The Omnichannel Approach

Contact centers in today’s global economy are rapidly evolving. Multi-channel contact centers are being transformed into omni-channel ones. Now, customers can choose and make requests among several contact channels without any inherent difficulties. The level of service is consistent, and agents can track a customer’s history even if they make inquiries on one channel and purchase on another.

The quality of agent performance and the customer service level will become transparent if quality monitoring is properly adjusted for an omni-channel contact center. If a company decides to pursue an omni-channel approach, it must be implemented systematically to ensure a seamless customer experience. However, companies must expect an enterprise-wide need for technical adjustments and reorganization as well as an adaption of monitoring processes for quality assurance.

Online monitoring as a precursor of omni-channel monitoring

The original assessment methodology to determine service-level quality in contact centers involved side-by-side coaching.  This methodology evolved into more flexible and powerful online monitoring. Customer interactions were randomly recorded and subsequently evaluated with quality monitoring software.

Monitoring goes omni-channel

With an omni-channel approach, online monitoring must expand beyond a single channel. All contact channels must be displayed and tracked with the monitoring software and shared for assessment. Moreover, valuation tools must be improved so agents assigned with diverse tasks are rated accordingly. Only modified assessments can provide appropriately modified training.

Customer journey in focus

In order to properly evaluate customer satisfaction, each interaction must be viewed as a series of contacts instead of a collection of isolated incidents. The underlying concept and goal of an omni-channel approach involves a seamless customer journey across multiple channels, but it can only be perfected if it is monitored and rated as such.

Evaluate processes

The omni-channel approach focuses on seamless networking among various contact channels. Omni-channel contact centers will succeed only if channel interactions are properly aligned. Therefore, monitoring should be extended beyond pure assessment of customer interactions to evaluate the efficiency and flow of processes – during and after customer interactions.

Focusing on the essentials

The more contact channels a company offers its customers, the more data it generates. Calls, chats, e-mails or posts in social networks – all channels provide data for assessment. However, the volume of information precludes manual review of the data. For an omni-channel approach, you need analytic solutions for both speech and text.

The interactions can be filtered based on predefined keywords, phrases and emotions to identify the most interesting and critical communications.

Thus, your assessment can focus on relevant conversations from preserved critical communications. Automated analytic solutions will reveal potential improvement opportunities.

Conclusion

Successful implementation of an omni-channel contact center requires a series of adjustments to achieve a seamless interaction among multiple channels so they become, in effect, one. The omni-channel concept also encompasses monitoring of customer communications across multiple channels. To effectively determine and maintain the service level, the assessment of isolated contacts in a single channel must be transformed to provide a channel-overlapping assessment of the customer journey as a whole.