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Interaction Management - Knowing Your Customers

by Rob McDougall, Upstream Works - November 8, 2011

Interaction Management – Knowing Your Customers by Rob McDougall, Upstream Works
 



At a glance:

Contact reason / outcome remain the most important elements of any interaction

Applications do not track interaction information

Human analysis of a call is still the only accurate way to capture the information in a call center

Channel independent interaction details are accurate and can anchor your entire customer experience program

Interaction details provide accountability and control

Interaction management will highlight the hidden problems as well as prove the known ones.

Interaction management provides tools to all levels within a company to improve customer experience and agent performance.

Interaction management delivers a powerful set of tools that provide an anchor point for all types of customer or agent centric measurements and ensures that data quality is maintained so that the information is fair, consistent, and accurate. It also improves the accuracy and reduces the total cost of ownership of speech analytics products and text analysis products.

Businesses struggle with capturing those most elusive elements of the customer interaction – the reason and outcome of the contact. While hard to capture, this information remains the most important element of any customer interaction for use in understanding why the customer is contacting the company and how it services its customers. This is vital information when used to allocate budgets that impact customer retention and spend.

General applications and self service systems have not been traditionally designed with interactions in mind, and as a result, contact drivers are often averaged and inferred from incomplete data.

In the contact center, human interpretation remains the only accurate way of understanding what a customer is saying. As a result, technologies used to determine the customer’s intent cannot rely on automatic analysis of a call or email message to accurately decide the intent and outcome of any given interaction. Properly implemented and with ongoing management, human input - either via post analysis of call recordings, or by agent coding of a call - remains the only accurate way of determining this information.

Current analysis techniques such as surveys or random speech analysis can provide a level of insight into customer behaviors, but are subject to statistical and human error, as the detail required to provide a complete view of both the customer and agent experience is lacking. Tracking and management of contact reasons and outcomes provides an accurate record of any interaction, regardless of channel, and eliminates errors by capturing the key elements of one hundred percent of a company’s interactions. This information can be used as an anchor to augment multiple systems and processes across the entire organization.

This information can be analyzed to prove/disprove existing hypotheses, and can also be used to highlight areas for improvement that are not known up front. The hunches and “gut feelings” of experienced managers can now be backed up with hard data and costs that provide real substance to a call center agent’s version of an interaction (or unknown self-service failures). Senior management can then properly focus and prioritize ongoing improvement efforts.

Interaction tracking provides granularity that goes far deeper than existing techniques, and ensures that even hidden problems can be located and corrected. Properly implemented, interaction tracking provides a powerful set of management capabilities for company-wide performance information of every contact center, line of business, and agent, as well as specific agent performance details and customer experience data that improves both agent performance and customer satisfaction.

Delivering on Your Customer’s Expectations - How Is Interaction Management Used?

Interaction management can be used to identify problem calls (such as repeats) as they occur, and agents can be notified or systems modified to proactively improve customer service. Businesses that experience low first call resolution (FCR) rates benefit from quickly identifying which TYPES of calls go unresolved so you can focus your improvement efforts on what is costing you the greatest amount of money!

This performance management capability can be augmented through the use of speech analytics capabilities, as Quality Assurance (QA) personnel can now direct the speech analysis resources at a more specific and targeted call population on an individual agent basis. This focused approach significantly improves the accuracy of the speech analytics engine and allows custom dictionaries to be created and used per call type, further increasing long term accuracy and decreasing the manual labor involved in auditing customer experience.

Interaction management also places every interaction type on an even footing, so that the same information is available about an interaction and its outcome, regardless of the channel that the customer used. With proper design, one can easily develop a genuine 360 degree view of the customer experience across all channels and across all participants that is easy to use and eliminates the ongoing high cost of ownership inherent in manually operated solutions.

Business Interaction Manager

Interaction Management should be designed to collect interactions from across an organization, wherever they occur, in real time, and provide that information to business users from executives to front line customer service staff in an easy to use and role tailored fashion to improve productivity and customer experience.

Rob McDougall is the President and co-founder of Upstream Works Software, providers of business interaction management tools that make every interaction visible, accountable and controllable to businesses that view their customer service organization as a strategic competitive advantage.

Upstream Works delivers business interaction management to improve customer experience; reduce costs and improve retention. Upstream Works provide organizations with visibility, accountability and control over all customer interactions regardless of source.

Rob McDougall can be contacted at rmcdougall@upstreamworks.com; 905.660.0969 x358

 
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