Interactions: You Can't Do Business Without Them

Business is about making money. But revenue cannot be generated, nor can profits be achieved, without interactions—the essential and diverse business interchanges that facilitate every aspect of the buying, selling and delivery of goods and services. So a truer statement would be to say that business is about having interactions which, when done correctly, result in the generation of revenue and profits.

But when we think of interactions, we often take only a surface view of them and oversimplify—even potentially undervalue—their role in the process of business and commerce. In fact, many business leaders do not recognize that there are different types of interactions, some apparent and some ambiguous.


The most obvious interactions are those that involve traditional, direct communication between people—the customer interacting with the sales or service representative, the purchasing agent collaborating with the supplier, or the supervisor mentoring the employee.

And while we may recognize that these interactions are being enabled by technology-oriented communications vehicles, such as a telephone or the internet, we do not typically think of the act of using these vehicles as an interaction itself—it certainly is.

So within person-to-person interactions are more interactions still, the interactions between a person and systems—the help desk agent seeking answers from a knowledgebase or the bank teller querying a terminal application for an account balance or instructions for processing a loan request.

These person-to-system interactions help us recognize yet another type of interaction, the ensuing system-to-system interactions that occur when user interfaces interact with databases and applications, where applications call upon and interact with other applications by exchanging data, or launching specific processes, combining to function in ways that are unique and relevant to a specific business model. Even the presentation surfaces (the very screens that compose the user interface) can and often do represent interactions between multiple entities.

The larger and never-ending dialogue that is made-up of these individual and numerous interactions occurs in every business sector, from multinational conglomerates with sophisticated business operations and an array of business affiliates down to the most rudimentary “mom & pop” organizations.

This global and all-encompassing business “conversation” has long since started between participants of every stripe and has been enhanced and enabled by numerous technology advances—supposedly simplified through standards and guided by development philosophies from numerous software and service providers—that have attempted to provide, in one way or another, at least some aspect of managing and delivering these myriad interactions.

But complexity, rather than simplicity, and clumsiness, instead of agility, has been the result. Today’s typical business ecosystem includes a heterogeneous mix of IT and communications systems, home-grown and packaged software applications, (legacy, proprietary, external and internal), voluminous business processes and documentation, personnel with varying job functions and levels of skill, often distributed into disparate physical locations, and each playing some role within the interactions.

Coordinating all of these assets and the vast quantities of interactions that emanate from them is complicated enough. But to deliver consistent and contextually relevant interactions to the intended audience—for the duration of the business relationship—proves a significant challenge that has introduced the need for an interaction delivery model—a model that can effectively harness the capabilities of human and technology assets, and provide a single, unified solution that gives business leaders a centralized method of delivering the right interaction to the right person (or system) at the right time.