Analytics predicted an Obama win, and it’s a Big Data lesson for all customer experience and contact center professionals.
Before the votes were cast, New York Times blogger Nate Silver predicted, with 90%+ confidence, that Obama would win the election. He did this while billions of dollars were spent on old methods of people calling me, people knocking on my door, and outbound IVRs calling me all day long. Seriously, I was beginning to think all of that money was spent on me. I am so glad this is over; I can get some productive time back. Whew!
So I am sure you are asking, how did Nate do it? BIG DATA, that’s how. Nate has been using his 538 model for several years now, with miraculous success and accuracy. It’s the same kind of math wizardry used to make Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Bean famous in Moneyball (read: Moneyball inspiration for contact center leaders).
While millions were wasted on polling me to death, Nate was smarter and did not have to work as hard. Huh, smarter and not harder…there is a novel idea. This novel idea can also be exploited by customer experience professionals and contact center leaders around the world. The contact center industry wastes millions of dollars quality monitoring (wasteful polling) and customer experience professionals waste millions of dollars over surveying (wasteful polling) to try to predict the customer experience.
If you are a contact center leader you may say, we are trying to audit contact center agent performance. Okay, but why are you doing that? To predict the customer experience or audit compliance, correct? You can get the answers by working smarter and not harder; instead of doing even more quality monitoring.
Think Big Data
We all can be smart like Nate and predict the customer experience by leveraging customer experience Big Data. In order to leverage Big Data, you must re-think (consult with experts) your current methodologies for interpreting the customer experience. There are newer methods of data analysis that are emerging that greatly improve the ability to interpret and predict the customer experience.
Nate’s success can extend far beyond the world of politics. Big Data analysis is poised to be a fundamental component for unlocking growth and competitive advantages in the marketplace. But there will be losers in this ever-growing,data-driven world. Which will you be?
You can try to glamorize your quality monitoring and surveying efforts all you want, but when the numbers come in, who is going to win? You can argue all you want, but Big Data won this election, and Nate proved it.
