IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
$10
per month per user
Mattersight Behavioral Analytics (discontinued)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Mattersight Behavioral Analytics, alternately known as Nexidia Analytics after Mattersight's acquisitions by NICE Systems, was a tool used to identity behavioral trends occurring in customer service, and help organizations to identify coaching opportunities. The product is no longer available for sale.
Our first and most basic scenario was to automatize the creation and publication/sharing of business reports that used to be created manually by employees throughout our organization. Using Cognos for that first use case worked well. The advanced analytics functionalities we used on the aggregated data were also as expected. However, the user interface is not always intuitive, and there is a steep learning curve, so I would recommend Cognos only to large organizations where there is a need for the most advanced functionalities (AI analysis/prediction).
IF it is cruicial in your organization to have the internal conversations recorded, this is NOT the product for you. If you do not need that, the savings in time by the software analyzing calls in a way where you can search for specific incidents is fantastic. The training on personality types and how to work with each one is also a great tool for any organization. I can say if it weren't for the rep to rep recording piece, I would give this product a 9.
I love how the systems analyzes the callers so QA's are able to help guide the agent on how to better handle that style on the next call.
I love how the system runs reports for us. We no longer have to manually enter and produce reports, which is a "bear" of a project.
Behavioral Analytics helps me keep track of not only my team's progress, but the progress of team leads and supervisors doing coaching and QA monitors.
Sometimes there might be performance issues when dealing with large and complex data.
Although IBM provides full documentation but sometimes it's difficult to find answers to questions and connect with their customer support.
It relies on external tools for data cleaning, transformation and also for some integration tasks. It can also improve on providing wider range of data sources for integration.
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
Mattersight Behavioral Analytics has always shown great support to our organization. They are always willing to help and find new ways to improve our customer experience. The team we have with Mattersight has become part of our everyday work lives in which we value their business
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
We have not had any issues with BA's availability. It is always up and running. The only issues we run into is staff not logging in everyday because they already have so many systems up as it is. Other than users, BA is great and is always there.
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
The pages load very quickly. The reports are nice. I wish I could understand a little more about what is on the reports and what all the sections mean, but once you remove the information that is not needed the reports are easy to filter through and read. I do wish that we would get Outlook notification for comments and monitors.
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
Mattersight gives great support. Every time I reach out to them I get a response within the hour, even if it is just to tell me that they will check into the issue. The staff always stays in contact and even after changes have been made or answers given they follow back up with you and make sure everything is going smoothly. The Mattersight team never makes you feel like you are burden and it feels that with every contact they grow a little more as well.
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
This was a great class. We learned so much about the program and our team through the on-site training provided by Mattersight. The trainers were very professional and playful at the same time. They really brought the training to life. The trainers were great at answering all questions and making sure we could train our staff in the same professional, yet fun, manner.
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
I love the roundtable meetings. This is a great way to come together with other companies that are also using the product. It is great to hear about how others train and hear some of their struggles and success stories, so we are able to make the best BA training out there.
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
It was really nice to start slowly and train leadership and then slowly start implanting of BA to the staff. This helped with coaching and helped with new staff as they hit the floor. We found that this helped the staff relate and share stories to help with team dynamic. Great system.
In the past Management had used Excel and Workiva capabilities to create the reporting dashboards that were being used to make decisions. Since switching to IBM Cognos Analytics the Company has been much more efficient and decision making has been streamlined. IBM Cognos Analytics was chosen due to its reputation and data visualization capabilities and neither have been wrong.
The version of Calabrio that we were using strictly recorded calls - It did not offer nearly as many options as what is available in Mattersight. Mattersight allowed us to implement a consistent approach to customer interactions. In addition, searching for calls, and specific points within the calls, is much more efficient with Mattersight.
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
We believe we improved our customer service with our employees working with our customers and adapting to their styles.
We improved our manager's efficiency selecting calls to monitor and conducting impactful coaching sessions.
We had challenges determining a true ROI as we found it difficult/impossible to fully isolate Mattersight's impact to our bottom line. It was hard to attribute our lead conversion applications and revenue directly to Mattersight with several other external factors in play.
