Yesterday, I met with a client and returned to the airport for the trip home. I was happy to see at the self-service kiosk that an earlier flight was available for a small change fee. Happy to get home four hours sooner, I paid the fee and proceeded to rebook the flight. Amazingly, the kiosk told me the new flight was overbooked and offered me a $150 voucher to get on my original flight. Not wanting to miss either, I accepted the offer.

I see this same logical conflict many times in the contact centers I visit. One routing strategy employed has a completely opposite outcome of another that a second group has just enabled. Self service teams strive for containment in the Voice Portal, while CRM groups devise strategies to get caller to opt out.

The best contact centers I have ever visited literally start with the mission statement of the company, the current business strategy, and seek to make those intentions occur within, across, and among every interaction. While an increasing conversation topic in many of our visits, many call centers continue to employ a "wrong things right" approach. Those that do optimize around the right behaviors have a significant corporate advantage.