In a marketplace characterized by emerging technologies and numerous touch points, it’s easy for organizations to lose sight of the importance of effective omni-channel contact center operations—voice, email and chat included. Why does it matter? Because contact centers play a central role in the success of the customer experience and business operations.
Robust omni-channel quality monitoring programs for contact centers can lead to benefits across the entire enterprise by increasing revenue, customer loyalty and efficiency. But to capitalize on the benefits, organizations need to build a sustainable, long-term quality monitoring program. This means that programs will set customer interaction guidelines, set measurable goals and provide consistent feedback to representatives. For many brands, engaging a third-party partner that specializes in quality monitoring and contact center operations is the best approach. This eliminates the risk of bias that may come with internal resources evaluating contact center interactions.
How to Capitalize on Business Process Opportunities
By monitoring call center operations and client interactions based on established guidelines, organizations can uncover gaps in customer expectations and the level of service provided across channels. Often, these gaps are symptomatic of other process bottlenecks, inefficiencies or high-level operational and customer experience issues that your organization needs to address upstream of the contact center environment.
Here are several recommendations that organizations should focus on when using their call center as a catalyst for business process improvements:
- Executive Reporting: Executive briefings on customer feedback and contact center operations are critical—they enable the C-suite to uncover larger operational issues that customer interactions in the contact center bring to light. It has been my experience that many of the customer interaction details and insights stay isolated in the contact center, making it difficult to identify and prevent key business process issues. For example, sudden spikes in customer contact volume may indicate an unexpected usability issue with your website, product or service offering.
- Omni-Channel Assessments: In quality monitoring programs, organizations must ensure customer communication is consistent across all channels. Lack of clear, coherent messaging across channels causes customer frustration, duplicate effort and inefficiencies. For example, if a customer can’t locate critical information through a web portal, they might reach out through a help desk email or correspondence process. If the email is an automated response with links that don’t work on a certain Internet platform, for example, this can create additional customer or prospect frustration.
- Contact-Type Analysis: From an operational perspective, there are several key metrics that organizations must track to understand what is driving their customer contact volume. This includes repeat requests, first contact resolutions, transfers and average handling time. For example, an influx of social conversation due to a network outage is a larger issue and needs addressing outside of the contact center.
- Regular Benchmark Calibrations: Regularly assess the compliance and loyalty benchmarks you have established. Ensure business goals align with your current guidelines and customer messaging within the contact center and across all key customer touchpoints.
With a solid foundation in place for a consistent contact center experience and an effective quality monitoring program, organizations can identify and improve business process opportunities and reduce customer effort. By looking at contact center performance and customer feedback holistically across all channels, an organization can generate deep insights and drive significant enterprise value.
