The document discusses using analytics to better understand customer interactions and optimize customer management. It describes mapping interactions based on their complexity and impact to route them to the most appropriate channel or agent. Analyzing data from multiple sources about interactions can provide insights to define optimal strategies for different types of contacts. Outsourcing certain interactions, like using a business process outsourcing partner, can improve efficiency when the analytics show it is suitable.

1. White Paper the role of analytics in Customer management
EVERY CUSTOMER-CENTRIC ORGANIZATION SEES A WIDE VARIETY OF
INTERACTIONS in its customer support operations – from the routine to the relationship-
changing. Support staff manage everything from routine interactions to crucial, ‘tipping-point’
conversations that shape the future of an account. In addressing this diverse challenge,
successful organizations understand that the foundation of the customer experience lies in
meeting expectations – not policies, scripts, and rules. Offering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ service model
is guaranteed only to underperform many customers’ expectations and overperform others,
often at a significant cost to the organization. Not only do expectations vary from customer to
customer, but from one interaction to the next for a single customer. A customer who is today
in a hurry to resolve an issue may evaluate an interaction by the speed with which it is handled.
Tomorrow that same customer, with a less urgent request, may place more value on an agent’s
listening skills, professionalism, or diligence.
While every customer interaction is unique – just
as every customer is unique – interactions can be
Insourced Agent Speech/ analyzed along two convenient, logical dimensions:
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complexity and impact. Complexity, just as the
name implies, refers to the degree to which an
interaction can fork into many potential service
areas based on the customer’s needs. An account
Process Optimization balance request has very low complexity; a technical
support call has very high complexity. Customers
tend to value human interaction, and the ability to
tap particular areas of expertise, as the complexity
IMpACT
IVR/WEB
Self-Service of an interaction increases. They tend to value speed
and convenience of access as the complexity of an
COMplExITY interaction decreases.
Impact measures the importance of an interaction
to the customer’s long-term loyalty and retention. All well-executed interactions make a positive
impact; all poorly-executed interactions make a negative impact. What differs is the scale of
the impact. When a customer has difficulty getting an account balance, or making a routine
change to their account, the impact is negative – but small. When a customer has a larger-scale
problem – an incorrect bill becomes a chore to correct, or a support issue is routed too many
times without adequate resolution – the impact is considerable. When positive impacts add
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2. White Paper the role of analytics in Customer management
up, customer loyalty increases, and it becomes more difficult for competitors to acquire them.
When negative impacts add up, the opposite happens. As a result, in order to achieve peak
performance in managing customer contacts, interactions should be grouped into zones by
impact and complexity.
The first logical grouping is low-complexity, low-impact interactions. These are account
inquiries, address changes, and other basic exchanges of information that prioritize speed and
convenience over personal touch. Most of these interactions are handled either via IVR or Web
self-service, and for good reason: doing so both pleases the customer, in terms of ease of
access, and drives the cost to serve down dramatically.
At the upper end of the spectrum, another logical grouping encompasses interactions that
exhibit high complexity, high impact, or both. These interactions hold significant implications for
a company’s customer satisfaction. Handled correctly, they’re a source of enduring customer
loyalty and increased long-term value. Mishandled, they’re a source of dissatisfaction, churn, and
expensive retention activity. That’s why so many organizations either keep these interactions in-
house, or outsource them only to a specialized Business process outsourcing (BPO) partner.
It’s often a surprise to organizations just beginning to study the economics of their customer
management system that neither of these interaction ‘zones’ is usually a significant source
of expense. The low-complexity/low-impact zone generally sees enormous numbers of
customer interactions, but each one is handled at very low cost to the organization. Meanwhile,
interactions in the high-complexity/high-impact zone are costly, but are small enough in number
that the overall cost impact is minimal. The mathematics of both interaction types – high-volume/
low-cost and low-volume/high-cost – make them easy to manage and budget for.
Apart from these two zones, however, the answer is not so simple. Between them lies a
large volume of customer interactions that do not fit the definition of either of the others. The
complexity of these interactions, and their potential impact on organizational performance, are
too high to leave in the realm of self-service; they generally require support staff involvement.
But neither do these recurring customer interactions require specialized in-house expertise. The
primary challenge of this realm of customer interactions is the economics of servicing them. The
volume of interactions times the cost to serve each one usually makes this the most expensive
type of customer touchpoint for many firms. Add in the need to consider alternative interaction
channels – such as chat, SMS, and email – and designing and deploying solutions for this layer
becomes increasingly complex. That’s why most organizations see this as an area of margin
opportunity – a process optimization layer that’s ripe for workflow efficiency improvement.
The decision as to whether to outsource a particular type of interaction is generally made easier
by mapping its position within these zones. But defining the perimeters between them is more
difficult than it might initially appear. While it’s often simple to group together easily-defined
interactions, separating an account balance request from an upselling opportunity, or a routine
service conversation from a ‘tipping point,’ is a delicate process. Unfortunately, too many firms
try to do so without really ‘seeing’ their interaction stream – without understanding, from a
quantitative perspective, how customers interact with the company, what their motivations and
needs are, and how each such interaction can be optimized for peak efficiency and performance.
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3. White Paper the role of analytics in Customer management
The complexity and impact of a customer interaction cannot be determined by viewing simple
ContaCt teleteCh: operational reports. Quantifying the nature of a customer interaction requires insight into the
solutions@teletech.com customer’s reason for calling, the representative’s actions, the call outcome and the customer’s
1.800.TELETECH or
reactions. Typically this data is extracted from disparate sources and needs to be linked
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together in order to provide actionable analysis. Useful sources include switch data, customer
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records, H/R data, voice segments from recorded calls, customer surveys, and more. While
each of these on their own provide visibility into the customer interaction (and overall customer
experience), the real value comes from linking them together into one centralized database that
can be analyzed holistically.
Interaction analytics blends existing satisfaction research with operational analytics to create a
coordinated plan for measuring and improving the customer experience. An effective program
should combine customer satisfaction surveys, a leading-edge analytics toolset, and speech
analytics to provide a data-driven approach to evaluating an organization’s performance-
topotential in delivering the best possible customer experience.
Ultimately, the ability to construct and analyze a 360 degree view of the customer experience
enables you to define an optimal treatment strategy for each unique type of customer interaction.
Where a transaction can be optimized through a business partner, the knowledge you’ve
gained about the success criteria for each interaction will allow you to design stronger service
agreements with business process outsources.
TeleTech offers clients both the analytic tools and the demonstrated expertise to bring customer
interaction management to peak efficiency. TeleTech’s Professional Services team is equipped
with the right solutions for your business needs – making it possible to map your customer
interactions by complexity and impact, and then route those interactions to precisely the right
channel, associate, and geographic location to achieve peak performance. At TeleTech, we’ve
built decades of experience in interaction analysis into the software tools, operating processes,
and workflow systems we deploy for our clients – and it shows in their engagement results.
We’ve helped companies around the world optimize their customer interaction management
systems and maximize the value of their customer accounts.
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