Part-1

Primary Task Response: Respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.

The marketing department likes to know patterns about the consumers who call the 1-800 phone bank with questions/problems. They also want your recommendation for the best business intelligence (BI) software to depict this information.

You meet with them to discuss the matter. Using the Internet and suggested readings, discuss your recommendation (with a brief rationale) for a suitable BI software solution to depict this data. Using the Discussion Board, suggest at least 3 quantitative objects that you should keep track about each caller and/or their behavior with respect to the snack food category and indicate if each variable is continuous or discrete (refer to the question and answer resource for this Phase for the definition of continuous and discrete variables).

Post your list on the Discussion Board. Read the other postings, and respond to anyone who listed variables similar to yours by saying which variable you prefer and why.

Part- 2

Primary Task Response regarding items you found to be compelling and enlightening.

To help you with your discussion, please consider the following questions:

What did you learn from your classmate's posting?

What additional questions do you have after reading the posting?

What clarification do you need regarding the posting?

What differences or similarities do you see between your posting and other classmates' postings?

Annalisa Gomez

August 19th, 2015

First off, we need to determine what exactly a business intelligence software is?  "Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions. BI encompasses a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers."  (TechTarget, 2015)

When researching different business intelligence programs out on the market, I have determined that the best suitable program necessary for extracting the information needed is to use the program Sisense.  "Sisense is the only business intelligence software that makes it easy for users to prepare, analyze and visualize complex data. Sisense provides an end-to-end solution for tackling growing data sets from multiple sources, that comes out-of-the-box with the ability to crunch terabytes of data and support thousands of users--all on a single commodity server."  (Capterra, 2015)  The information that the program software gathers will help determine the necessary information to gather when the 800 calls come in.  This will help filter out the unwanted data, and stick to focuses on the data the matters. 

When looking at providing 3 quantitative objects that we should keep track of, this is going to be based on the various departments, and the marketing aspects.  The first object that should be focused on would be the amount of time spent on the phone.  

Customers are calling to get their questions answered, or ask about products.  This should be tracked so we can figure in how much time each customer takes on the other end, as well as on our end.  The second object would be to keep track of actually how many customers purchase the product from the

800 call, or from the business.  This will help to determine if the sales are being made, or if the time is just simply being wasted. 

The third object to focus on would be the attitude of the customers on the other line.  Some customers become very unhappy with the 800 line call, and end up hanging up, or saying inappropriate things to the representative.  This is good to keep track of, so we can manage our conversations more effectively. 

These variables should all be continuous, as customers are all different, and we can not determine who we are going to be dealing with over the phone.  This makes the phone conversations not quite ideal, but we have to always be sure that we handle each situation the same. 

When ruling out the negative outcomes, it will help us to get to the positive