Alchemex delivers Excel reporting for three smaller call centres

Budget constraints leave smaller call centres ill-equipped to take advantage of business intelligence. Standard reports simply do not cut it, with each manager wanting to apply their own unique style to the job of managing people.

The result is that many call centre managers turn to Microsoft Excel, because it's a tool they are familiar with and with which they experience some level of empowerment.

Publishing concern Succeed Magazine uses Excel extensively for GoldMine reporting, to monitor and motivate the performance of its sales agents. Sales Director, Stephen Horszowski, explains: "We are growing fast and as a result our needs are changing dynamically. Excel's presentation capabilities and the ability to drill down make it the ideal platform to present all our data. Most importantly, because we are keen to up-skill in Excel, we are independent and have control of our reporting, in our changing environment."

For years BI vendors have evoked the notion of Excel as a part of any BI toolkit. A valid reason is that multiple versions of the truth are sometimes an output from empowered end-users. Most importantly, however, is the time it takes and the manual intervention required mainly because of lack of true reporting features such as integration to the source data. But now, with Microsoft's formal entry into the BI space, Excel is a wise reporting choice for any smaller organisation.

The geographic location for this paper takes place in southern Africa, where a software vendor has been using Excel to partner a middleware reporting application, Alchemex, for over four years. Alchemex converts Excel into a true reporting platform. A notable benefit is that IT departments can work with the end-users, who have been helping themselves for years, and include their outputs as a contribution to the company's formal BI strategy. Alchemex has a current install base of over 2 000 sites. With its strategy to rapidly develop Excel template sets, on top of popular install base applications, it's not surprising that its client base is exploding and international interest is mounting.

International Alchemex distributor, Excel Integration (Pty) Ltd, uses Alchemex to develop solutions for CRM applications and seems to have found a niche in smaller outbound call centres. MD, Brad Bartlett, explains: "We found that these operations already had very impressive Excel reporting but because it was largely manual they could only go so far."

Business Intelligence for GoldMine is an example of an Alchemex product that has emerged because users are demanding more value from all their data. "A sales environment, particularly in a call centre, is so measurable and with easy flexible access to the data inputs, a sales manager has 'click once' access to intelligent reports. This can be used to motivate or alternatively to reprimand the resources responsible for bringing in the money."

Outbound call centre, Business Images is one example. This IT consumables organisation uses the reporting product to automatically display a series of Excel graphs on a big screen. Manager, Shaun Davies enthuses: "Reports auto refresh every 10 minutes and our agents are motivated by the change in status. It's a very competitive environment and that's healthy for revenue."

Davies is able to easily change the collection of Excel graphs he wishes to display thus keeping the initiative refreshing. "Initial estimates were expensive so it was great discovering BI for GoldMine, because the entire initiative is so affordable," he concludes.

With BI for GoldMine, containers are developed to facilitate the extraction of the required data specifically for creating Excel reports. "Because we can reuse containers, we focus on this aspect, leaving Shaun with the option to do the pretty stuff in Excel," explains Bartlett. "Ultimately, this amounts to affordable business intelligence. It's the separate roles of data extraction and Excel presentation that create a partnership potential for IT and end-user. This partnership is not plausible with traditional reporting tools."

Succeed's call centre was looking for a very different enhancement. Horszowski explains: "We only have so many qualified leads for our agents so our 'closing efficiency' ratio is critical." A new initiative at Succeed is the scheduling of reports overnight. The reporting tool then sends an Excel report via e-mail to each agent for viewing on their arrival the next morning.

"The report allows the agent to view their performance yesterday," says Horszowski. "We package a variety of indicators such as call volumes, successful versus unsuccessful, forecasts and closed sales and we even highlight where the agent has captured data poorly, so they can correct it in hindsight."

Excel is ideal as a data repository facilitating the presentation of tables and graphs over multiple pages, with easy menu-driven navigation. Succeed has also discovered the potential to present weekly information in an interactive sales meeting where the sales manager is able to navigate through the information on a big screen.

"With access to so much information, one is able to identify, investigate and respond to strengths, weaknesses, comparisons and this keeps staff on their toes," explains Horszowski.

Findit-SA, the last example in our case study, is looking for operational enhancements through automated Excel reporting. In this environment a closed sale, by an agent, triggers a workflow finally ending in the administration department. Manager Gregg Baxter explains: "Besides the reporting for our agents, we also see great potential in the tool's generic capability as it also has a strong track record on accounting packages."

Excel is also an ideal format when mobility is important, such as a report that needs to flow internally or to clients or suppliers.

Findit-SA is first focusing on the CRM sales reports as an input to drive the next step of the administration process. As a next stage, however, one can take advantage of a feature called union reporting, where the tool fetches data from multiple sources and presents it in one integrated Excel workbook. Excel Integration's Bartlett states: "This powerful feature is offering smaller businesses with an alternative when integration is tabled. Instead of a complicated project to get the company's packages to talk to each other, we promote just integrating the outputs via Excel reports."

Because this tool's traditional market has been in financial reporting so much intellectual material already exists for popular accounting and payroll packages. "So, when a business begins utilising the solution to deliver reports on multiple applications this can be seen as the initiation of true desktop business intelligence," claims Bartlett.

Recent releases of the software now also include access to Excel reports via a Web browser, plus a cube offering (via OLAP) for the bigger environments. With Microsoft recently announcing Excel as its tool to take BI to the masses, Alchemex and Excel Integration are in a good space. Manual and repetitive manual Excel reports are now redundant and should no longer embezzle valuable time from key people. Click once Excel reporting has arrived and it is affordable. "So, if you are STILL routinely preparing Excel reports, remember your competitors are busy analysing theirs," concludes Bartlett.

Business Intelligence for GoldMine is NOT a FrontRange Solutions Product. Accordingly, FrontRange Solutions Inc cannot guarantee the accuracy of any reports generated thereby and does not endorse or offer technical or other support for the operation of the product. Although Business Intelligence for GoldMine is a READ ONLY product, FrontRange Solutions Inc does not warrantee the product and will accept no responsibility or claim any liability for any effect the product may have on the user's database.