IF MANAGEMENT ASKED YOU HOW WELL YOUR 

AUTOMATED B2C CHANNELS ARE PERFORMING,

WHAT WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO SAY?

But, if any of your predecessors had that ‘set & forget’ mentality which is pervasive in the management of these systems in many organisations, maybe there is room for improvement today.

Callers’ attitudes to IVRs have changed over the years and call completion rates (the percentage of calls that do not need to be sent to a live agent) have gradually increased as a consequence.

e-Commerce take-up rates for B2C transactions have significantly increased over time and there has been a commensurate increase in their productivity levels too.

And the SMS channel has rapidly emerged as another important medium for B2C interactions.

You probably have logs that enable you to track transaction completion rates in each of your portals and you may have noticed an increase in their effectiveness over time.

However, can you be really confident that there is no further scope for improvement?

Do you know whether the performance of each of your channels is at least the equal of your competitors' comparable portals and whether there has been any relative change over time?

If you don't know how your systems compare, how can you rectify this?

You will be aware, of course, that a number of conventional portal performance improvement service providers exist in the market. 

Their approach is essentially one that has been commonly employed with only minor variations for many years. It consists of employing highly paid experts to conduct time-consuming analyses of transaction process flows to identify improvement opportunities.

While it works, this method is not objective because it relies upon the prior knowledge and experience of the expert analysts and, because it is expensive, it generally lacks comprehensiveness.  

Alternatively, it is possible to build or acquire a software solution that resides with and monitors traffic in automated applications and reports on events to enable you identify problems and identify where improvements may be made.

However, this is an expensive and risky proposition. 

THE INTERACTION ANALYTICS APPROACH

Interaction Analytics has developed a unique approach that both complements the existing methods but also introduces a significant additional feature.

This new approach can enable you to, for each portal: 

1. find precisely where there are process shortcomings on a detailed step-by-step basis and therefore identify all opportunities for improvements
2. quantify the extent of achievable improvements by making comparisons with appropriate benchmarks
3. rank all opportunities to improve your applications and focus on the biggest wins on an interaction, step-by-step, basis
4. determine the ROI available for each of the available improvement opportunities, enabling you to establish and prioritise those which are worth pursuing and avoid making changes that will not deliver a worthwhile return.

The Interaction Analytics approach can be entirely independent of your IT platform. 

It does not require you to introduce yet more software into your already complex IT environment and manage the consequential costs of:

1. acquisition
2. integration, including sociability risks
3. ongoing maintenance

Further, there is no need to change your relationship with existing portal services providers and systems integrators, regardless of whether your channels are in-house or in-the-cloud.