Organisations frequently want to understand 'a customer's journey' including the number they dialled, the selections they made in an IVR, the agent they were routed to first and where their call was transferred to subsequently. However, although the information necessary to do this may be stored within (or generated by) each system that handles a call, it may not be possible to tell which parts of this information relate to the same call.

QPC's Professional Services team have many years of experience with systems that use CTI information and working with contact centre system configuration teams so that 'Contact Identities' (Con IDs) can be successfully passed between systems as they handle calls. As the QPC MIG collects data from the systems it is connected to it also collects these 'Contact Identities' so that events and data from different systems, which relate to the same call, can be easily understood.

Obtaining a contact management system and IVR as a 'hosted' solution (i.e. where equipment is owned and managed by a service provider but leased to a client) is becoming increasingly popular as organisations wish to benefit from greater business agility (the ability to reduce or increase contact handling capacity easily) reduced capital expenditure, fast deployment, greater reliability and easier maintenance.

The 'Contact Identity' principle used for tracking calls can also be extended to office work items (such as application form processing) if a unique identifier (such as an application reference number) is present. This enables organisations to easily monitor the total time necessary to complete whole processes (the processing time for an application form for example) no matter how many individual tasks are used within that process. Seeing if the same Contact Identity appears many times also helps businesses to locate process problems, such as the need for rework, caused by agent skill gaps.