Siebel has released a new version of its Business Analytics platform, featuring enhanced role-based user interfaces and a new predictive analytics tool designed to offer customer-facing staff more relevant information.

Siebel Business Analytics 7.8 is enabled for web services, and also continues the trend for business intelligence (BI) vendors to improve usability. “You can’t provide a call centre agent with Olap [online analytical processing] tools,” said Larry Barbetta, senior vice-president for business analytics at Siebel. “It has to be intuitive to use.”

A Real Time Decisions predictive analytics tool can give staff, such as call centre agents, faster access to customer information, while pre-built processes ensure they deliver appropriate offers in response to the behaviour of customers, said Siebel.

Bruce Cleveland, senior vice-president of products at Siebel, said the release was the first part of its new Customer Adaptive Solutions roadmap, which will tighten integration between the firm’s BI, customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management technologies.

Michael Parks, chief information officer at Virgin Mobile in the US, said the ability to more tightly integrate customer data with CRM applications would help his firm to craft mobile top-up offers suitable for specific groups of customers.