Doing away with Human Splashscreens!

I called customer service at the firm that holds a large chunk of my life savings in the form of mutual funds and liquid cash. Every time I asked for some specific information about my account, the agent would affirm an understanding of my request. She would then launch into some sort of small talk – weather, sports, tv shows and the latest on the credit crunch. I don’t know how, but we started discussing physics and she told me why the moon looks bigger near the horizon. Since I have worked on a project to improve customer experience for the call center of a large organization, I know what the agent was doing. She was buying time! And she is a great agent. An inexperienced agent will either sheepishly admit that the system is slow, or (worse still) put me on hold while the system is ‘looking up the information’. The agent I was with, however, was more experienced and she was compensating for the slow system response.

Its like the splash screen which many applications present on launching. At launch time, an application may need to load various libraries into memory. This may be an intensive activity that can continue for 4-5 seconds. Meanwhile, very smartly, the application will present a splash screen – a little rectangular screen with something that keeps the user engaged. The product name, version number, a neat little animation. Sometimes, it will even have a little progress bar (in our analogue, this would equate to the agent gently letting me know that my information is loading up).

All of this is great. But there are a few ‘ifs’. If the time spent in the gentle conversation is really minimal. If I am used to this paradigm where every call to the financial institution is assumed to be a long winded 15+ minute affair. If I have not seen faster customer service. If I am not in a rush and would really like the information now. If I am not one of those guys for whom time is money. If …

The problem with these ‘human splashscreens’ is that they don’t just come up once when the application is first launching. They come up every time you ask a question. The whole conversation is a series of Questions and Answers interspersed with human splashscreens as the system is slowly wading through non-findable and redundant content to find that one nugget you requested.

A thinker once said, “Time is not money. Time is more valuable than money, for you can make more money”. Given enough time (or, rather, having lost one minute too many), there is a very real possibility that I will lose patience. And I might take all my financial investments to another firm. A firm that values my time more. A firm that knows what it takes to provide efficient and timely customer service. A firm that understands that it is not simply about bigger and faster machines, but it is also about Content Quality.

All problems are not simply about getting a server farm and finding ‘reasonably good’ information, such as what web search engines might do. Some problems are about finding ‘accurate’ information that you will stake your professional reputation against. As an example, a financial organization cannot tell its customer that Google thinks the 401k limit for 2009 is 16,500 USD. It has to tell them that it, the financial institution, are asserting that the limit is 16,500 USD.

To be able to do this accurately AND in a timely fashion, slowly and steadily, the industry is beginning to realize the value of Enterprise Content Quality. There is a healthy rise in interest around this discipline and people are taking notice of the strides that technology is taking to provide professional tools, techniques and methodologies to enhance the quality of content. The goals are to make content more valuable, findable and re-usable. A number of techniques are utilized by these cutting edge technologies – de-duplication, better organization (improving and redesigning the Information Architecture) and categorization.

The next time a customer service agent takes a long time to answer what must be a fairly routine query, ask yourself these questions:

1. How much does this firm really care about content quality?
2. What does this say of the content quality of other systems that this firm employs to manage my money?
3. Are there other firms out there that do a better job?
4. If yes, why are my $$$$ still here??

Firms that recognize and leverage these technologies will reduce the ’small talk’ that customer service agents have to engage in. No more splashcreens, so to speak. Their average call handle time will go down, and the cost of customer service will reduce dramatically. Customer satisfaction will increase. Of course, if all that happens, I might never know that the moon appears larger near the horizon because of a trick our mind plays on us. We start comparing it to terrestrial objects – a building, a tree or a mountain. Up in the sky, there is nothing to compare it with and it seems ’smaller’. There are very simple experiments to prove this, but that is not the point of this post now, is it?