The Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, DC. Photo: Getty Images
After months of anticipation, small businesses now have a glimpse of what a revamped Internal Revenue Service could look like as the agency begins to transition to a digital-first approach. The IRS on Thursday released its $80-billion plan to begin the agency’s modernization efforts, which will introduce new digital tools, streamline tax processes, and offer more assistance to taxpayers.
Some of the improvements will be gradually introduced over the next 10 years, though the IRS has highlighted that it will focus on getting rid of its paper backlog in the first five years. This is a key issue for the agency: The IRS kicked off 2022 with an unprocessed paper backlog of 11.5 million returns, almost a third of which were original business returns.
The earmarked funds stem from the Inflation Reduction Act and will help the IRS transact with taxpayers more efficiently. As part of that focus on efficiency, the agency has committed to quickly fix taxpayer issues as they emerge — which is pretty noteworthy, says former IRS commissioner Mark Everson.
“This objective is good news for all taxpayers, but particularly for small businesses, who want to be treated fairly by the IRS but don’t want unresolved tax issues hanging over them like a sword of Damocles,” says Everson, who is now the vice chairman at Alliantgroup, a Houston-based tax consulting firm. “It will take time for the service to roll out the contemplated improvements, but we have already seen better phone operations in the current filing season.”
Interacting with the agency should get much easier over the next decade as the plan is implemented. But there are three particular improvements that will make a big difference for small-business owners — and some of them will be rolled out as soon as this year.
1. The path to digital
Thanks to the agency’s digitization effort, entrepreneurs will be able to file all of their tax documents and respond to notices online. For example, a new tool will allow business owners to respond to as many as nine notices online. Normally, if an entrepreneur received a notice for document verification, they’d need to respond via mail.
Businesses will now be able to file their Form 1099s online as well. These measures will help the IRS chip away at its paper backlog as the agency pivots to digital. That’s not all. The agency is already undertaking efforts to simplify tax forms such as Forms 940, 941, and 944, and it will also work to make those forms mobile-friendly.
2. Tax credit assistance
It’s about to get a lot easier for small-business owners to claim tax credits. The IRS plans to introduce a “credits and deductions” search tab on the website to help entrepreneurs claim what’s theirs. To put taxpayers on notice, the agency will introduce personalized alerts and partner with nonprofits and other local entities to expand outreach efforts. This marks the first time the agency will offer this type of assistance to business owners.
3. More online service tools
The IRS will introduce new online service tools as soon as this year to ease the tax process for entrepreneurs. In 2023, the agency is launching online business accounts, which will be expanded as the IRS improves its capabilities. By 2024 it will be possible for entrepreneurs to track their refunds and schedule payments. Accessing data and other records, such as business tax transcripts, will also be an option.
An added bonus: Business owners will be able to amend processing errors when they file, which can help expedite refunds. While all of these changes will take time to implement, the good news is that some efforts, such as digital scanning, are already underway. On March 8, the IRS shared that it had scanned more than 120,000 paper Form 940s since the start of the year, which the agency says is a twenty-fold uptick compared to 2022 in full. And it only hopes to improve from there — which business owners will surely welcome.
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Cloud computing helps businesses by delivering on-demand computing power and resources swiftly, in many instances minimizing or eliminating the need to buy, install, and maintain new and expensive physical hardware and infrastructure. But at the same time, organizations still need to keep their most valuable data and IT systems within their own on-premises data centers due to key considerations such as security, privacy, safety, and meeting regulatory mandates.
That is why enterprises have adopted a hybrid cloud architecture across their IT operations that provides in many use cases greater software-as-a-service application flexibility, increased cost savings, more efficient processing, and storage capabilities, as well as broader options when it comes to governance and privacy. We see hybrid cloud as integral in the accelerating adoption of data warehouse platforms that function as a containerized application for developing highly performant, self-service data warehouses in the cloud which can be scaled dynamically and upgraded independently.
With hybrid cloud, in alignment with their multi-cloud implementations, organizations can continue to have their own private, on-premises IT infrastructure for their most mission critical data and systems, while also bringing in public cloud resources to advance their hybrid data and data architecture modernization strategies.
The hybrid cloud trend runs in parallel with broader multi-cloud adoption as it allows organizations to use more than one public cloud service, with each public cloud service typically supporting different applications. However, hybrid cloud challenges must be addressed to realize hybrid cloud’s benefits.
Key Hybrid Cloud Challenges and Trends
Organizations are increasingly compelled to distribute and spread data throughout their data centers, private clouds, and public clouds to meet the expanding demands of collecting, storing, analyzing, and managing massive amounts of fast-growing data volumes usually in real-time. Plus, with more data now created and originating outside data centers, they are finding overall data administration more complex and creating new cost containment, performance, and integration challenges.
In addition, legacy data warehouses frequently lack granular control over resources allocated to jobs and tasks as well as the ability to support multiple versions of tools and engines. Accordingly, we see that users, groups, and workloads are required to use the same versions of query engines and tools. Such interdependency muddles operations and the upgrade process and can suppress innovation, especially across hybrid cloud environments.
Why Hybrid Cloud? Attaining More Hybrid Data Optimization and Flexibility
One key benefit of hybrid cloud is that it can provide more technological and process freedom for businesses. Instead of being limited by existing on-premises data center capabilities, using hybrid cloud allows organizations to quickly respond to their unique business needs by accessing additional compute resources through public cloud platforms, creating more data workload optimization and management flexibility.
The value of this option is that public cloud services can be available at the push of a button and configured automatically according to customer data workload demands and policies, including elastic up/down scaling capabilities. This kind of flexibility and measurable cost structure is especially critical today, as intricate macroeconomic conditions continue to challenge businesses around the world.
By having a hybrid cloud strategy, growing businesses can move quickly on their topmost compute needs rather than having to wait until costly infrastructure is budgeted, planned, and eventually installed. Opting for hybrid cloud can mean optimizing compute resources in areas such as streamlined upgrade processes and operations, accelerating time to market and innovation, as well as keeping operational costs manageable.
Hybrid Cloud Helps Address Data Storage Complexities
Hybrid cloud also enables organizations to make better business decisions by giving them a more flexible storage framework. Today, organizations typically store data in individual repositories maintained for each data center, creating a complex and fragmented data storage system that leads to bottlenecks and inefficient data operations. This is why we see organizations rapidly adopting the data lakehouse across their hybrid cloud architecture.
The data lakehouse blurs the line between structured and unstructured data, enabling organizations to store all types of raw data in one location, while still having a storage layer on top to provide transactional views of data and structured data management and analytics when needed. And by transitioning to hybrid cloud, enterprises can attain advantages through being able to bring together and pool all those isolated repositories together to create a unified data lakehouse as well as distributed data warehouse implementation.
This hybrid data approach allows access to more insights and information through streamlined access and administration of their overall data. While we are seeing versions of this from a number of data platform providers such as AWS, IBM, Oracle, Teradata, and Snowflake, a robust example of what I am speaking about is the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).
CDP provides its users with a unified platform that offers portable, interoperable data analytics essential to optimizing the entire data lifecycle and more efficient management of distributed data. This applies to any data running across the organization’s hybrid cloud including public cloud, on premises, and edge environments. CDP’s common security, governance, metadata, replication, and automation provided by Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX) also enables the platform to operate as an integrated system.
Different vendors each have slightly different approaches to offering the tools and technology required for enterprise data leaders. It’s important for enterprises to carefully select the right platform to meet its data and analytics needs, but the benefits of a hybrid data approach should be a key consideration.
Flexibly pooling is another feature critical to a hybrid data strategy. This feature pools critical business data together, regardless of where it is physically stored, and is another major benefit of the hybrid cloud approach to break down data silos within organizations and deliver unified data management. Improved data management delivered by hybrid cloud is a huge boon for enterprises that are seeking to modernize their aging business operations.
Hybrid Cloud Helps Organizations Improve Business Outcomes
Immense flexibility is one of the greatest strengths of hybrid cloud. Growing businesses, including small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises, can be thwarted when their internal IT operations are unable to meet their hybrid data requirements. But by being able to flexibly access power, performance, storage, and networking resources, organizations can react more quickly to growth opportunities and improve business outcomes.
Another benefit of hybrid cloud is that it is not an either-or decision. For many companies, moving their operations to the cloud can be worrisome due to factors such as regulatory and legal concerns. With hybrid cloud, that either-or decision is less onerous since it can allow organizations to use hybrid cloud according to their technical and business priorities.
Another part of the hybrid cloud value proposition is that going the hybrid cloud route means that organizations can avoid vendor lock in. Organizations opting to embrace a hybrid cloud strategy can gain more flexibility in balancing and optimizing their on-premises and public cloud data resources. Workloads and data can be distributed across public cloud platforms, allowing for more choice based on both IT operational and business priorities.
Other Hybrid Cloud Benefits for 2023 and Beyond
The popularity of hybrid cloud is continuing to gain steam in post-pandemic 2023 as organizations are looking at a wide range of strategies, including hybrid cloud, to boost their IT operations and modernize their data platforms to improve competitiveness and better respond to uncertainties such as supply chain issues and macroeconomic pressures.
By adopting hybrid cloud, organizations can be better protected against downtime and data loss related to data center disruptions as well as from non-data center sources. With a hybrid cloud approach, organizations can improve the load-balancing and distribution of their critical operations during troubleshooting cycles.
As cloud computing continues to evolve and deliver more data management demands hybrid cloud will also continue its own unique growth by meeting data workload optimization goals across on-premise, public cloud, and edge environments, allowing organizations to avoid the fragmentation and limitations of a single environment approach and potentially debilitating trade-offs across any of their data realms.
By bringing both essential services together for customers, hybrid cloud is solidly positioned to deliver the flexibility, cost savings, security, and on-demand compute power needed by today’s IT organizations.
Many people chase achievement, assuming it will lead to well-being. They should reverse that order of operations.
Without going too far out on a limb, I believe almost everyone would like two things from their jobs and careers: success and happiness. They want to do relatively well financially, receive fair recognition for their accomplishments, enjoy their work as much as one can, and become happier as a person as a result.
These are reasonable goals, but they can be a lot to ask—so many people, especially ambitious, hard-working people, simplify them in a logical way: They first seek success and then assume that success will lead to happiness. But this reasoning is flawed. Chasing success has costs that can end up lowering happiness, as many a desiccated, lonely workaholic can tell you.
This is not to say that you have to choose between success and happiness. You can obtain both. But you have to reverse the order of operations: Instead of trying first to get success and hoping it leads to happiness, start by working on your happiness, which will enhance your success.
Success and happiness are generally positively correlated, as many workforce studies have shown. For example, companies in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list saw an average 14 percent stock-price increase every year from 1998 to 2005, compared with 6 percent for the overall market.
And as Gallup data have shown, among business units with employee-engagement levels (that is, employees who reported feeling heard, respected, and intellectually stimulated, and who had a best friend at work) in the 99th percentile, 73 percent perform above the company average, and 78 percent perform above the industry average.
From this correlation, many assume causation—from success to happiness. During my years as an executive, I found that people strongly believe that pay increases—especially big ones—will have a large and long-lasting effect on their job satisfaction. The data tell us a different story, however: Large wage increases have only a small and transitory effect on well-being.
Researchers in 2017 tracked the pay and job satisfaction (measured on a 0–10 scale) of nearly 35,000 German workers over several years. The study found that the anticipation of a 100 percent pay bump increases job satisfaction by about a quarter of one digit in the year before the raise. The raise increases that satisfaction bump by another fifth of a digit. By the fourth year, the increase has fallen to less than a fifth in total.
In other words, say your job satisfaction is a six out of 10—not bad, but could be better. If your boss doubles your pay, it will get you to about 6.5, and then it will fall back to about 6.2. Maybe this isn’t the best strategy to help you love your job. And that doesn’t even take into account the cost that increased job success can have on overall life satisfaction. In 2016, psychologists measured career success by asking 990 college-educated full-time professionals to compare their career achievements to others’.
They found that people generally enjoyed the money and status that relative success produced. However, success did not lead to total contentment: It indirectly chipped away at life satisfaction, likely via time constraints, stress, and impoverished social relationships.
Much stronger and more positive results emerge, however, when researchers reverse the order, looking not at success’s effects on happiness, but happiness’s effect on success. Scholars in 2005 surveyed hundreds of studies—including experiments to establish causality—and concluded that happiness leads to success in many realms of life, including marriage, friendship, health, income, and work performance.
One explanation might be that happiness makes us more attractive, so we are rewarded by others. Alternatively, happiness might make us more productive. Novel experimental research suggests both are true. For example, scholars in 2021 studied Chinese livestream web broadcasters, for whom voluntary viewer tips are the primary source of income.
They found that when they showed more positive emotion, their tips immediately increased, suggesting that people who appear happy are rewarded in the market. Another experiment involved British test subjects engaging in a time-limited arithmetic task and math test. The researchers found that subjects who were shown a clip of a comedy movie beforehand were about 12 percent more productive on the task and test than those who weren’t, and that the funnier they found the clip, the more productive they were.
Whether you are an employee or employer, it is a better investment to increase happiness at work and in life, rather than simply trying to increase measures of success.
The first thing to remember is that happiness requires balance. No matter how much you enjoy your work, overwork will become an obstruction to well-being. Researchers in 2020 studying 414 Iranian bank employees found that workaholic behavior (such as perfectionism and work addiction) strongly predicted workplace incivility (such as hostility, privacy invasion, exclusionary behavior, and gossiping).
Workaholic behaviors also degraded the quality of family life (as measured in disagreement with statements such as “My involvement in work provides me with a sense of success; this, in turn, helps me to be a better person in my family”).
You should guard against workaholism in yourself and help your friends and family who suffer from it. But just as important, employers should not encourage overwork—which will likely require effort and attention on their part, as research shows that executives generally underestimate employees’ struggles with well-being.
Once work quantity is under control, happiness at work requires a sense of meaning and purpose. I have written in this column that the two key aspects of meaningful work are earned success and service to others. Earned success implies a sense of accomplishment and recognition for a job well done, while service to others requires knowledge of the real people who benefit from your work.
Lots of research shows the importance of these work aspects. For example, Gallup has revealed that people who serve their communities and receive recognition for it self-report significantly less stress and worry in their lives than those who do not (either because they don’t serve their communities or do not receive recognition).
Meanwhile, the most meaningful jobs tend to be those that are the most service-oriented. According to 2016 research by the Pew Research Center, proportionally, more workers in nonprofit and government sectors—i.e., work that is generally service-oriented—said their jobs give them a sense of identity than did private-sector workers.
It’s harder to find the link to service in some professions than others, but it can usually be done. Years ago, I was working with a team of academic researchers creating policies for improved bank regulation. One scholar who was particularly passionate about the project told me he always remembered that his work mattered, because poor people need access to reasonably priced credit, and that requires less bureaucratic red tape.
Even if you struggle to see who benefits, because the people you touch with your work are very far away or your work touches them indirectly, try looking a little closer—maybe even in the next cubicle. You can always enjoy the effects of service by helping your colleagues, and there is clear evidence that supporting co-workers can help ease negative emotions at work.
Ultimately, although success and happiness are linked, the alchemy is mostly one-way—and not in the way that most people think. Working on your success to get happier is inefficient at best, and may blow up in your face and lead you to unhappiness. But working on your happiness gives you the best chance at getting both.
Even if all of this makes sense to you, you may still find yourself falling into old habits of seeking happiness via worldly success at work. Don’t feel too bad—I do it too, even as a specialist in this field. Whenever I notice my hours creeping up to workaholic levels and my dreams of happiness revolving around some accomplishment, I like to reread a short story published in 1922 by Franz Kafka called “A Hunger Artist.”
It features a man who starves himself in a cage for a living as a traveling carnival act. He is obsessed with his work and, as a perfectionist, seeks what he calls “flawless fasting.” The hunger artist is proud of his success, although he is always gloomy, and, Kafka writes, “if a good-natured man who felt sorry for him ever wanted to explain to him that his sadness probably came from his fasting … the hunger artist responded with an outburst of rage.”
Over time, the hunger artist’s act falls out of public favor. In desperation to resuscitate his flagging career, he tries fasting longer than he ever has before. Instead, he is utterly ignored, and sits alone in his cage. In the end, the hunger artist starves himself to death. In a twist of absurdism—
we might even call it Kafkaesque—the protagonist admits just before expiring that the only reason he had engaged in his art was because he could not find any food to his liking. I’m not that bad, of course, but I have a bit of a hunger artist in me, and you might too. Here’s my advice: You won’t find happiness by forgoing happiness. Don’t starve yourself. Your odds of success will increase if you eat.
“happiness”. Wolfram Alpha. Archived from the original on 18 July 2011. Retrieved 24 February 2011.Anand, P (2016). Happiness Explained: What Human Flourishing is and What We Can Do to Promote It. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780198735458.[page needed]
“How Universal is Happiness?” Ruut Veenhoven, Chapter 11 in Ed Diener, John F. Helliwell & Daniel Kahneman (Eds.) International Differences in Well-Being, 2010, Oxford University Press, New York, ISBN978-0199732739Veenhoven, R. “Does Happiness Differ Across Cultures?”(PDF). Archived(PDF) from the original on 9 August 2017. Retrieved 10 October 2018.
http://www.happinessandwellbeing.org/project-team/Archived 12 October 2018 at the Wayback Machine); “I would suggest that when we talk about happiness, we are actually referring, much of the time, to a complex emotional phenomenon. Call it emotional well-being. Happiness as emotional well-being concerns your emotions and moods, more broadly your emotional condition as a whole.
The How of Happiness, Lyubomirsky, 2007Kashdan, Todd B.; Biswas-Diener, Robert; King, Laura A. (October 2008). “Reconsidering happiness: the costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia”. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 3 (4): 219–233. doi:10.1080/17439760802303044. S2CID17056199.“Landes Xavier | Stockholm School of Economics in Riga”. Archived from the original on 30 August 2019. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
If the results hold up, the upshot appears to be that income is pretty strongly related to life satisfaction, but weakly related to emotional well-being, at least above a certain threshold.” Section 3.3, Happiness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness/#HedVerEmoStaArchived 2018-06-11 at the Wayback Machine
World Happiness Report 2012 (Report). p. 11. Archived from the original on 18 July 2016. How does happiness come into this classification? For better or worse, it enters in three ways. It is sometimes used as a current emotional report – “How happy are you now?,” sometimes as a remembered emotion, as in “How happy were you yesterday?,”Chernoff, Naina N. (6 May 2002). “Memory Vs. Experience: Happiness is Relative”. Observer. Association for Psychological Science. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
Inge, W.R. (1926). Lay Thoughts of a Dean. Creative Media Partners, LLC. ISBN978-1379053095. Looking back, I think I can separate the years when I was happy and those when I was unhappy. But perhaps at the time I should have judged differently.Helliwell, John; et al. World Happiness Report 2015 (Report). Some have argued that it is misleading to use ‘happiness’ as a generic term to cover subjective well-being more generally.
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An electric warehouse forklift uses Plug Power's fuel cell system. Plug Power
Plug Power, which supplies fuel cells for electric forklifts used by Amazon and other companies, said the retail giant plans to buy thousands of tons of carbon-free “green” hydrogen from it per year in a deal that also includes an option to acquire a stake in the company worth up to $2.1 billion.
Under the agreement Plug will begin providing Amazon with 10,950 tons of liquified hydrogen per year that will be used to fuel transportation and building operations, starting in 2025. It’s the biggest such deal to date for the Latham, New York-based company, which expects to hit an annual revenue target of $3 billion by 2025 as a result.
“It’s a huge deal … it’s a huge deal for the (hydrogen) industry,” Andy Marsh, Plug Power’s CEO, tells Forbes. Along with fuel for forklifts, Amazon may also use hydrogen to power a range of vehicles used in delivery operations, including long-haul trucks, he said. “It’s the first, much larger-scale hydrogen ecosystem for Amazon where they’re really thinking about all the applications they can use hydrogen in.”
Hydrogen is expected to become a major source of electric power, along with batteries, for both vehicle propulsion, as well as an option for stationary power generation and storage. While most industrial hydrogen that’s used for oil refining, food processing and the chemical industry is currently made by extracting the element from natural gas, that method emits carbon dioxide.
Companies including Plug, Cummins, Nikola, Nel Hydrogen and many others are shifting to a new technique using electrolyzers that can make a “green” form of the fuel from electricity–ideally from renewable sources–and water that has no climate-harming carbon emissions.
Hydrogen also gets a boost from the new Inflation Reduction Act signed into law this month by President Joe Biden, which includes a production tax credit for green hydrogen worth $3 per kilogram of carbon-free fuel.
Plug, which will benefit from that credit, has sold Amazon fuel cells for its warehouse forklifts since 2016, and estimates it’s provided more than 15,000 units to date. The company aims to expand its hydrogen fuel supply business and is adding production capacity to do that. Plug has said it will be able to make 500 tons of green hydrogen per day at facilities in North America by 2025, up from a goal of 70 tons per day by the end of this year.
By 2028, it hopes to produce 1,000 tons of hydrogen per day. Amazon said the deal is part of efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all its operations by 2040. It believes “scaling the supply and demand for green hydrogen, such as through this agreement with Plug Power, will play a key role in helping us achieve our goals,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of sustainability at Amazon, said in a statement.
As part of the deal, Plug granted Amazon a warrant to acquire up to 16 million shares, with an exercise price of $22.98 for the first 9 million. It vests in full after Amazon spends $2.1 billion on Plug products over the seven-year term of the deal.Shares of Plug Power rose 9% to close at $30 in Nasdaq trading on Thursday.
Recently, financial services and telecommunication providers have experienced significant challenges. They encountered digitally savvy competitors, increased expectations for online customer service (pre-and post-pandemic), and higher case volumes of agitated customers. Meanwhile, remote work affected the productivity of service staff, daily operations, and more. But they aren’t the only service-driven industries reacting to disruption and increasing consumer expectations.
Quality of service can mean the difference between keeping or losing customers, so organizations need to examine how, where, and when they engage with them. A single customer view looking at experiences across service, marketing, and commerce is essential. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with disparate data and disconnected applications that obfuscate that view. That means service fulfillment and relevant technologies must step up to help organizations deliver more consistent, seamless, swift, and personalized experiences for customers who agree “good enough” service won’t suffice.
Transforming your service strategy and operations with data leads to better business results. A data-driven service approach is making a positive difference in the financial services and telecommunications industries and can also help your business achieve these benefits:
1. Enhanced, personalized customer experiences across all channels
2. More productive, empowered service agents influencing success
3. Increased efficiency, prioritization, and automation throughout service operations
4. Reduced IT complexity and costs leading to higher margins
The Risks Of Poor Customer Experience
If customers experience less-than-stellar service, there’s a greater risk of switching to competitors. In fact, 80% of consumers will switch after just one poor experience1—driving businesses to compete on more than price and choice. There are other serious downstream effects: increased customer churn, diminished reputation and trust, stalled growth, and attrition of employees, agents, or leadership.
Business circumstances can change instantly. Customer interactions can portend issues with serious implications (i.e., costly compliance or regulatory fines or sharp declines in satisfaction scores). Each problem puts a company at greater risk for stolen market share you can’t afford to lose.
With a commitment to data-driven and digitally driven service operations—from the contact center to the field—you are better positioned with customers and can reduce or eliminate most risks. In digital environments, engagement barriers are often reduced or eliminated allowing customers to gain more service access, and brands to gain increased opportunities for better customer service delivery.
How To Unlock Data And Transform Customer Service End-To-End
Transitioning to data-driven service starts with leaders’ commitment to building and maintaining a cohesive data strategy spanning people, processes, and technologies that support business resilience and future growth. The next step is unifying data sources with intuitive and flexible analytics to achieve a single source of truth.
When you infuse analytics across service operations (and the business), agents and leaders gain that invaluable, complete customer view to impact personal, swift, effective service, and transform the call center from a siloed operation to an agile changemaker that affects marketing, sales, product development, and more. Tangible results include:
For financial services…
· Up to 31% increase in customer satisfaction
· Up to 29% increase in agent and user productivity
· Up to 27% reduction in customer retention
For telecommunications…
· 37% faster time to resolution
· 55% decrease in cost to serve
· 53% increase in average revenue per user (ARPU)
Let’s examine the four benefits of data-driven service and relevant resources as you focus on protecting the bottom line.
1. Enhanced, personalized customer experiences across channels
Customers are precious business assets, so carefully nurturing and protecting each relationship is key. Regardless of how they engage, each expects a personal interaction resulting in swift resolution. Maybe there’s a service issue and they made several attempts to get help. Or maybe there’s an opportunity to upsell their existing products and services. Unfortunately, the siloed data systems sitting inside and outside of your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) system make it more complicated to deliver best-in-class service.
Data, analytics, and AI are foundational to digital enterprises where functional insights drive positive business outcomes. According to McKinsey, many companies using data-driven practices report above-market growth of +15%2—especially in the B2B market, but the same practices apply to B2C enterprises.
Charles Schwab relies on data to answer financial planning questions, improve customer experiences, drive operational leverage, and more. Shifting from a static to dynamic customer view with Tableau helps their call centers, branches, and headquarters staff see data errors or inconsistencies and discover insights to make product adjustments so clients’ money goes further and their engagement stays positive.
“Now those receiving and handling the customer calls are making their own impact, helping maintain higher customer satisfaction levels. They’re transitioning into a role where they’re looking at the data behind customer engagement.” Senior Data Analyst, Charles Schwab
2. More productive, empowered service agents influencing success
When agents shift from system to system trying to access information and manually perform processes, customers feel and react to the effects of disengaged communication, fragmented experiences, and long wait times. They want meaningful interaction from service staff seeing a complete view of customer and business data to influence smarter responses and actions.
As noted in the “State of Service” report from Salesforce Research, 91% of customers say they’ll make another purchase if the service is good1. With intuitive analytics, your agents can access and catalog data, then analyze it for valuable and trusted insights, and also share it with others to act in customers’ best interests. Access to pre-built dashboards like Tableau’s Call Center Accelerator gives your service team deeper views of overall service levels and helps all business leaders analyze agent performance—good and bad. Feel confident knowing data is at their fingertips to make better, quicker decisions in all customer interactions.
Thousands of customers depend on internet, cable, and phone providers to deliver reliable service. When customers use these services, ample data is created and can be collected. Verizon analyzes it with Tableau to ensure customers are satisfied, problems get handled, and departments like marketing or call centers can see patterns and behaviors to improve service. A Center for Excellence is critical as they perform analyses, support data management, and deliver insights to stakeholders for improved decision-making.
“Insights from dashboards help us optimize call center operations to reduce multiple customer calls. Monitoring these timely dashboards shows us that as the resolution rate and satisfaction index of customers go up, volumes for calls and dispatches—key cost drivers—go down. Senior Manager of Data Analytics, Verizon
3. Increased efficiency and prioritization of more complex cases throughout service operations
Before 2020, contact centers could manage traditional customer demand and service spikes. But these spikes are usually short-lived and predictable versus the unforeseen changes and new expectations growing from digital engagement and the pandemic. With a smaller workforce also handling call center cases due to downsizing, data-driven technologies that support efficiency, prioritization, and automation are necessary to the experience equation—particularly for large, dispersed enterprises.
Today, interactive analytics with built-in AI help your staff confidently understand all customer data and service performance in their workflows, which helps them be more predictive and proactive when choosing how to act on behalf of customers. AI-powered analytics also fuel speed to insights for better contact routing, improved call center and field staff capacity, and automaton of more cumbersome, time-intensive processes.
For example, a single dashboard displaying call center KPIs in Tableau can help management see and know where to optimize operations—from streamlining or eliminating multisystem dependencies to automating low-value processes that hamper productivity and communication. This frees up service staff to help more customers and address more complex cases.
Inconsistent, fragmented data at Telstra made pipeline, revenue forecasting, and quicker delivery of new technologies to customers difficult. But the combination of Sales Cloud and CRM Analytics transformed how they deliver customers new solutions and measure business value. Sales Cloud provides a complete view of enterprise customers and enables sales to forecast and collaborate for more meaningful interactions. CRM Analytics also helps line of business managers and service staff stay focused on how to achieve their business KPIs.
4. Reduced IT complexity and costs leading to higher margins
By using a self-service solution like Tableau, gain highly configurable, manageable, and customizable analytics to increase performance clarity and create faster, more accurate business decisions or predictions. IT is no longer a bottleneck, and service operations staff, business analysts, and executives have a clear understanding with direct visibility of the customer journey and what factors extend or detract from success.
This can translate to better planning with staffing, forecasting, and seasonality to reduce service costs and maintain high-quality, year-round customer engagement.
Growing through mergers and acquisitions, strategic data became vital to business operations for JPMC. IT made data easily accessible for business teams through Tableau so domain experts could keep up with industry changes, regulations, and risks, and optimize for customer success. For example, marketing operations analyze the customer journey to inform promotional materials and products like the mobile application and branch managers examine retail data to implement better banking experiences.
“We put Tableau on our robust customer data sets…to quickly ask questions like ‘How many customers have a Freedom and a checking account, and use the mobile wallet.’ ” Director of Analytics, JPMorgan Chase
Embrace Data-First Service And Win With Customers
In the competitive, highly regulated environment facing financial services, telecommunications, and other industries, leading with data-first service creates a winning position. Grow and protect valued customer relationships with the help of a world-leading analytics solution like Tableau combined with Salesforce, the leading CRM, to connect with customers in more meaningful ways across every channel—every time.
Visit Tableau’s data-driven solution pages for Financial Services and Telecommunications to explore helpful resources – an eBook, customer stories, quick-to-implement tools, and more.
Try the Tableau Call Center Accelerator and hundreds of pre-built dashboards to see your data visualized for many use cases while tracking and improving KPIs for service operations, customer experience, and other areas.
2. Boringer, Jöchen, Alexander Dierks, Isabel Huber, and Dennis Spill. “Insights to Impact: Creating and Sustaining Data-Driven Commercial Growth. McKinsey & Company. January 18, 2022.
Allison (Ally) Witherspoon Johnston, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing, Tableau. Allison leads the Tableau product marketing team and has worked at Salesforce
The Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, DC. Photo: Getty Images
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