Baseball's spring training began a few weeks ago with teams reporting to camps all over Florida and Arizona.

One of my favorite pastimes during this season is to watch the averages of the players – especially those who are on the edge of making a major league roster. Because they’re generated in such a short period of time, amazing statistics can be deceiving. This makes it difficult for managers to assess the validity of these performances over the long term and determine which players make the final cut.

Contact centers also evaluate performance using tools like Average Speed of Answer to measure the efficacy of customer service delivered. Much like spring training, any metric based on an average can be misleading in the short term. Since contact centers run operational analyses on short intervals – typically 15-30 minutes – averages can downplay customer experience outliers. What’s more, Average Speed of Answer only accounts for the front end of the overall customer experience when in reality, it’s the middle and back ends of the customer interaction that typically generate customer dissatisfaction.

Over the past ten years, much progress has been made in attempting to define more precise ways of determining how effective interactions are. First Call Resolution has become mainstream and is a more accurate tool because it includes a customer experience element. In other words, it poses a good question: Does the organization bring to bear all the information and processes necessary to satisfy the customer on the first try?

With any customer interaction, it’s critical to look beyond the averages to get a better sense of how the experience can be improved. The growing investment in analytics and business intelligence is a positive sign that companies are serious about customer satisfaction. More importantly, it’s a sign that they’re exploring the emotional, experiential side of customer interaction and interested in creating powerful, long-lasting connections.