3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

For all the time companies spend today trying to perfect their customer processes, it doesn’t seem to be working very well. Customers’ expectations are higher than ever, and a plurality of customers report feeling dissatisfied with all or part of their relationships with companies. A recent survey conducted by Accenture (News - Alert) found that 91 percent of customers surveyed reported they had to contact a company multiple times for the same reason; 90 percent reported being put on hold for a long time; and 89 percent said they have had to repeat their issue to multiple representatives.

Too many companies today focus on the pieces of customer support rather than the whole customer journey. While it’s great that you’ve improved your IVR, retrained your agents, beefed up your digital channels and introduced a mobile app, if these elements aren’t designed to work together, they will hinder rather than help customers who expect a seamless omnichannel experience. Customers also expect to be able to get help and find answers with little effort, and when they have to work hard to resolve their problems, their opinion of a company will decline.

In a recent blog post, Fonolo’s (News - Alert) Nicolina noted that customer journey tracking helps businesses begin to understand their customer’s behaviors and uncover details that they otherwise wouldn’t catch. This is particularly critical as customers transcend devices and communications channels.

“It’s as if customers need to be swayed into the purchase as they jump from device-to-device, which is why improving the customer experience is so important,” she wrote. “If any of these user experiences are not designed with this in mind, it’s possible your customers will give up completely, rather than starting over again with the original device. By tracking the customer journey from each device you can see where skews in the experience are occurring, and optimize from there.”

When you’re accurately able to follow a customer’s journey, you’ve given yourself more opportunities to re-engage and upsell them through their favorite channels. Following your customers’ journey, however, is not an easy thing to do. Most agents see only pieces of a customer’s relationship – single transactions or callbacks – which means they don’t get a good perspective. You may require a separate quality team to track your customers as they progress through the channels and ranks of your organization.

Customer satisfaction surveys can be adjusted to get a better picture of customers’ journeys, so if you’re currently doing surveys (or outsourcing them to another organization), think of how you can revamp them to help get a better picture. Third-party remote monitoring can also make a big difference. Many companies seeking to track the customer journey approach quality monitoring organizations such as BPA Quality to ensure their call quality monitoring is systematic and the evaluation is independent and consistent. Using these services, companies can ensure the monitoring of not only phone calls, but emails, chat and even social media in a way that presents “the big picture” to the customer support organization. Roadblocks and pitfalls can be identified, and processes can be revamped to ensure a smoother customer journey from beginning to end.