Contact Sentry technology builds, in real time, a structured data mart containing every customer interaction, every touchpoint interaction and every agent interaction for every call center contact. It is built around the concept of “contact space”, which is the space that a customer occupies when they get in touch with your organization.

Contact Space

From a technology perspective, you can view contact space as the set of contact points that a customer encounters during their interaction. A contact point is basically any point in your contact space where your customer interacts. These include phone, queue, IVR, agent – each contact point is a place where a customer can make a decision or take an action and it is also a place where you can gather information that allows you to manage and understand your customer’s experience.

The Power of Interaction Views

Contact Sentry monitors every point in the contact space. As the customer transitions from one contact point to another, relevant information known by that point is added to the data mart. In the data mart, three types of interactions are created:

A customer interaction is created that covers the customer experience, including who the customer is, why they called, how it was resolved, and key durations from the customer perspective.

For each touchpoint (device) encountered by the customer, a touchpoint interaction is created. These interactions provide traditional call center devices statistics. Key customer interaction data is added to the touchpoint interaction to show how the device affected and served the customer.

For each agent encountered by the customer, an agent interaction is created that covers the time from when the interaction was offered to completion of after call work. These provide agent performance management and analytics. Since the agent interactions contain contact reason and FCR information, and link to survey data, agents can be managed and trained based on outcome for specific types of calls.

This structure is very efficient, as most pertinent questions can be answered by querying one type of interaction (customer interactions for customer experience, agent interactions for agent performance management, etc). To answer more complex questions, different interaction types are joined using a common interaction ID.

Tracking the Journey

A benefit unique to Contact Sentry is the ability to track the path of the call. No assumptions made about the flow of the call – Call Sentry accurately reports what happens regardless where the call first appears, how many times a call is transferred or requeued, and how the call is completed. The customer interaction is maintained as a single entity even if it appears as multiple disconnected calls due to conferences, requeues or multisite transfers.