The customer support department is only as good as its ability to respond. It works in real time and must handle issues that may have a root cause that lies almost anywhere within the business.

As the conduit for the flow of customer information this can generate some of the most useful data a company could ever hope to have at its disposal. It tells you what your customers think about your product, your services and just how you deliver them.

On a day to day basis customer support is all about relating to the needs of the individual. However, when you stand back a little and look at the larger picture, it is possible to smooth out the peaks and troughs of separate customers and to see the wider trends and patterns of behaviour.

Swiss telecoms provider, Cablecom was seeing customer defections running at 20% each year and even though this was not untypical in their industry, this was understandably putting a massive strain on the business. It was already known that most customers left somewhere around 13 months into their contract but by analysing the customer support records, it became obvious that the problems were in fact surfacing at around the 9 month point. As a result of this analysis the company started to offer special deals to selected customers after 7 months and since then customer churn has fallen to just 5%.

Analysing your customer support data by using the latest Business Intelligence from companies like Tableau Software, will allow you to uncover the underlying patterns and trends that exist in your business. With large volumes of data this is work that would be difficult and very time consuming to do in a spreadsheet or traditional database. You can also compare the data from your Customer Support system alongside Customer Satisfaction data and Sales Orders for the same period – it might make interesting reading!

If keeping up with the daily call stats is important for you, it would be well worth considering the use of a dashboard to distribute information on performance to the whole team. By taking information out of you database you can regularly feedback results to keep everyone motivated and on track. Business Intelligence lets you decide what the information should look like and it’s incredibly flexible with what it can achieve. It allows you to combine data from different sources together on the same page; so stats from the telephone system right next to details out of the CRM system. It’s really is very useful.

Whatever analysis you have in mind, Business Intelligence software can make the job faster, more interactive and will help you to produce self-explanatory visualizations of exactly what is going on with your customers.