Businesses are competing more than ever to achieve customer loyalty given the many options available to today’s consumer. With increasing stakes and multiple channels available to reach a business, a sophisticated quality assurance program is essential to understanding customer preferences.
If you capture customer feedback, you can gain insights into the gaps in a user experience. However, these insights are usually only found through surveys, focus groups, or siloed information from customer calls and comments made on social media. While these traditional methods to capturing data have merit, relying solely on these channels doesn’t provide the type of insights necessary to optimizing today’s customer experience.
The most successful businesses in 2015 will combine these traditional approaches with a deeper set of analytics to understand their modern multi-channel consumer. The most effective way to gather those business insights is to leverage customer feedback from multiple channels along with insights gleaned from a quality contact monitoring program to drive meaningful business outcomes from the integrated data and analytics.
Incorporating Analytics to QCM
Combining traditional quality contact monitoring with more in-depth analytics can help a business gather insights that not only develop internal processes, but also improve external efficiencies to benefit the customer experience. To gather these insights, an organization must train its assessors to capture additional information from the monitored interactions. From there, integrate the quality contact monitoring data with additional data from customer feedback, including complaint data, along with other areas of the organization such as sales and billing. This will help identify business process improvements and implement meaningful actions that put the customer first.
By monitoring more than just agent performance, businesses can gain insights into the following areas:
- Upstream process issues driving contact volumes:
One good example of this is an airline company with a mobile app that customers can use to purchase and check into flights from their smartphones. Once the app is created, however, the business may receive calls from customers saying they aren’t getting a confirmation email. QCM, combined with the right analytics, can identify the bottleneck in the email’s process and transfer the issue to the right person to solve the problem quickly. In this case, QCM would identify the issue and push it upstream to the IT department. - Demand for new product:
If customers aren’t getting what they need, or enough of it, they will let an organization know. Understanding and prioritizing new products is essential to the success of a business. The ability to measure demand is possible by applying benchmark data to quality contact monitoring.
- Gaps in customer service:
Customer service isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy, yet there are baseline solutions to strengthening the customer experience. For example, when customers order a product or service, they expect it to be delivered on time. However, if an organization receives complaints that customers want a better sense of delivery times, that organization can implement a series of strategic changes to allow for more accurate arrival estimations.
- Issues impacting customers’ ability to self-serve:
Customers expect to reach the organizations with which they do business on multiple channels, yet if they can’t do so seamlessly, they’ll become frustrated. If a customer begins a transaction on a computer and continues on his or her mobile device, the transition should not be difficult. When a customer can’t self-serve, the customer experience is more likely to turn negative. Understanding where customers are reaching an organization aids in providing the best experience.
Businesses can convert customer feedback to true business advantages by combining the key learning they receive from multiple customer touchpoints along with those from quality contact monitoring. By listening, capturing, and analyzing critical customer insights, organizations can identify root causes behind where they are failing in the customer experience and produce actionable strategies that create more valuable customer engagements. By integrating data with quality contact monitoring, businesses can improve the current-state of customer experience and operational performance.
Daren Moore president at management consulting firm The Northridge Group.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
