How was it for you?

There is little logical about customer relationships. It can be easily overlooked when booking at a sales return but customers are people and people are complex. “Fire and ice within me fight” wrote the poet A.E Housman in describing how his emotional and the rational ‘sides’ were battling for control of his actions some 100 years ago. But today, in the age of science and pseudo-science business all too often assumes that customer actions are rational and can be predicted and programmed. People feel just as much as they think and, while it may be relatively easy on a one-off basis to plant an idea in a customer’s mind and get the response of a sale, winning loyalty to get repeat sales depends on how they experience the event – it’s the difference between a one night stand and a relationship.

Most of us have felt let down by at some time in our lives and can recognise the disappointment we experience as a result. How deep this disappointment goes and how it is expressed depends on how much we feel we’ve invested in the relationship and how much we feel we’ve received in return.

In our purchasing relationships bad experiences encountered in low value or occasional purchases can be shrugged off with the simple resolution of ‘never using them again’, but when it comes to buying high value items or things that we really do need we invest those decisions with our emotions. We buy into the product, we buy into the brand, we buy into the company and when we’ve made that commitment the sense of betrayal when things go wrong goes far deeper. Rather than quietly putting it down to experience we tell the world of our disappointment.

Studies by US customer experience specialists TARP found that only 4% of customers take the trouble to complain – 96% simply defect. If that is not bad enough, the average disappointed customer tells five others of their disaffection and 20% tell 20. The 20:20 effect doing disproportionate damaging to brand reputation.

Datapoint Katalyst enables enterprises to track customer emotion and its relationship to the effort that customers have to make in transacting with you within its customer experience model, ensuring that enterprises have the opportunity to address any issues that impact negatively on their relationship with you.

It’s good for business to be in touch with your customers emotions.

The Datapoint formula for business success

 

So what does Datapoint mean by ‘contact optimisation’?

Everyone in the contact centre world will be very familiar with the concept of contact centre optimisation – the continuous quest to make the best use of the resources and technologies available to it.

While maximising resources and achieving efficiencies are essential in pure cost terms, they are only of limited value if your contact centre isn’t fully integrated into your business and strategy.

Most often contact centres operate as things apart needed to communicate with customers but independent and separated by business processes and technology disconnects from the wider enterprise. As a result, the valuable market intelligence gained daily through customer interactions remains trapped within the contact centre, incapable of contributing to the success of the business.

Contact optimisation describes the approach that Datapoint applies to structure its clients’ contact centre activities to make the most of the technology and asset investments made in them plus leverage the customer interaction intelligence and business insight they obtain.

Is your contact centre a necessary evil or a strategic asset?

Located at the nexus of interaction between the enterprise and its customers the contact centre should be one of an organisation’s most valuable strategic assets. All too often though its potential goes unappreciated, the contact centre being divorced in geography, operation and technology from the core of the enterprise.

The pace and complexity with which contact centres continue to develop compound these ‘disconnects’: the flow of the real time market intelligence and business insight gained in the course of customer interactions remaining trapped within contact centre systems, difficult to access, correlate and interpret, and often months old by the time it can be passed on to the wider business. Stripped of its immediate relevance and fragmented in its delivery this once dynamic intelligence plays little part in shaping the actions and course of the enterprise and is used instead simply to tune operations in the contact centre itself.

Now Datapoint has made these disconnects factors of the past by creating a means for their clients to release the potential in their contact centres and put them and the intelligence they deliver at the active heart of their businesses.

Named in recognition of its transformative potential, Katalyst is a directed technology platform that bridges gaps between contact centre systems and the contact centre and the wider enterprise. Provided as a managed service, with Datapoint consultants shaping the Katalyst solution suite to the specific technology environment and then guiding its application, Katalyst enables enterprises the opportunity to map contact centre investments in people, processes and technologies to performance outcomes and align them with business objectives as never before.

Better Datapoint Katalyst harnesses next generation analytics to provide market intelligence and business process insight throughout the organisation in real time.

Datapoint Katalyst – perfecting contact centre performance, empowering the enterprise.

Just what CIOs are looking for – Datapoint Katalyst

Late in 2010 Gartner interviewed 2,000 CIOs worldwide to learn what their business and technology priorities would be in 2011. Their business priorities they identified were:

1. Increasing enterprise growth
2. Attracting and retaining new customers
3. Reducing enterprise costs
4. Creating new products and services – service innovation
5. Improving business processes
6. Implementing and updating business applications
7. Improving technical infrastructure
8. Improving enterprise efficiency
9. Improving operations
10. Improving business continuity, risk and security

Happily, even as Gartner asked the question, Datapoint was developing a solution that would enable them to address every one through their contact centres – Katalyst.

The Katalyst directed technology platform enables Datapoint contact centre clients to optimise the performance of their contact centres and the relationships they have with their customers and make their contact centres strategic assets at the heart of their enterprises.

Leveraging Datapoint’s more than 40-years experience in the industry, Katalyst enables users to: exploit customer intelligence to increase enterprise growth, drive service innovation and provide a better customer experience; improve operational performance, business processes and the technical infrastructure; model and track technology implementations and change programmes; while, at the same time, reducing costs, controlling risk and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Datapoint Katalyst – quite a solution.