I used to live in Chicago and always enjoyed visiting the trading floors of the commodity exchanges. If you've never seen a commodity exchange in action, you're missing a real treat. Upon the opening bell, a cacophony of shouting begins by the traders as they pursue a price for the commodity in question. It's entertaining in some ways, but in others, it's a reminder of how we need to question our assumptions when it comes to customer contact.

We hear a lot about companies that have "relationships" with their customers. Their advertising and web sites speak about it extensively, but underneath the hood of the contact center a different story often emerges. We've spoken before about how the contact center has only two states, available work or available resources, and the former (also known as queuing) is often the case. Check the logic that many businesses employ with their contact routing rules, and you'll find that the very cacophony present on the floor of a commodity exchange is also present in the contact center in the form of "intelligent" routing, or routing that pursues a commodity outcome – the "Service Level".

For those of you at companies pursuing dimensions of loyalty in the contact center based on retention, Net Promoter Scores, Six Sigma, or other characteristics unique to you, the phrase "Service Level does not equal Wallet Share" will emerge from the shouting. Why use a commodity approach for efficiency's sake in pursuing a higher order result? Or as a friend of mine would say, "Why do the wrong thing so right?"

The contact center industry has been built on several dated assumptions that we will discuss in upcoming posts. As customer contact becomes a strategic differentiator, its important that we all let go of these assumptions rather than hold on to the past.