Why do the villains have the coolest UI's?

My kids hate it that I can't put systems development out of my mind when we watch an entertaining movie. I say something like "Do you think the bad guys took the time to make a cool holographic interface for each WMD and prioritized usability when they built their project schedule and funding?!" 

And my son tells me something like, "Dad...please...suspend reality until after the show!"

Take any of the recent group of post-apocalyptic films depicting regular folks sticking' it to the mega-maniacal man (Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner). The villains' systems have awesome user interfaces for back office personnel and complete end to end integration. One explanation may be that the villain in this genre typically controls a centralized economy and thus can fund any boondoggle project they desire...

But...holographically shaping and letting loose hell hounds or taking control of a police officer's brain through a touch screen??  Yeah, that was funded and completed on schedule to assist the back-office personnel in their deeds, impressive...albeit creepy.

We'll put aside that a central theme of this genre is that the system does always have a fatal achilles heel (so their security testing needs work).  I'm just proud of Evil, Inc.'s ability to deliver desktop tools that make the workplace productive and fun.

So humor me and take a look at the user interfaces depicted in futuristic films and compare them to (real) large-scale transformation projects at large corporations- from what you've seen. It's fun to compare, isn't it!?

You may have guessed that I have some frustration with the reality that internal tools and UI's are often cut first, with the result that our back office work becomes mired in low-productivity processes.  The sci-fi perspective is a nice one to contemplate.  

So my mind wandered during a recent film and I thought "if I was offered a job at Evil, Inc. and weighed my pros and cons, it would be something like "first pro is the awesome user interfaces they deliver...ok, con is ethical and moral ambivalence and general creepiness, yep I admit that is a negative, BUT THOSE UI's ARE NEEDED SO BADLY!, I REALLY WANT TO WORK ON THIS STUFF!".

The Emotional Context of a Business Transaction

Years ago, my MBA program had a course on the history of business management. The work of Frederick Taylor featured prominently as the late 19th/early 20th century originator of the Scientific Management movement.

My summary of Scientific Management:  business profit is optimized by breaking down work into its smallest, atomic tasks, and hiring and training individuals who are optimized for the execution of those discrete units of work.  The task of management is to squeeze the maximum output from
each work unit.   This is done by applying techniques such as "time and motion studies" to ensure that employees were maximizing their economy of action.

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I understand that Scientific Management contributed many fundamentals to effective methods that we use today to manage business operations. However, Scientific Management, while contributing greatly to efficiency, eventually hit the wall because it didn't leverage the passion of the individual- the desire to imprint our work with our own style and insight.  In other words, we cannot be separated from our emotions.

For over 100 years now, analyzing and improving business processes has involved minimizing the emotional element of business transactions- noise to be removed in order to focus on the signal. But now we have the tools and knowledge to model and make positive use of the emotional dynamics of a business transaction such as customer support calls.

Understanding emotional context and integrating it into process improvement methodology is a prerequisite for us to make the next leap forward in improving The Customer Experience.

To test this premise I worked on a framework for analyzing customer service interactions and mapping the emotional context and flow of transactions.  I found that the state of each of the parties and their baseline assumptions led to a discrete, predictable set of flows and outcomes for transactions.

This validated my thought that lofty goals such as "exceeding customer expectations" are unattainable and costly, and by their very definition can set employees up for failure.  What is really important is understanding the customer's assumptions, how they were formulated, and the flexibility in the emotional of both customer and employee to seek a resolution.

• Each customer enters a transaction with goals, desires and emotions that are often not explicit but tend to be revealed Iin bits and pieces.  I call these Emotional Influences
• These Influences come from all our prior interactions
• As a customer and employee begin a transaction, they tend to align with one of several common Participant Archetypes
• Particpant archetypes, the content of the transaction, and their emotional influences combine to determine why an interaction results in a satisfying experience or why it does not.

Some emerging tools can also identify and map the emotional changes over the course of a support call.  When ive done this type of analysis simply via listening and annotating I have found that tension is often due to emotional influencers that were expressed earlier but were ignored by the other party.

(for some great background on role analysis, read  Eric Berne's classic work on transactional analysis: Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis.)

Does more data = better insight?

Sometimes companies wonder how, with all their data, they still sail off course.  In the field of customer service analytics, vendors play a game of trying to “out-data” the other guy.  There is a better approach – more effective and more efficient than sitting through endless vendor presentations involving over-mining of an underwhelming  but voluminous set of base data.

There are many reasons why the game is played the way it is today.  To justify bringing in an analytics company, many corporate buyers act in a risk-averse, as opposed to benefit-attracted, modus operandi.

Both vendor and the corporate buyer of the vendor's services want to be able to show reams of data and analysis to show that discretionary budget dollars are producing something.  But lots of "something" does not equal results.  

A case in point is traditional quality assurance monitoring, which certainly produces more data than any senior manager has time to go through.  But no matter whether QA is done in-house or through an outside vendor, it is almost ubiquitously criticized for missing the big picture of why customer satisfaction isn't improving.  In fact, with a high value customer who has a thorny issue, adherence to standard scripts often fans the flames of the customer's ire.

And so busywork rules supreme, while insight founders for sponsorship within the corporation.  I’ve been on customer analytics assignments where I get the “aha” moment with a client after analyzing a small number of customer service calls.  But we end up presenting slide after slide of data showing how much work we did rather than focusing simply on what we found that can help the business improve.

But lets put the politics aside and analyze the nature of customer service transactions for a minute.  In your business, you may have interactions with customers that average a minute or two or over half an hour.  Within a transaction of any length, what I’ve found is that there is a dynamic of the interaction, detectable early on, that sets the stage for a positive or negative customer experience.

I don’t discount the value of QA operations in making sure that agents say things the correct way, that they adhere to scripts when necessary, and open and close the conversation in a pleasant manner.  But all that data they collect is not the primary determinant of customer’s satisfaction with the interaction.  The primary determinant is whether the agent is in synch with the emotional context of the customer.

Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless: How to Make Them Love You, Keep You Coming Back, and Tell Everyone They Know 

I will continue this topic in my next post, this is my teaser for the topic of the emotional context of business transactions.  Think about gifts that you have given to family members, maybe your spouse or children.  Have you ever given a gift where you were sure they would like it, you perhaps spent more than you thought you would, took time to wrap it nicely, and then…they express disappointment?  Maybe their disappointment is quite subtle, but you FEEL it.  What went wrong?

Well, producing loads of data would not help you.  What you experienced was the same thing that I call “the emotional context of business transactions.”  To avoid such unpleasant experiences requires an exploration of the emotional context of the customer.  I’ll take you there in my next post.