Impact Analysis & the Final Four

This weekend was a little personal lesson in basketball, the laws of supply and demand, hope, joy, and how all of that applies to a CX strategy. Dorky? Yeah, but that's how I roll.?

I am a proud Texas Aggie, so when my beloved Aggie men's basketball team made it to the Big Dance, we bought tickets to the Final Four in a spurt of hope that 40 years of being an Aggie fan has not yet disabused me of. The Final Four was in my backyard, so why not, right? What if they make it and I can't get tickets? That would be tragic.?

Furthermore, if they don't make it to the Final Four, it'll be easy to sell our tickets and get our money back, right? RIGHT??

Well, my Aggies ran out of time and were eliminated in the first round. Sigh...?

After the sting wore off, we started watching ticket prices as March Madness progressed. We bought our nosebleed seats for a price I'm embarrassed to admit. This was at a time when there were 68 teams all hopeful to make it to the Final Four and hope was fueling prices. Still, if the right teams - big schools; nearby schools; schools whose fans travel - made it, we should have no trouble getting our money back. Heck, maybe we'll even make a little profit.

Ticket prices trended down as the big schools fell to the madness of March. When the games of the Elite 8 came to an end, ticket prices crashed. You could get tickets in our section for 12.5% of what we paid for ours. Another sigh...?

Since the money was already spent and it wasn't coming back, we decided to make a day of it and go enjoy the games... and enjoy the games we did! They were incredibly fun to watch live and feel the emotional waves sweep through the audience with each lead change. Young men playing their hearts out with seniors knowing that it might be their last game ever on the big court. It was electric. Perhaps it was even more electric because I didn't have a rooting interest.?

With my Aggies watching from home, it was not the experience that we hoped for. It was fun, but not worth what we paid for it. It was about 12.5% of the fun we had hoped for when we bought our tickets. The market was right.?

Applying a hard lesson in unrealized returns to CX strategy, how much of your CX strategy is built on hope? Have you bought that new technology in the hope that it will deliver a positive business outcome? How many times have you done that and didn't get your money back? Have you paid $400k and you're only getting $65k worth of value? Particularly in the current stressed economic climate, we need to know what we're buying and what tangible business outcomes it will deliver.?

This is why Waterfield Tech created our Impact Analysis. Our Impact Analysis assesses your contact center operations, identifies costly areas of inefficiencies, and provides recommendations to increase efficiencies through automation and other improvements to deliver financial gains -- often with no additional out of pocket cost. Why buy new technology without knowing how, or if, it will actually do what you need? Sometimes, perhaps usually, technology isn't even the answer. People and processes are always more important than the technology.?

That's enough with the work talk. Let's get back to basketball. Good luck to UCONN and SDS tonight. It's been fun watching y'all get to the last dance. Soak it up.?