Intent, Insight and Impact, the “Three I’s”, hold the key to providing better service and optimizing Customer Dynamics, the ongoing, multi-faceted, interactions and transactions between customers and organizations across all channels of communication. Companies can utilize Customer Dynamics data to improve products, understand what customers want, identify trouble spots in operations and understand why customers switch to competitors. Capturing intent, gaining insight and using that insight to make an impact allows companies to improve business operations without sacrificing service.  Let’s dig a little deeper into the “Three I’s”.

Intent: The major driver behind Customer Dynamics is intent. Customers contact a company when there's something they want to accomplish: solving a problem, getting an answer to a question, making a purchase, etc. Businesses also have desired objectives, including controlling costs and increasing revenue. To truly understand customer relationships, organizations must address both types of intent.

Quite simply, if you don't understand what a customer wants, how can you meet their expectations?  Similarly, if the company's intent stands in the way of taking care of the customer, conflicts are inevitable.  The first step is capturing intent: gathering the raw material of customer interactions across phone calls, emails, chat sessions and social media. 

Insight: Next, companies must analyze all of the unstructured customer data to understand intent and extract insight. Why did the customer reach out to us?  Did we satisfy his or her intent?  Analyzing interactions across all channels yields insights that are not apparent when examining individual interactions.  For example, without cross-channel analysis, you might consider an interaction in which a customer got the information he needed in one call a successful interaction. But with cross-channel analysis, you would see that before that call, he endured an unsuccessful attempt at chatting with your web agent, emailed your contact center and didn’t received the proper information in return, and finally called as a last resort. This is not exactly the success story you may have originally thought.

Impact: Insight paves the way for the final step, impact—real business results. You can adjust processes so that self-service channels work better, proactively reach out to customers and better allocate agent resources. Optimizing Customer Dynamics can also help agents recognize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities in real time. Solutions that provide real-time analysis of interaction-related data and deliver real-time guidance to contact center agents affect your efforts to improve the customer experience as well as improve operational efficiency and sales.

Many organizations don’t realize the power of Customer Dynamics, limiting themselves to quick-fix customer service that addresses each interaction as an isolated conversation without looking at the whole picture. By adopting the “3 I’s” mindset, companies implement practices to continually improve customer satisfaction and business results in the following areas:  compliance, operational efficiency, customer experience and sales and marketing effectiveness. And Customer Dynamics optimization is the methodology that can help make that happen.