Intelligence, companies eliminate the gaps and gain the end-to-end visibility into current service transaction operations necessary to improve monitoring of key success and failure points. As a result, companies are aware when exceptions occur in real time which is the first part of the solution. Knowing precisely which process has an issue is the next step. Getting to the transaction level and seeing the in-process context is essential to understanding the individual service transaction failures. At the aggregate level, time series analysis and aggregate service transaction failures point out different problems such as application or systems issues.

With Operational Intelligence,

companies eliminate the

information gaps and gain the

necessary end-to-end visibility into

service operations to improve

monitoring of key success and

failure points.

3V I T R I A T E C H N O LO G Y, I N C . > T H E P O W E R O F O P E R AT I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E TO I M P R O V E C U S TO M E R C A R E P R O C E S S E S

Figure 1: A complete view of the customer care process.

You can see in Figure 1 how a view of the end-to-end process (in this case a customer onboarding or enrollment process) and the status of each step in real time provides the user with an understanding of what is happening and what may be impacted. In this example, the user can monitor the process flow and coordinate associated activities or responses that could be automated or manual. This single view provides visibility into the aggregate exception rates shown in the top right box, as well as insight into the individual transactions and their status with respect to service level agreements, shown in the bottom box.

This real-time dashboard provides a transactional and an aggregate view into customer care operations that can significantly improve business decisions and positively impact customer satisfaction levels. Without this visibility, decisions about incident resolution, staffing levels, and product improvements, to name a few, are being made by gut-feel, and rarely does intuition outperform analysis.

Insufficient Insight is caused by the flip-side of the visibility problem: too much data. Detailed spreadsheets, activity logs, emails, alerts, and warnings arrive in a continuous flood. Without context there can be little analysis, and without analysis data never becomes information and remains unusable.

Operational Intelligence allows an individual to request an inquiry or analysis once, and then have it continuously evaluated over time against one or many streams of events in a highly efficient manner. For example, perhaps you want to know the average wait time of customers broken out by region, product requested, and customer type. The underlying data arrives as a series of events in a continuous event stream and computation must be performed on the real-time events in order to calculate the average wait times.

Companies that manage the

customer experience from an

end-to-end view can see issues

and take corrective action before

the customer experience is

negatively impacted.

4V I T R I A T E C H N O LO G Y, I N C . > T H E P O W E R O F O P E R AT I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E TO I M P R O V E C U S TO M E R C A R E P R O C E S S E S

Operational Intelligence provides the power to analyze multiple events over a specific period of time, detect complex patterns, and make correlations. This reflects the ability to aggregate a broad array of data and content in order to provide additional context to the purely transactional operational information. Operational Intelligence allows you to process, in real time, the potentially high volumes of low-level events and transform these low-level events into higher-level, aggregated and composite business events for visualization and automated response.

With the process context provided by Operational Intelligence, team members can drill down into any process from a dashboard to examine issues more closely, as shown in Figure 2. This dashboard provides visibility into all of the alerts generated from “in jeopardy” or “violation” situations in the top right box. The bottom box provides insight into the status of the resolution action on a given exception.

Figure 2: Analysis providing context for smart, real-time decisions.

This additional insight enables team members to take corrective action in time to lessen or eliminate a negative customer experience. This real-time insight is critical to delivering optimized customer service.

Taking Action is the desired result and the return on investments in visibility and insight. With the visibility to see what’s happening and with the insight to understand what it means, action is taken in time to improve the situation.

Action can take many forms, from manual to fully automated. The type of action depends on the process and policies in place to direct it. For example, policies can automatically dictate that notifications be sent when established failure points or service level violations occur. Another example is the automatic correction of failed transactions. In this case, monitoring the service transaction level can identify patterns in the exception types, and the solution then models automated processes to proactively address those failure types. The more real-time the action is (meaning it is taken before the exception affects the customer) the greater the benefit to both the company and the customer.

The key to achieving competitive

advantage lies within transforming

data into actionable insight that

empowers real-time action.

5V I T R I A T E C H N O LO G Y, I N C . > T H E P O W E R O F O P E R AT I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E TO I M P R O V E C U S TO M E R C A R E P R O C E S S E S

The Result: Improved Customer Care Driving Greater Business ValueIncreasing revenue and decreasing costs are imperative economic goals. Maintaining customer loyalty, reducing customer churn, efficiently providing services, and accurately billing for services are just some of the ways you can achieve these goals. Operational Intelligence from Vitria provides the foundation for delivering a timely, accurate operating picture, to enable you to focus on key events and reliably monitor responses. The result is customer service excellence.

Vitria M3O® Operational Intelligence Suite ComponentsBy combining five key technologies – complex event processing, business process management, visualization, workflow, and data feed management – into modular, integrated components, Vitria M3O Operational Intelligence suite delivers the visibility and insight to take optimal action and provide excellent customer service.

Vitria’s unified approach to Operational Intelligence provides the following benefits:

• Accesstoawidevarietyofdatasourcesinrealtime,includingbusiness transactional systems, operational systems, and external sources such as web feeds • Continuousmonitoringandanalysisofinformationinrealtime • Abilitytoaccessandcorrelaterelatedinformation • Richvisualizationoftherawandanalyticaldataorganizedeasilyfromthe business user’s perspective • Abilitytorespondusingavarietyofautomatedandhumanworkflow processes

Vitria M3O Operational Intelligence suite fosters development productivity and collaboration by delivering model-driven, fully integrated components including a complex event processing (CEP) engine, dashboarding and process modeling tools, as well as policy and process management. Deployment is non-intrusive and has minimal impact on existing business applications and associated infrastructure. The fully integrated suite enables more rapid delivery than alternative solutions. The Operational Intelligence components can be deployed in traditional enterprise computing environments or in the Cloud.

Vitria M3O Operational Intelligence suite components are as follows:

M3O® Analytic ServerM3O Analytic Server provides advanced, continuous analytics of real-time information and historical data, via a sophisticated CEP engine to deliver the in-time analysis, as required by today’s business environment. M3O Analytic Server provides multi-dimensional analysis, pattern detection, trend analysis, and in-context correlation of real-time information and operational and historical sources, all visualized with M3O Operations Book dashboards.

Operational Intelligence provides

the visibility to see what is

happening and the insight to

understand what it means, so the

right action can be taken in time to

improve the customer experience.

6V I T R I A T E C H N O LO G Y, I N C . > T H E P O W E R O F O P E R AT I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E TO I M P R O V E C U S TO M E R C A R E P R O C E S S E S

M3O® Business Process ServerM3O Business Process Server is the runtime environment where you can perform model-driven execution of policies and processes defined as BPMN models with the M3O Modeler. M3O Business Process Server also provides the capability to define and manage policies across the enterprise, apply the policies to events, and then take action according to the defined policies.

M3O® Feed ServerM3O Feed Server provides seamless connectivity to traditional and non-traditional information sources, including JMS, RSS, web services, and databases, enabling what-if analysis, event archive, and recovery of feed histories. M3O Feed Server also allows you to manage and balance large volumes of real-time events across multiple M3O Analytic Servers as necessary.

M3O® ModelerM3O Modeler provides a unified modeling environment that supports automated processes and rich human-oriented workflows, via a business-friendly, easy-to-use interface empowering business analysts with a workspace tailored specifically for them. Likewise, IT users have IT views and capabilities that support necessary IT functions, presented within the same unified environment.

M3O® Operations BookM3O Operations Book is a powerful Web 2.0 Rich Internet Application that allows you to easily define dashboards to monitor Key Performance Indicators and Service Level Agreements. M3O Operations Book has an extensive library of graphical widgets providing rich visualization of data in a variety of ways. You can mash up and display analytics that visually model the relationship between information and events, leveraging the CEP engine in M3O Analytic Server. With easy-to-use dashboards that combine real-time information sources with historical data, M3O Operations Book delivers in-time information, reducing time-to-visibility when it matters.

Partnering with Vitria to Improve Customer Care Vitria’s Operational Intelligence solution provides the building blocks and development environment to deploy the real-time Customer Care processes that are required to positively maximize the customer experience. Founded over 15 years ago, Vitria Technology is the leading provider of Operational Intelligence and has supplied technology to many of the worlds leading companies across multiple industries, including Energy and Utilities, Communications, and Financial Services.

About Vitria

Vitria Technology, Inc. is the industry’s

leading Operational Intelligence company.

Our innovative Operational Intelligence

solutions empower customers to analyze

business activities in process and take

real-time action. The result is better

decisions when they matter most—before

opportunities have faded or problems have

escalated. With a rich heritage as a pioneer

of BPMS, Vitria’s award-winning solutions

provide the backbone for many Global

2000 companies’ mission-critical business

processes. Vitria has customers in North

America, South America, Europe, Asia, and

Australia.

945 Stewart Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94085Tel: +1 (877) 365-5935 Email: moreinfo@vitria.comwww.vitria.com

© 2010 Vitria Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Vitria, BusinessWare, M3O, Operations Book, and StreamXQuery are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vitria Technology, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners, companies, or organizations. Operational Intelligence for Customer Care 05/10 300-9