In my last entry I talked about conflicting goals in the contact center, the kind that come about when a common set of higher order business outcomes are not pursued.

First the new consumerism tipped the scales in favor of the contact initiator. Then came the emergence of conflicting organization goals. Now the third leg of the challenge to customer satisfaction – and this one’s from the “oldie but goodie” category – rears its head again. In case you didn’t guess it, it has to do with relevant and contextual data.

Most organizations produce mountains of data. Just look at the success of storage vendors and SANS in the last 10 years. Much of this data is produced in line with organizational silos, and often stays put. Even if it’s aggregated to a common data mart, much of it is not made actionable “in the moment” or in context to the full customer relationship.

For example, many years ago a colleague of mine developed an application called “JOLT” (Just One Last Thing). You know that thought that crosses your mind just as you hang up from a call or dismiss the resource you’re chatting with, requiring you to re-engage with the organization by initiating another contact into the business? How nice would it be to be reconnected immediately with the last resource you were dealing with, or at least be given the opportunity to wait for that individual, rather then re-authenticate and reintroduce yourself to new individual? This is tricky stuff, but as I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike the other day making a travel reservation and realized I had given an incorrect return date, it sure made a lot of sense to me. I have seen many dollars spent on trying to make this standard strategy, but customer experience is not about the averages as we have said – it’s about the outliers.

As a hint of things to come, we’ll soon be talking about a mongoose and rodent analogy from one of our colleague’s international trips. Stay tuned – I promise it’s relevant.