3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

When it comes to ensuring a quality customer experience these days, smart companies have begun tracking and mapping the way customers get from Point A – a question or concern they might have – to Point Z – satisfactory resolution that leaves a positive impression on the customer. We’ve read about creating customer journey maps and ensuring that omnichannel support systems allow customers to jump across communications channels at will to find an answer with no loss of knowledge or need to start over again, or repeat themselves. We engage in quality monitoring or third-party remote call monitoring to ensure that the customer experience is a positive one. These are important exercises today: customers will drop a company the moment support becomes onerous.

But it’s also important to remember that the average customer interaction has two people in it: the customer and a support agent. Focusing on quality for only one of them will likely hurt both of those individuals. The message many experts are delivering to companies seeking customer engagement today is: ensure that it’s just as easy for your agents to navigate the customer experience as your customers.

“From personal experience, I have always believed that the engagement and development of team members with the same level of rigor used in measuring and managing customer engagement and experience can deliver exceptional dividends,” wrote Andrew Mutch, Chief Customer Officer of BPA Quality UK Research Center in a recent blog post. “We are all aware of the drive towards reducing customer effort, satisfying customers and in encouraging customers to promote our products and services, indeed most businesses have robust processes for measuring these areas; CES (News - Alert), CSAT, NPS. Can the same be said for our employee practices?”

If the contact center makes it hard for the agent to find the right answers – either because she hasn’t been sufficiently trained or the knowledge bases are too awkward, disorganized and disparate to easily navigate – it is, by default, making it hard for the customer to have a good experience. So the questions remain: Why wouldn’t we want to spend an equal amount of time tracking and measuring our employee effort? How easy it is to work for us, our employee satisfaction and our employee promotion scores, given the impact our people can have on our business and customers?

“From a customer perspective, we measure the customer journey; from promotion to acquisition, utilization, satisfaction and retention, with teams looking at understanding and enhancing all touch points for consistency, simplification, cost optimization and enhanced experience,” wrote Mutch. “We undertake detailed root cause analysis, process improvement, and quality measurement and invest heavily in technology to ensure we are meeting business and customer needs.”

It’s a given that happy contact center agents are in a far better position to make for happy customers. For this to happen, most companies today will need to make changes in their customer support technology foundation, their quality monitoring, their hiring and training practices and their contact center management. When agents are treated like valuable professionals who hold a company’s most precious assets – customer relationships – in their hands, it becomes easy to chart a path to an outstanding customer experience.