Microsoft Power BI lets you build dashboards and interactive reports from your existing data. It can connect to pretty much any data source and also comes with a bunch of built in connectors to services like Google Analytics, Facebook, Quickbooks Online etc.
We’ve been working on a range of Power BI connectors for our accommodation provider clients, providing them with updating business intelligence dashboards to monitor their Xero Accounting, NewBook booking data, Office 365 activity, MailChimp, Facebook, and now their phone calls.
Since phone numbers are unique, this data can be matched against existing customer data in Power BI, so our clients can find out which customers are calling, how often, and for how long.
This is a sample dashboard I put together this morning using the phone data we’re importing for a Queensland tourist park. The data comes from FoneDynamics, an online call tracking and analytics service based in Australia. 
Clicking on dashboard elements opens the interactive Power BI reports. From here, you can drill down into the data and see how the elements relate to one another. In this example, we’ve selected ‘No’ under the Repeat callers chart. This gives us some pretty detailed information about the first time callers into the tourist park. This could include how long they spent on the phone, how many first time callers went unanswered, how long it took to answer these calls etc.
Since we’re using Power BI, we can open and interact with these reports on any device. Here’s the same dashboard running on an iPhone, where you can open the charts and set alerts on important data. For example, get notified when the missed calls for the month exceeds a certain number.
The tech stuff
For this solution, we had to pull the data from a collection of CSV files stored on an FTP site. Power BI will connect to CSV files out of the box, though not via FTP and it won’t join multiple CSVs into a single dataset.
I wrote a console app last night to connect to the FTP site, pick up each CSV, collect the phone records from it and upload them into an Azure Storage Table.
Here’s the data in an Azure Storage Table.
Once the data for the previous day’s phone records is uploaded into Azure Table Storage, I set up an Azure Web Job to run the process once a day.
Now that we have a regular, up to date source of phone data, we can connect to it using Power BI Desktop app. We can use this app to create our reports before publishing them to Power BI Online.
If you’d like to learn more about setting up Business Intelligence dashboards for your data, send an email with what you have in mind and we might be able to make it happen.
