Comparison and trend within RightNow CX

Advanced Analytics: Comparison and Trend

By Mark Kehoe © Kehoe Consulting

Save Harbour Statement This document may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-‐looking. While these forward-‐looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-‐looking statements, which reflect my opinions only as of the date of this document. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout this document, we will attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions.

Pre-‐requisites In order to get the most out of the document you will have had some training in the Oracle | RightNow CX product around analytics and administration. You’ll also be familiar with editing reports and might have had a go at writing rules. The document has some complicated analytics but the report you need is available to import. This document covers some new functionality on the system, and anyone who has been around the product for a few years is going to be pleased that a new table and a new piece of functionality has been exposed. The CX version used for this document is Nov ’13. This document has been written an informal style, to impart experience rather than as a formal training document. If you would like to receive training on analytics, administration or any aspect of Oracle | RightNow CX contact me at [email protected] or on 0487 335311 or via LinkedIn.

Introduction There are two useful features within analytics that I’ve found useful in mature contact centres. Often within contact centres there are busy periods within the year or month and sometimes we need to figure out when things will pick up or calm down. Equally, as the usage of the system ramps up you might need to calculate when more staff would be needed. The comparison and trend values enable you to look into the past or look into the future. They work well with date ranges and a pre-‐requisite in getting the best out of them both is to have added relative dates and date grouping into the report.



Comparison Comparison values enable you to look into the past. We can to compare two periods side by side and using the date group function this can be pretty flexible. Usually the two values would be something like open incidents for this month compared to open incidents for the same month last year. Once you get the hang of it you can do some really clever things such as adding the values to the graph for a quick visual indicator but for now I’ll keep it to the basics. I’ve made a copy of the incident backlog report and will use this for my example. My contact centre has a busy period over Christmas and based on the figures from last year I’d like to know when I could expect an influx of emails. I’m going to work on the backlog to figure out when I need to hire more staff. 1. Click on the Max. Backlogged column. From the design tab click on Insert Column and select Comparison Value. If its all worked well then you should see the a new column added to your report called Comparison Value (Max. Backlogged). Now the column has been added the value can be changed so that I can make it function as I need. For some inexplicable reason, head back to the home tab and on the right-‐hand side click Comparison. You should see the following: With our two columns we can now start playing around with the values. In my example I want to see what was going on this time last year. Comparison allows for relative values so I can put -‐1 Year for this time last year. With the date group on the report set to a week I can now see this week last year: This image gives you the idea although it looks a bit odd to me as it’s in the middle of the report, but hopefully you get the idea.

Figure 1: Inserting a comparison value into a report

Figure 2: Configuring a comparison value



Next comes the exciting part of seeing the comparison values appear in the report. As the report runs, we will be prompted to enter an offset against the date range. It will look something like the image shown below. In this example I’m interested in weekly figures:

The report starts making sense when we see the output. In my report we will now have a new column containing this years compared to last year’s figures:

Figure 3: Changing the comparison offset



If required you can change the headings to something more meaningful but I’ve left mine as the defaults.

Trending Trending allows us to see where figures are going. We can also project forward based on information from the past and that is how I typically like to use trending. To create a trend select the column we wish to project with. Again, I’ve selected the Max. Backlogged column. From the Design tab select Insert Column and choose Trend Value: With the column in place the design tab now has an extra option. For the life of me I have no idea why comparison doesn’t to the same but hey, I’m not in product development. As you can see from the image, we have both forecast units and an option to perform a forecast. Note that the further forward you forecast, the less accurate the values can become. In the image shown to the right I’ve forecast three units forward, which for my report is three weeks. It relies on a bit of common sense and an understanding of the results to know just how far you can forecast forward. The



more history you have, the further you can project. Now that we have the forecast in place lets take a look to see what the result would be:

As we can see, the figures from my test site indicate that I’m going to have a problem in a few weeks time after Christmas when my backlog gets out of hand! Once the values are in place you might want to include a couple of additional tasks. The forward projected values against the other fields will obviously have zeros and you might want to do something with NVL to either blank them out or put in some text to explain what is going on. Again, the dates will be blank so you might want to do some more NVL work.

Comparison and trend within RightNow CX

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