Originally published May 5, 2010

You’re Taking It Out of Context
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Living with a writer for the last 36 years, one of my favorite books has become “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” 

The cover of the book shows two pandas, the vegetarian whiting out the comma, and the NRA member walking to the right brandishing a handgun. 

The point is, of course, that punctuation matters.  Why? Because punctuation establishes a context for words and thereby turns them into a thought & gives them meaning.  Of course it’s not just about punctuation – content has to be coherent for there to be identifiable meaning – but context certainly matters.

How many times do we hear “I know I said that, but you took it out of context and that’s not fair?”  And what that really means is that when we take something out of context, it can be misleading.

If you run a contact center, you’re no doubt swimming in numbers from all of your analytics, metrics and KPIs.  It’s all important data of course, but without context, data are merely numbers that’ll drive you to distress.  You may be using Tivoli or HP Operations Manager (formerly Open View) to help you organize your data and give it structure.  Structure is certainly important, but I assert structure does not establish meaningful context.

To truly have context, you also need perspective.  “So what am I getting at?” I hear you muttering.

You need to establish context for the metrics you get from your contact center technology instrumentation, and to do that you have to add perspective to the mix…your customers’ perspective.

Here’s what I mean…

All that data you get from your high-level system monitoring solution can in fact be nothing more than noise when there’s no context.  Many times I’ve heard “The first thing we do is shut off the audible alarms because with a network like ours, there’s always something broken and if I jumped every time I got an alert that a server or segment had an issue, I’d be spending all my time chasing ghosts.  Most of the time it’s just not that bad.”

What you really need to know is when the customers’ experience is being adversely impacted by a technology issue so you can use the raw data from your internal monitoring systems to identify the bad actor and get back to business.  You can’t try to pursue every hiccup as though it were the end of the world – unless it is.  And if it is, you need to know NOW.  Whether the issue is trivial from the inside out perspective or a major failure, the context of what’s happening to customer is what you need to know so you can appropriately direct you attention.

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Mike Burke

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