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Reporting and analytics

MM: Let’s go to the sixth phase of your customer lifecycle model.

ES: The sixth phase is reporting and analytics. Tying all of this stuff together. Being able to see what plans or services are coming in. How many USD did I do in transactions through my payment processor? Or how many Euros? How many Rubles? How many Yen?

We’re getting financial information out of there and we’re getting marketing information out of the system. Where are these leads coming from? What promo codes are they entering in? What plans are they buying? What’s most effective? What are my usage statistics?

We had one game launched where it was a free-to-play, but they would pay for items. Some customers were spending $150 a day buying items in the game. Getting that data out.

Then some of the stuff that’s on our roadmap that we don’t offer today, but we have it in beta right now. Looking at metadata around the service.

For instance, I was talking about the efficiency of our tool to solve problems quickly. One of the things we do is to track views and clicks of CSRs.

Imagine you’re a software provider and you have a call center in India and a call center in the Philippines. The call center in India might be to solve a problem. Let’s say the problem is service upgrade. They want to buy more seats.

If you see that the call center in India is solving that problem in 10 views and 3 clicks, whereas the call center in the Philippines is doing it in 2 views and 2 clicks, you might want to do some training for the call center in India to increase their efficiency.

MM: What else along those lines do you see in terms of emerging as applications for this customer lifecycle management?

ES: One other piece at the end that we’re integrating with is, we’re integrating with the accounting system. We’re taking the data and putting it into SAP, in one case. NetSuite in another case. Oracle Financials in another case.

It’s the ability to interchange financial data seamlessly. I think there’s kind of a gap in the SOA world. There are well known protocols for us to exchange information on the PCP-IP stack that we can use for financial information. But it would be cool if there were a standardized way to send general ledger information and inventory information to accounting systems.

There’ve been a couple of attempts, but its not very well used or adopted or very well thought out.