Don't you love it when something that seems like it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer turns out to be right on the money? Literally?

13 years ago, IQ Services was started by a couple of guys that had a really cool idea - if you could only figure out how good the user experience was going to be before you put a new contact center into production you could tune it before it went into production instead of 3 days later after it dropped to its knees the first time it was hit with full load.

Customer experience - make sure you've got it right before it's too late.

Sounds like a natural, doesn't it? 13 years ago they already knew it was all about the experience, what happens when someone actually uses your system, not just how it looks on paper when you list the components, comb the ACD metrics or plot the standard deviation of AHT or some such thing.

So what's this got to do with Interactions? This past week in Orlando, Intervoice formally introduced its new personna - Convergys (http://www.convergys.com/) - to its base of longtime loyal users at Interactions. Ravi Narayanan, VP, Market & Product Strategy, making the point about the importance of customer experience, cited a study by The ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index - http://www.theacsi.org/) that documents this importance in no uncertain terms:

those companies with a high ACSI rating outperform the S&P 500.

Of course outperforming the S&P500 doesn't seem to be too hard to dothese days , but it's affirming to know that when your customers like you - and are willing to say they like you - it's not just their lips flapping. They're voting with their wallets too.

Makes cents, not just sense. And there's proof!

Now that's cool.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423