Every mega trend in the CX industry today generates data, whether it is personalization (delivering the preferred experience to every individual customer), security (ensuring compliance with increasingly strict privacy regulations), automation (smarter and smarter bots), augmentation (natural language processing and the development of avatars), emotion sensing, voice-to-text translation (and related search for coaching and audits) and, of course, any and all Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications which we’re seeing more of in 2020.

Contact Center, CX, CRM and other types of vendor developed systems have moved or are moving swiftly to the cloud, not only for better economics and greater flexibility, but precisely because cloud makes the storage and compute necessary for analytics-based solutions possible, in a way that local, decentralized premise-based legacy systems cannot.

Add to this the maturation of omnichannel access to service and support, and the additional data generated when conversations happen in contextual situations (for example, from a mobile app while inside a specific retail store from a customer wishing to ask a question about a specific Smart TV) and we begin to understand the limitless value hyper-intelligent CX platforms and applications can deliver.

That is – if they have a means to capture, store, process, analyze and create meaningful and actionable insights from oceans of data.

In its annual CMO survey, Deloitte found that despite marketing analytics budgets increasing over the next 3 years, perceived contributions from analytics remain weak; CMOs and the new generation of CXOs (Customer Experience Officers) know they must leverage data to compete and succeed, but the very idea of analytics and its cousin AI is daunting.

In 2020 and throughout this new decade, to compete on analytics, companies must turn to AI-driven automation to help operationalize those analytics, and with the related deluge of data and proliferation of customer contact opportunities, it is simply no longer humanly possible to make potentially thousands of decisions per second necessary to deliver consistently great CX without automation in the mix.

An SAS-Futurum survey found that by 2030 67 percent of customer engagement between a brand and consumer using digital devices will be completed by smart machines.

One company is taking an unusual approach to harnessing data generated by multiple contact center and CX systems and platforms with an audacious goal: to normalize any data generated across multiple sources into a single domain, then use that data to generate reports that guide agents, managers and serve as a “window” between contact center operators and their clients, with an interesting new set of alert and notification features based on criteria (or policy) set by whomever is using the solution.

Eventus Solutions Group, a strategy, consulting, managed solutions and contact center technology company based in Denver, CO, this week announced the general availability of what they describe as “a substantially enriched version of the popular IntelligenceHub CX-as-a-Service (CXaaS) business intelligence platform.”

The company is in an interesting position to understand every contact center and CX platform because they actively assess each one as part of their years of helping large enterprises and organizations transform their digital interactions with customers, and have taken a completely neutral stance on vendors (including Genesys, NICE inContact, Pega, and dozens more) allowing their clients to choose the best fit.

Following strategy and consulting engagements, clients frequently turn to Eventus for managed solutions, meaning either managing part of their contact center and CX operations (for example, providing the productivity platform but not the agents) or all of their operations (running 100% including recruiting, training and development of agents and managers.

“Our clients pulled us into the managed solutions business,” said Heather Barrow, Manager, Analytics & Insights and Product Deployment, Eventus “in many cases because the evolution of technologies and inevitably more sophisticated data-driven applications became overwhelming. Super successful companies are those who focus on their core business – their products and services – and they are finding that it not only makes sense from a cost and risk management perspective to ask experts to operate and evolve their CX programs, but that when they do so they have access to more valuable data that can impact outcomes beyond CX, when the data provides insights into their offerings.”

The company established what they call their IntelligenceHub data analytics and insights platform several years ago, with an initial release, interim “mega” release 2.0 about a year later, and in 2020 the 3.0 release which includes more connectors to 3rd party systems, along with more features that leverage the unification of data across disparate sources.

This fully cloud-based productivity and quality assurance platform now includes more functionality, a more personalized and intuitive experience, new security features, and significantly faster performance.

Necessity: The Mother of Invention

“We were pleasantly surprised by the rapid adoption rate when we initially launched IntelligenceHub several years ago,” said Heather Barrow. “Because we work with so many different technology vendors to allow our managed solutions clients choices that best suit their needs, we developed the first release to differentiate our service offering and to support our unique gain share business model. You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and IntelligenceHub was designed to provide complete transparency into actions and outcomes which make it possible to understand and continually improve every interaction and every trend.”

The latest enhancements are detailed in the release notes made public by the company and are fully backwards compatible with previous versions of IntelligenceHub, with no loss of previous functionality.

“IntelligenceHub provides a window into how we are serving customers, and how our investments in continually improving CX are paying off,” said Samir Khandhar, Vice President of Client Experience, Arbonne International. “Working with Eventus, we leverage a number of technologies, from voice recording and transcription to omnichannel orchestration and analytics, all leaders in their domains. The platform brings all the data together and harmonizes it, but even more importantly, makes it easy to understand and act upon. We no longer wait for manual reports given access to immediate and up-to-date online reporting including dashboards customized for our business and can view at any time information and insights that we’ve not had access to before.”

The IntelligenceHub 3.0 Mega Release is the foundational platform for future enhancements throughout 2020. Future Major Releases will focus on near-to-real-time reporting, additional Data Connectors, embedded analytics, further performance improvements, and the continued evolution of the new user interface, based on user feedback and requests.

The IntelligenceHub team at Eventus worked with clients, vendors and Tableaux on adding features, creating a more intuitive end-user experience, speeding up the compute and processing, adding secure access management capabilities. Tech vendors with pre-integrated connectors grew dramatically since the platform was launched a few years ago and include among others:

• Adobe Analytics
• Amazon Athena
• Amazon Redshift
• Aspect
• Genesys Avaya
• Genesys Engage
• Google Analytics
• Google Sheets
• Hadoop
• Hive
• IEX
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL
• NetSuite
• NICE inContact
• Oracle
• Pega
• Power BI
• Salesforce
• SAP
• SAS
• Snowflake
• Teradata
• Twitter

“We identified this need in the market early and invested to build a unification platform built to scale to support data computing, analytics and real time decision support made possible with automation,” Barrow said. “We were pleasantly surprised by the reaction we received from the market, and knowing we were solving for a problem that will only grow in complexity and size going forward, are continuing to work closely with our clients, our partners and with the CX industry generally to stay ahead of the big data game which will continue to fuel an enormous amount of innovation in the future.”

Originally published on Customer Magazine