Untangling the complexities of contact centre change through Interaction Intelligence.
“Every other day I hear about contact centre analytics capabilities delivering rich insights without any thought about what it means and to some extent deliberately confusing the market as to what type of analytics exists to address a specific business need.”
Seeing dark clouds forming on the horizon heading your direction gives one insight into the weather changing soon. Referencing data sources that have been richly analysed by meteorologists using various diagnostic and predictive techniques tells us a whole lot more about those clouds and the initial insights you had. In fact, it enables you with the right actions if you know it is either
- a hailstorm -> hide
- a drizzle -> grab an umbrella, or
- nothing at all -> carry on about.
The other day I had a call with the Head of Support Services for the Collections Contact Centre of a well-known clothing retailer. They are currently using interaction intelligence to negotiate higher commitments from their customers to settle their accounts. She explained how, through interaction intelligence, it showed that the agents were not really selling their customers on setting up direct debit orders to help service their accounts faster. Up until that point, they did not have the intelligence to show this and never realised it. This in turn prompted them to solicit further feedback from the agents. The root cause of the issue pointed to be the instability of the system where direct debit orders were set up. The agents just did not trust the system anymore. With a few changes, it was fixed. This retailer was able to rectify a deep unknown cause of a larger effect. Going forward this had a significant pendulum swing effect on the commitment of debit orders from customers. Happy customers, happy client.
Every other day I hear about contact centre analytics capabilities delivering rich insights without any thought about what it means and to some extent deliberately confusing the market as to what type of analytics exists to address a specific business need.
So many historical events would testify that the real deal for the understanding of cause and effect is in the detail. Looking at the story of the Titanic it was only later discovered why it sank. It was designed to be unsinkable. Whatever went wrong was merely the effect of a much deeper cause not discovered during the initial design and trial phases. Only in running the ship on its first voyage, and with the unthinkable that happened, would the real design defects unfortunately show up.
Surely, we all design contact centres to stay afloat even with heavy weather, but in undergoing heavy weather and other circumstances are we sufficiently geared to uncover the deeper details and the real effects (or rather defects)?
Most contact centres are primarily designed to report on traditional hygiene factors. Just knowing what happened is a starting point, but is it enough to be able to synchronise such a complex environment of people, processes, and technologies?
In running contact centers there are so many sources of data telling you what happened, but for most of the daily grind contact centre management teams find it hard to detail with certainty why it happened. Was this decrease in debit order commitments an agent-attributed incident or was it a new technical limitation, or a bug we were not aware of?
Luckily for most contact center management teams the quasi-meteorologists are not really needed to get a deeper, simpler grasp of the complexities at work contributing or detracting from the contact centre’s success. Surely some days may feel like whirlwinds yet having an ongoing deeper learning capability that can simplify the complexities is really where several future-oriented contact centers have matured their ability to act effectively and efficiently.
The difference between insights and interaction intelligence is then where the latter ability empowers all stakeholders within the organization to take the right action. It is about investing effort in the right things, in the right order, at the right time on something that was deeply hidden and not known before.
In the words of another customer using interaction intelligence within their contact centre operations daily: We already know where the problems are {what happened}. Interaction intelligence facilitates a deeper understanding of the problems and helps greatly in finding solutions to complex problems.
Stop the sinking!!!
Don’t get caught in the bad weather facing the storm blindly without rich Interaction Intelligence that can help you steer clear of elements hiding deep below. Reach out & discover how you can future-proof your business and your contact centre with interaction intelligence.
