There's a Difference Between Fast and Timely
Delivering
information is critical in many businesses, but don't waste energy and
resources getting data to places where it won't be useful.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Time is the scarcest resource in our lives.
Data may be the oil of the digital economy, but the timeliness and contextual
delivery of that data is what creates real value. One of the things we
learned early in our first business -- we provided market-based vehicle
valuations to the auto insurance industry -- is that it didn't matter how fresh
and accurate our data was, or how quickly we responded to inbound inquiries.
What mattered is whether the folks asking for the answers were accessible and
available when we got back to them with the info. The when and where of the
data delivery (context) is just as important as the what (content) in the final
analysis.
In addition, many of the traditional
management tools we initially employed turned out to be poorly aligned with the
real needs of the business. Driving our people crazy to meet certain
performance standards, arbitrary operating metrics, turn-around times, or other
contractually mandated service levels was simply stupid if the end results
didn't matter to the customers. Not everything needed to be instantly available
or be made into a crisis or a fire drill if no one was going to appreciate,
recognize or compensate us for the extra effort. Youthful and
aggressive enthusiasm eventually yielded to painful experience.
It took a while to get the flow and timing
correct in that business, but the core offering - real-time and precise
valuation information as opposed to the stale, generalized historical data that
was the industry standard - radically changed the way in which claims for lost
or stolen vehicles were settled in the auto insurance game. Today, 40
years later, that business is still
operating as the unquestioned industry leader, works with every major insurer,
and is worth billions. The most important lesson we learned is that a
one-dimensional emphasis on speed alone often creates more undue stress rather
than building value.
The best and most valuable data-centric
startups understand how to add substantial value to their offerings by managing
and compressing time as they constantly move forward on the continuum from old
news and after-the-fact analysis to the real time delivery of current
information. Shrinking the space between the creation, measurement and
evaluation of relevant activity -- capturing it in the moment, at the edge, and
from both employees and their customers (bi-directional) -- and then converting
and communicating it back to the team members as immediate, actionable
instruction is now the name of the game. The more immediate that any strategic
inputs can be, the more accurate and valuable the decisions relying upon them
will become. The only right time is real time and right now.
Many old-line data-based businesses, including
mine, sought to increase the availability and immediacy of decision-making
information. But now we're seeing the emergence of companies that are
developing on-site systems to provide real-time feedback that can be used
effectively to inform and improve employees' qualitative behaviors
rather than simply their quantitative decisions.
This is the new wave of augmented human
intelligence tools, which focus on creating and supporting better informed,
more aware, and readily reactive workers as opposed to those long-promised and
largely unsuccessful systems that propose to use artificial intelligence to
actually replace humans. The goal today is to make all your people smart fast.
And nothing improves learning more effectively than instant, on-the-job
feedback.
I believe that we're going to see an explosion
of real-time guidance in almost every customer-facing service business. And
there's probably no more challenging an environment in which to try to
implement consistent and ongoing behavioral change than the world of call
centers,
whatever industry they support. Call centers overall suffer 100% annual agent
attrition, difficulty in properly deploying and scaling their coaching
resources, recurring and repeated agent errors, and an inability to quickly
share changes and improvements across their workforce.
While there are plenty of players in this
space, one of the most interesting young companies is St. Louis-based Balto,
which is focused on using conversational intelligence to provide real-time
guidance for call center agents and managers. You can check out their products
and services but noting their pitch and the problems they identify will be far
more valuable for you because these are universal concerns. Investing a little
time will help you create a significant knowledge advantage. The key to the
most effective innovation is very often "borrowing" new ideas and
approaches from other people in adjacent industries and applying them to your
own business.
Solution migration, cross-industry
pollination, and inexpensive adaption are all great ways to boost your business
without spending big bucks. Originality and
invention are often overrated, time-consuming and costly. Find the
best ideas, figure out how they apply and make sense for your company,
and get busy making them
work for you.
Here are four key concepts that I
borrowed from Balto's materials and I'll bet that thinking about how to deal
with each of them in the context of your own company can help you build a
better business - whether it's claims, sales, logistics, health care, insurance
or any other direct-to-customer product or service - especially at present when
so many of your team members are still likely to be working remotely.
(1) A Small Number of
Recurring Problems and Errors Cause the Bulk of the Issues with Customers.
As many times as you tell your team how, when
and what to say, they still forget, quit, freelance, get bored, and get upset
or distracted. Automated and interactive scripts, dynamic checklists, sidebar
chats and prompts can constantly provide and reinforce the right messages,
paths and online responses to issues and objections. Training and practice are
helpful, but not as valuable or effective as real-world experiences and
immediate feedback.
(2) The Best Time to Keep a
Customer is Before They Leave.
Once a conversation is over, it's almost
always too late to retrieve or recover the customer. Automated bi-lateral
conversation monitoring with key word triggers and timely alerts permits
next-level personnel to join, interrupt or intercede and work instantly to
salvage and restore the precarious relationship before it ends. A supervisor
can only listen in on one discussion at a time while the right system can be
listening into all of the ongoing discussions at the same time and alert the
supervisor or manager when prompt action is necessary.
(3) Problems are Rarely
Unique to Individual, Unhappy Customers. Solutions Need to Address
Root Causes and then Be Quickly Circulated to the Entire Team.
Solving one-off problems with unhappy
customers is necessary, but it's not sufficient over the long run as a strategy
for overall improvements in deficient processes and unsatisfactory agent
behaviors. Even more importantly, once a broader fix is determined and in place
and applicable to all customers, it's critical that the solution (either what's
working or what's not working) be immediately transmitted to the entire team
and incorporated in all of the supportive tools and materials and all future
interactions.
(4) All of Us are Smarter
than Any One of Us.
It's hard to overstate the value of
aggregated, collated, and carefully analyzed data collected from literally
millions of conversations, transactions, interactions and dispositions when
you're trying to continually enrich the customer experience. While your
particular situation may have specific variations, there's no question that the
best practices, hints, directions and standard responses derived from the daily
activities of hundreds of businesses and then gathered into a common database
of instructions and directions will be largely applicable and extremely useful
in your particular use cases as well. Customers may come in all sizes and
shapes, but their basic needs and desires are remarkably similar in almost
every respect. You can try to learn these things over a lifetime or have them
at your fingertips overnight.
The best entrepreneurs aren't too proud or too
busy to look, listen and learn-- or to beg, borrow and steal the best ideas
from wherever they might be found. In the final analysis, a successful
enterprise is never about who did it first, but about who does it best.
NOV 30, 2021
The
opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of
Inc.com.