Vendor agnostic solution by Esgyn

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Status Quo
Contact Center Managers are too busy to follow the latest technology trends and
Customer Service Representatives are too busy training for their jobs to track new
technologies and tools. Therefore, most organizations rely on vendors to provide
new and innovative solutions. This works fine as long as there is a vendor agnostic
approach to solve this problem. However, contact center technology stack is
dominated by a dozen vendors who provide Interactive Voice Response (IVR),
Customer Telephony Interface (CTI), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Customer
Relationship Management (CRM), Speech Recognition Systems. Outside of
telephony, there are additional vendors providing ERP systems, Order entry, Web
chat, and several other home grown desktop applications. Unfortunately, most of
these vendors for historic reasons have their data stored in their proprietary and
native built databases. Contact center managers are left to grapple with this data
relating to low level logs, transactions and interactions in distinctly different data
storage servers.
How Big Data can help contact centers?
Interestingly, in other parts of the same Company, where IoT applications are
emerging, there are technology platforms deployed and analytic tools using Big
Data. It’s a big contrast. These big data technologies are derived from the work of
How Big Data can enable Customer
Journey Analytics.
By Rajh Salgam
ESGYN Corporation

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open sourced organization such as Apache technologies are applicable to contact
centers as well.
We can analyze the historical data as well as ingest data in real time from as many
as a dozen key systems that gather day to day customer interactions. Using
accelerators, we can quickly ingest daily in real time to a single place called the
“Customer Data Lake” and truly trace the customer journey and analyze customer
behavior in ways we could not do in earlier days.
There are tools available to do data analysis and provide visualization techniques
that support structure and unstructured data. Therefore, organizations of any size
and budget can gain dramatic insights into customer behavior. All this at a
reasonable price point that can fit a typical contact center budget. Customer
journey analytics can elevate contact centers from a cost center to a profit center
based on some of these revenue generation activities:
 Upsell and Cross sell opportunities
 On time renewals
 Improved fraud detection
 Increase customer loyalty.
 Improve overall customer experience
Several high-volume contact center operators such as: Teleperformance, West are
already incorporating call center analytics that allow them to bring together real-
time and historical data and therefore isolate revenue generating calls, identify
customer sentiment and mood, predict root causes of their dissatisfaction based
on context, and identify what characteristics of a contact lead to costly repeat calls.
Big Data supports structure and unstructured data. Social media listening tools are
enabling contact center managers to actively search words and phrases on Twitter,
Facebook and other social media sites to identify brewing customer complaints.
Where to Begin?
FOCUS ON CUSTOMER JOURNEYS FROM OUTSIDE-IN VIEW
More and more customers and their devices are now integrated and connected to
contact centers via the web and mobile apps, systems and processes must support
customers on these new touchpoints. This digital disruption is making customer

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experience a priority and shifting business focus from traditional systems of record
to superior engagements that could impress a customer.
Best way to tackle this problem is to create a framework and start with identifying
all your customer journeys at a high level. This aggregate view of journeys
effectively summarizes how your customers interact with your company. From this
global perspective, you can see how all the journeys fit together, how they inform
the broader experience, and how they fit into your overall customer journey vision
and strategy. This makes it much easier to see the relative importance of each
journey and how it shapes the customer experience.
Esgyn to the rescue
In the world of contact center technologies, Esgyn is a neutral vendor with an open
sourced Apache Trafodion Data platform. This means it allows ingestion of data
from various contact center sources and supports both structured, semi-structure
and unstructured data. Esgyn brings all the benefits of a Big data platform and
analytical toolsets and applies these tools to the contact center data. It supports
operational applications and business transformations that require sub second
response times at very high levels of scale and concurrency.
Esgyn Framework
To analyze customer interactions, you need to track the customer as they move
from system to system, and join all those transactions together. This is
accomplished by ingesting data into a Data Lake with the help of data accelerators
and EsgynDB. Accelerators enable easy ingestion of data from various contact
center sources and since it is a Hadoop based system there is practically no limit to
the amount of data storage. EsgynDB can support peta bytes of storage. Once
relevant data sources are gathered into this Data Lake, we have reached a level of
storage that analysis and measurement will allow us to figure out what our
customers are trying to do. It will also describe their overall behavior and
preferences. This information will help us drive business outcomes. We can
determine how the activity within this interaction impacts the result. For example,
we can see how far a customer has traversed before they gave up renewal of their
subscriptions to an insurance policy. Next time a customer service agent can see

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this interaction and bring up this option and suggest an up-sell or cross sell option.
Lots of data means lots of potential for insights. Esgyn framework supports several
business use cases and once the contact center managers, customer service
representatives and business owners understand the power of Big data, its ad-hoc
reports and analytics capabilities, they would come up with new ideas to measure
customer behavior and customer satisfaction criteria.
Esgyn supports Big Data solutions in the following ways:
 Ability to leverage open sourced very large Hadoop ecosystem
 Handle mixed workloads – both structured and unstructured data

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 Accelerates offloading and modernization of applications from Oracle,
Teradata and other traditional RDBMS to Hadoop, avoiding expensive
licenses and vendor lock-in of data
 Use of data accelerators to ingest data to The Data Lake.
 Reducing TCO 10X compared to traditional RDBMS platforms with ability to
scale elastically
 No latency and replication of data from operational environments
 Facilitating closed loop analytics with insights from Big Data, historical, and
operational data on the same platform
 Providing convergence of NoSQL with SQL, model flexibility to support a
much wider variety of workloads, while leveraging existing investment in
skills and tools
 Increasing confidence with Esgyn trusted experts supporting their Big Data
initiatives
 Convert data into real-time operational intelligence
In order to gain business insights into your contact center data, you need to see
what it is like to do business with your company from the point of view of a
customer. This requires viewing data at certain levels, For example: at the
Interaction, Engagement and Journey levels. With the information gathered and
analyzed at those levels, you can improve the customer experience and increase
your value to your customer.
It’s important to note that contact center managers have access to all the
needed data already. Therefore, with the new technologies emerging
surrounding Big data analytics, you can use that data to create a contact center
data lake and measure customer engagements. Esgyn platform supports mixed
workloads (structure and unstructured) and vendor agnostic ingestion of data
from various contact center sources. Therefore, the result is quicker and easier
visibility into the customer engagement. With private cloud platform, it is
possible to maintain a contact center data lake without large IT budgets.