Operational BI Key to Best-in-Class Performance

If consumers survive our latest economic swing, they will benefit for a while from an almost universal recognition by businesses of the importance of their continued happiness. And to ensure they are keeping their customers happier than the competition which has come to the same realization, companies are increasingly relying on benchmarking.

However, unlike the benchmarking done among competitors within an industry, such as that being conducted within the TM Forum’s Business Benchmarking Practice, service providers may find themselves measured against a broader set of metrics.

Telecom service providers aren’t the only ones cost cutting. According to Aberdeen Group, in a recent study called Operational Business Intelligence: What You Need to Know About Improving Your Customer-Facing Performance, 82 percent of companies it recently surveyed are cutting budgets. However, in order to achieve best-in-class status, top performing companies are turning to what Aberdeen Group calls operational business intelligence, which is “the application of business intelligence capabilities within operational areas of the business that typically involve information or data that changes frequently, often multiple times during the business day.” It is more real time in nature than traditional business intelligence.

Aberdeen found that top performing companies excelled in customer operations, sales operations and service operations performance at a rate five to six times higher than other companies.

These top performing companies were 84 percent more likely to use operational forecasting tools as part of their customer facing processes and 38 percent more likely to automatically track their performance. A large number, 79 percent, could also access the data within an hour of an event or transaction.

Top performers also have been at this business intelligence thing for a while. Forty-eight percent of best-in-class companies have been working with BI for at least two years. They are using it to address performance in finance, accounting, customer service and relations, IT and sales operations. They also are going beyond the analysis of historical data and trending and applying BI to more immediate operational needs. In fact, speed and accuracy improvements for making business decisions are now the top priority of these companies versus the search for operational efficiencies that is was before.

Best-in-class performers put five to seven times the emphasis on weighted average year-over-year improvements in customer service, sales operations and service operations composite scores for performance.

Although even top performers continue to struggle to reduce their time for making decisions, they have greatly improved their ability to access near real-time operational data. This is due in part to their ability to limit the amount of data they have stored and need to manage. Best-in-class companies on average manage approximately 167 Gigabytes of data, whereas laggards manage 309 Gigabytes.

Among the steps Aberdeen says laggards must take to improve is to seek opportunities for data collection and reporting automation, target information delivery down to as granular a level as possible and align operational KPIs (key performance indicators) with department and corporate goals.

Leaders, on the other hand, should use their data to continue searching for operational performance improvements and develop a business activity monitoring capability. Only 11 percent have done so.