The reporting engine that is embedded in Oracle Engagement Cloud, can be used in couple of ways. Most often it is used to analyze the available data to better understand internal processes managed in Engagement Cloud or the customers managed by Engagement Cloud. In a very different way, less well known, the reporting engine can also be used to report on data that is not available in Engagement Cloud e.g. data quality reporting and negative reporting.
Negative Reporting
Negative reporting is my name for the type of reports that indicate missing data. Good examples of these are:
- Contacts that have not been visited the past quarter (no appointments available).
- Customers without closed opportunities last fiscal year (no opportunities available).
- Customers without primary contacts (see example below)
I’ll upload a few examples of such reports and describe some techniques that can be used to make them soon.
Data Quality Reporting
Another usage of reporting on unavailable data could be Data Quality reports. Here the data records are available, but the goal is to identify missing values for some key fields.
You might think that it is as easy as making these fields mandatory, but not always all data is available when users try to enter them into Engagement Cloud. Enforcing such rules by making fields mandatory leads to people not entering data. Another way of dealing with such situations is making these fields not mandatory whereby users can share information as soon as they receive the data, complete or not. Missing data can be highlighted with a data quality report instead.
The example report below shows for the available accounts some of the fields for which urgently values need to be identified like the ‘Postal Code’ and ‘Industry’ field in the example below. These could be essential for account assignment rules or segmentation purposes.
A video explaining on how to upload this report in your instance can be found here
Techniques used in this report
A few less known techniques that were used are:
- The account name is a link to the account detail page allowing users to take immediate action and complete the account profile
- All filters are combined using the OR operator instead of the default AND operator. Accounts need to be shown when one of the fields is missing, not when all fields are missing.
- Conditional formatting was used to highlight missing values but also to hide available values
- For noticing primary contacts, the number of contacts were counted instead of checking if a value for the name was available
Have fun building your own data quality reports!
