Quality management considerations for digital service channels
“This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes” – but what about this chat? Or email? Or social direct message? If a contact center didn’t have a quality program to evaluate and improve their service delivery on voice interactions, we would think they were nuts. But for some reason on digital channels, many contact centers think they get a quality hall pass.
- One admin experience and interface for all CC apps. The best quality management software is unified within a single omnichannel customer experience platform. This means that all customer interactions across all channels are routed through the ACD which lives within the same administrative environment as all workforce engagement capabilities – including quality management. So no matter the channel, the data is there and you’re able to evaluate it.
- Screen recording for all digital channels. To really understand the customer experience and effectively coach on digital interactions you need to see both the transcript and the agent’s screen. Why? Many digital interactions are asynchronous and deferrable – they can start and stop depending on the customer’s response times and customers don’t expect responses as quickly as on voice. As such, agents are usually handling more than one digital interaction at a time. Screen recording lets you coach to both the words being exchanged between the agent and the customer, while also coaching on process, timeliness of response, multitasking, etc.
- Quality planner that supports digital channels. You should also ensure your quality management software has omnichannel quality planning capabilities so you can granularly define by channel what types of interactions you want routed for evaluation. And the routing piece here is important. Your evaluators should not have to go hunting in the system for digital interactions to evaluate. Nobody has time for that. The quality planner should automatically identify the interactions meeting your criteria and serve it to your evaluators on a silver platter.
- Digital self-evaluations for agents. Have you ever reread an email you wrote when you were in a rush and cringed at your word choice or spelling mistakes? Experiencing that really opens your eyes and leads you to be more attentive in your future written exchanges – well, at least for a while until you’re in a rush again. Agent self-evaluations on digital channels serve the same purpose. It puts them in the evaluator’s shoes and forces them to identify for themselves how they need to improve on each channel.
Workforce management considerations for digital service channels
What do forecasts and schedules have to do with digital channels? Staffing is staffing, right? Wrong! Implementing digital channels has tremendous impacts on your forecasting and scheduling but these are often overlooked by contact centers. A common mistake is to roll out new channels, and only then realize that you need to staff differently to support them. But good news is - you don’t have to make that mistake too. As we mentioned, many digital interactions are asynchronous (or deferrable, the two terms are interchangeable) with frequent starts and stops within the same customer interaction and often very long delays. For example, a customer might send a Facebook message, then board a flight for three hours and go dark, and then resurface once they land and expect to pick up the conversation right where they left off. So forecasting handle time can be more challenging than on live voice interactions.Add this to the fact that each agent can handle a unique combination of different channels, at different volumes, and the communication and volume trends for each individual channel differ. Did you catch all that? Let me re-state because it’s overwhelming even for the those intimately involved in digital transformation. That was scheduling your people for (1) MANY different channels, (2) varying volumes across those channels, (3) elevation between channels, and, yes, (3) varying trends for preferences and volumes across the days of the week and across the different geographic regions you support. Luckily, today’s workforce management software simplifies right-staffing in a true omnichannel environment down to a couple steps. When evaluating workforce management software, make sure it’s digital-proof and has the following capabilities:- One admin experience and interface for all CC apps. Sound familiar? That’s because this was also one of the top things to look for during your QM software evaluation. The best customer experience platforms also unify workforce management. Since all customer interactions across all channels are routed through an ACD that lives under the same roof as the forecasting engine, you ensure that no matter the channel, the data is there and you’re able to forecast for it. Say goodbye to duplicating agent setup and messy data feeds, and say hello to creating users one time in one system and forecasting in minutes.
- Staffing plan that lets you specify number of simultaneous interactions per channel. You need to be able to define channel capacity for interactions that occur at the same time. For example, for each channel type you support – both real-time and deferrable or asynchronous interactions – you need to be able to define how many interactions an agent can handle at a time. For example, perhaps your agents are capable of handing 3 SMS texts at a time, but 4 social media interactions at a time. This is important for the forecasting engine to take into account to get an accurate staffing plan.
- Staffing plan that lets you define service targets per channel. To create your staffing plan, the forecaster needs to know what your service goals are for each channel. Because certain channels require different response times, you need to make sure you can define the service targets uniquely for real-time Interactions versus those asynchronous contacts that can be handled later. For real-time channels, traditional contact center KPIs like Service Level and Wait Time (or Average Speed of Answer) are relevant – but not really for asynchronous interactions. For example, setting a traditional SLA of answering 80% of voice contacts in 30 seconds or less is reasonable, but answering 80% of deferred digital interactions in 30 seconds or less is not even possible. It could take longer than 30 seconds to just read what the message says, and 80% sets you up for some angry, confused customers since there are no abandons with deferrable work. That’s why digital-proof WFM software provides the ability to define how many business hours – not minutes or seconds - it should take to handle all deferred contacts, and whether or not they must be resolved within the same work day.
- AI forecasting to remove the guesswork. The best workforce management software uses sophisticated AI technology and a myriad of patented algorithms that automatically consider your individual KPI goals for each channel type, while also automatically factoring in which agents are skilled with each channel type, and at what volumes. Additionally, the best WFM software will further simplify things by eliminating the need to specify the exact forecasting algorithm that should be applied by automatically picking the best algorithm to fit your forecast’s time period and data set. Erlang C, Box-Jenkins ARMIA, exponential smoothing – NO PROBLEM! I don’t even have to know what those mean!
