Why do you monitor your heart rate or other areas for health? Monitoring calls in a contact center occurs for similar reasons. ICMI wrote an article on how to go about monitoring multichannel in the call center. A summary of that article is below:
You can’t survive alone on a perfectly healthy heart, other organs need to be fully functioning too. Multiple channels are key organs that work in tandem helping the organization to be successful, each channel has a different role but it is all the one entity, the same DNA. If a channel fails, the others need to work harder to take the heat, they are under pressure, and they need to perform at their best to help the other recover. When a channel underperforms the repercussions usually come in the form of damaging or losing customers.
So How Do We Go About Monitoring?
We take heartbeats, pulses, blood tests, etc. regularly and consistently, we compare them to previous records and against averages and goals. We see if we are improving, we find weaknesses and come up with ways to heal these; we note strong points and continue to implement things that keep these performing well. We set goals and try to meet and exceed them. We test when we are weak to determine what we can do to improve, we test when we are strong to try and identify trends occurring and understand why our performance is excellent so we can replicate this.
Where do I start?
- Prioritize and weight key areas; Quality Scores, Customer Satisfaction, First Contact Resolution, Employee Engagement, Response Times.
- Use reliable information coming from primary sources consistently (in terms of quality and quantity)
- Check methods; evaluate the evaluators. Ensure you’re calibrating your quality monitoring, asking the right questions in your customer survey, your technology is functioning properly.
- Recognize the differences and similarities in channels and preferably use a system that can be applied across all channels, this will allow you to compare performance across the piece.
- Recognize failure points and wow moments, nobody likes a Negative Nelly so celebrate the triumphs as much as you criticise the failures.
6 Important Criteria for Monitoring Multichannel
1. Diagnosis
Have a monitoring structure that you can drill down into the detail and find the root causes. The alarm gets raised when you initially see a bad result, but that’s when the investigation begins in order to diagnose and come up with a remedy.
2. Involve Agents
Contact center agents are delivering the customer service and monitoring multichannel is based on their interactions and performance.
- Getting agents to self-score their performance and interactions is a great way for them to get a better understanding of what they are being monitored on and allowing them to suggest how they can improve.
- Use real agent examples for training and take suggestions from them for things that should be considered in monitoring.
- Encourage conversations about monitoring, understand what areas they don’t think should be monitored too and why. This will give you the opportunity to communicate why it is important and/or reconsider its relevance.
3. Transparency
Monitoring multichannel should have the goal of using the results to take action in improving performance. Transparency gives stakeholders (who are essential to improving performance) trust and buy-in for the proposals which were created on the back of insights from monitoring as they should be able to see the logic, confusion is avoided. Transparency will mean that there isn’t room for misinterpretation or grey areas, the richer the information source the better the solution.
4. Reliable System
Using a system that you can’t rely on or that breaks is a terrible way to monitor multichannel. Your time needs to be spent analyzing results, implementing improved behavior and monitoring rather that sifting through piles of dirty data which isn’t really telling you anything.
5. Easy To Use
Monitoring is an important task that should be straightforward; if you’re using a system that is laborious, difficult to interpret results, and difficult to work with, you’re wasting time. Having an easy to use monitoring tool will allow you to focus on the results, not the technology.
6. Flexibility
Don’t be afraid to question new things, the contact center industry is changing all the time, so too should your monitoring.
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