It’s a well circulated science “fact” that every face you see in your dreams is one you’ve seen before, some time in your life. It could be your best friend, your greatest enemy, or a total stranger you only saw once in a crowd at the mall, but it’s still a “familiar” face. Never mind the fact that this claim is essentially impossible to test; the idea of it is powerful. On a fundamental level, it taps into a basic human understanding that faces are important.

Tech companies know this. That’s why Google tried (and failed) to clean up YouTube comments by forcing people to comment using their real names and faces from Google+. It’s why Facebook works as a business: seeing your friends’ faces makes it easier for you to offer up all kinds of information about yourself that you’d never give to a giant company otherwise (after all, Facebook isn’t asking for it, your Aunt Rhonda in Minneapolis is). At Century Interactive, we’re no different. Faces are important, both in our internal and external products.

Internally, we just rolled out a new tool we’ve dubbed LUNSH. Not only is it amusing to attempt to pronounce properly, it’s a fun and interesting way for CI employees to get out and see each other’s faces and learn about their coworkers.

Six days of the week, the tool shows the Opt-In Screen. Here, our employees can say “Yes, I want to sign up to LUNSH!” and can do it with a single click. They’ll get to see who else has opted in and a few fun stats (because when you deal with as much data as we do at CI, you enjoy finding new ways to use and display it) and that’s it for those 6 days. Day 7 is completely different: Day 7 is LUNSH Day. On Day 7, our employees see a new screen, populated with LUNSH Groups. See, on LUNSH Day, everyone who opted in gets sorted into a random group with up to five other LUNSHers. All of our data is stored in a SQL database, which unfortunately doesn’t include some mystical built in function for randomly sorting a bunch of data. To get these random groups made, each opt-in record is assigned a random number (which IS a built in function). On LUNSH Day, we sort the table using this random number, giving us our random sort! Then we just cycle through this week’s records and pop a record off the top of a list, throw that person in a group and repeat until we’re out of records! Each group then gets together, picks a restaurant, and enjoys lunch (er, LUNSH) with their coworkers. It’s a fun and easy way to meet up with employees in different departments that you may never see in an average work day and connect with the people you share an office with 5 days out of the week. If you’re lucky, the CEO may wind up in your LUNSH group! (Dress nice on LUNSH Day, just in case).

We have the same philosophy when building our external products. Car Wars, Service Setter, and Patient Pursuit users have probably noticed the images in the staff pages. It would have been easy (certainly easier to code!) to just list names and call it a job well done, but it was a deliberate decision to include staff photos in throughout our products.

Like Google’s attempt to make YouTube commenters more accountable, adding faces into our products helps maintain accountability and make what would otherwise be a dull stats table into a more exciting page. With staff photos, it’s easier to attribute the statistics you see (whether it’s an individual call or a CRISP score) to a person or a coworker or a friend. It makes it easier to recognize good calls and praise a job well done (instead of “Wow, we had a good call” you think “Wow, Stephanie had a good call!”) or recognize a difficult call and work towards improvement. When your staff uses one of these products and sees their calls and metrics attributed not just to their name, but to their face as well, it’s easier to take ownership of that call and recognize it as a personal accomplishment or area for growth. Even if your staff list still displays our default photos, it’s easier to think of a person behind all that data when you see those faces; people trying to provide a great experience to the caller and striving to be as professional and helpful as possible. This effect is even more powerful if you have already uploaded staff photos, but even those CI placeholders (we don’t blame you for keeping them, they’re some good lookin’ CI team members!) can leverage the power of a friendly face.

You may think CI is all about the calls and data, and we are. There’s a lot of power in data and the connections you can make with it. However, we like to think there’s something we work with that even more important and integral to our business and helping grow yours: faces and the people behind them.