What is Your Time Worth?

tech trends

What is Your Time Worth?

Big Data Has The Answer

February 11, 2015
by Allison Ryder

Most organizations don’t have Big Data; they have some data, and it’s often imperfect. Given this constraint, there are still ways to extract meaning from the data that is collected in the workplace and improve business processes and efficiencies.

Last Wednesday, the Continuum Boston studio welcomed Adam Ferrari, CTO of the data-driven start-up Crisply, to host a lunchtime lecture. Ferrari, whose background includes working as a founder of search solution Endeca and a VP at Oracle, is focused on helping organizations answer a pressing question plaguing their sales and support staff: Where does our time go?

If Time is Money, the Fortune’s in the Data.

Crisply, based in downtown Boston, uses machine learning and predictive algorithms to compute the human effort behind a company’s customers. The software draws on user activity from common Software as a Service (SaaS) business systems (think: customer support programs, phone call details, and even companies’ email applications.) And why?

Crisply’s aim is to help their clients better manage sales and technical support teams by arming them with fact-based data about the human effort required to engage and retain satisfied customers. The Crisply service syncs with Salesforce.com, a robust customer relationship management (CRM) application used by many companies to manage sales relationships and pipelines, as well as customer support tickets. Crisply’s software aggregates and analyzes data from the CRM to quantify human effort and uncover which client accounts get the most attention. The follow-up question, of course, is whether such attention is warranted from an ROI perspective. As an example: Using Crisply’s data, an organization can evaluate industry performance by measuring the total time invested in particular prospects in relation to the overall value of the client engagement.

Immediate benefits include improving resource allocation, measuring the effectiveness of sales and support representatives, and discovering optimal territories in which to work.

Big Data is No Big Brother

Robotics aside, Crisply is highly sensitive to perspectives that characterize digital behavior tracking as reminiscent of Big Brother. The software only draws on activity that aligns with the metadata it has pulled from CRM applications. In other words, Crisply is careful not to track employees’ personal applications.

Right now, Ferrari defines Crisply as an MVP. The company has a handful of truly engaged partner organizations, each of whom is providing feedback so that the Crisply team can continue to refine and improve the offering, as they work toward a listing on the Salesforce AppExchange.

When asked what personally motivated him to join Crisply, Ferrari responded, “What I think is interesting to quantify are these behind-the-scenes, back-office, enterprise problems…there’s a ton of untapped value there.”

Listen to our full podcast interview with Adam Ferrari:

Embedded content: https://soundcloud.com/futuremadereal/podcast-003-adam-ferrari
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