A one question quiz
Are the following titles taken from Robert Ludlum novels, proposed Mission Impossible films, or the names of photo filters?
- The Parsifal Mosaic
- The Zeigarnik Effect
- The Sigma Protocol
- The Cassandra Compact
ANSWER: They are all Ludlum novels, except for “The Zeigarnik Effect.”Which is not a photo filter either, but a psychological phenomenon named after Bluma Zeigarnik, the Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist.
In short, the Zeigarnik Effect is when people better remember interrupted or incomplete tasks than they do completed tasks. Zeigarnik was intrigued by a 1920s finding that waiters could remember more details of diners’ unpaid orders than their completed, paid for orders. Once payment was made and the transaction was complete, the open loop was closed, and that seemed to signal their brains to stop holding onto the information.
Customer support teams manage an endless series of open loops. Customer questions come in, they are shuffled and sorted and assigned out, back and forth conversations happen, and ideally they are happily resolved, closing the loop.
Software like Help Scout allows teams to manage many of those open loops at once by breaking them into different queues and “remembering” the current state so it doesn’t have to be held only inside a support agent’s brain. If every support question could be answered in one quick reply, specialist software wouldn’t be nearly as necessary. We could just use a shared email inbox.
Every support pro knows the nagging feeling of an unresolved issue that needs follow-up, the weight in your mind that keeps drawing your attention when you’re supposed to be writing docs or doing reports or just taking a break.
Features like internal notes and AI generated summaries and drafts are handy tools to reduce the effort and time taken to manage all those loops, though they can't also remove the loop from our minds (a limitation that is probably best left in place, Elon).
The Zeigarnik Effect suggests that open conversations stick in our squishy human minds, and therefore having one person work on the conversation to completion may be faster and more satisfying to the agent, though not necessarily to the customer.
Does your team, as a general principle, keep the same person on the same conversation until it is done? Why?
Do assistive technologies like help desks, by allowing the burden to be managed through software, reduce the noticeable memory difference between open and closed loops? More research is needed (particularly in this age of the replication crisis), but even without it we can be thoughtful about how we manage our attention.
For example, even though it is technically simple to have one person simultaneously working 5 live chats, splitting attention across that many open loops must have some effect on quality. Perhaps assistive AI will shift that number higher, but that remains to be proven.
