I decided to clean out my drawer of obsolete electronics over the weekend. It’s my equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer, only filled with has-been technology devices. Combing through tangled cables to find my ancient Palm V, my old Nokia phone and my original Ipod made me almost nostalgic. Each of these devices was once a tool I relied on to stay organized, keep in touch, or amuse myself on long business flights. But over time, new gizmos came out and these got tossed in the drawer. Today I carry a smart phone that combines the best features of them all.
My electronics drawer is a pretty good metaphor for what happens to business technology in general. Once upon a time, all the technology in the drawer was state of the art. Now much of it seems almost quaint. The cycle is never ending. So-called next generation, cutting-edge solutions must innovate to keep their leadership position, while the stakes are constantly ratcheted up by market demand for more robust, user-friendly solutions. The trend is clear: innovate today, or be gone tomorrow.
Interaction analytics is no different. A few years ago, call center agents dialed their own calls, and supervisors managed their teams by listening in. Doing simple recording and post call review was once considered innovative. Whatever limited insights supervisors gained were applied solely to improving call center processes.
Fast forward to today: call centers are contact centers, and the literal “voice of the customer” is delivered via phone, in texts, by chat, or social media sites. Today’s interaction analytics solutions can provide customer feedback that was never available before. Best of breed solutions surpass even that – pinpointing the root causes of customer issues, and providing strategic insight that impacts the entire enterprise.
Just like my smart phone has reset my expectations on how I interact with my world, best of breed interaction analytics solutions are raising the bar for what companies can expect to learn from their contact centers.
Today’s companies aren’t satisfied learning WHAT happened to a customer relationship. They want to know WHY. And who better to answer such questions than the customers themselves? Today’s best interaction analytics solutions can deliver the answers – in the customer’s own words – and share them with enterprise analytics and modeling programs to empower strategic responses.
Savvy organizations are coming to realize that the interaction analytics process is not something you buy. It’s something you do. Investigating the customer experience, discovering customer attitudes and interpreting what it all means to your organization is an ongoing practice. Using the right tools – those that continually evolve to leverage technological advances – can give you a strategic advantage.
When choosing the right tool to release the customer intelligence in your interactions, you don’t want settle for yesterday’s technology. Not all analytics tools can deliver best of breed capabilities, and it’s vital to recognize the capabilities that set true leaders apart.
Check the blog next week when my colleague Larry Skowronek delves deeper into this topic of best of breed solutions. He’ll be discussing a new innovation in customer interaction analytics technology that combines the best advantages of two approaches to deliver an authentic next generation solution.
