In the current climate, almost every day brings a new challenge for businesses. Contact centers have been at the forefront, handling unprecedented call volumes and queries for which most organizations don't have a protocol. Remaining efficient while adapting to the continuous changes and requirements thrust upon your contact center is crucial to delivering a satisfactory level of customer service right now.
Monitoring your contact center technology allows you to spot issues before they impact performance; taking the necessary steps to ensure early detection will give your team peace of mind that everything is working as it should be.
We've reached out to contact centers to help identify some of the practical issues they're tackling at the moment and offer support with our free monitoring service – an initiative we are rolling out to help contact centers during this uncertain period.
Here are some of the top reasons why you need to implement effective monitoring of your contact center.
1. We're experiencing higher call volume, are we still operating as expected?
You may have performed load tests before, but these are strange and unprecedented times. You're likely altering code or making real-time adaptations to your IVR system in response to changing expectations as a direct result of the pandemic. Under these circumstances, you'll want to know that everything is still ticking over, particularly as call volume increases and your new scripts are put to the test.
Regular, automated monitoring ensures that you're always up to speed with the functionality of your system at any given time. Consistency in customer experience (CX) builds reassurance with customers that you are doing everything possible to serve their needs.
2. Are our carriers coping with the increased stress on their systems?
It's no secret that connection failure rates have increased as carriers have been overburdened with communication demands. Your network's bandwidth may be struggling with the increase in traffic, but without monitoring, you may be the last to know.
A sure-fire way to lose a customer's faith in your business is to have them ring through to a dead line or have their call dropped. Monitoring will give you visibility over your network's performance and help you to prioritize calls.
3. Is our internal network infrastructure coping with the changes to how traffic is moving across it?
Glitches happen, and when your network infrastructure is overloaded, mysterious things can start to crop up – like an influx of calls to a team or individual that doesn't typically handle the particular queries coming their way.
If traffic isn't routing through your IVR system correctly, clients may grow irritable and frustrated with their experience. Automated testing will help you to keep traffic flowing along the intended channels and help you to continue delivering results for customers as expected.
4. Is the audio quality of calls that are being answered by remote agents clear?
Many companies have been quick to embrace remote working to allow their business to continue operating and assisting customers. While this move has been necessary and highly effective for organizations whose customers heavily rely on their contact centers, there is the issue of connectivity and call quality for remote agents.
Monitoring will help to ensure that any switches in your network that have been put in place to accommodate distance workers are functioning effectively. What's more, you'll be quickly alerted to latency issues, jitter, or packet loss on a call so that you can quickly jump in and help to fix the connection quality. This will help you to continue delivering excellent service – even if your team is working remotely.
5. We're making a number of changes to our announcements as the situation evolves. Are these working as they should?
Governments are changing policies and lockdown rules almost daily. For many businesses, this directly impacts their operation strategies and even their customer service policies. This means there’s a good chance you’ll have to update your announcements regularly. Normally, you'd have time to test new scripts or have your development team close at hand if immediate adaptations were required.
Since your workforce is now spread out and operating from remote locations, you want to ensure that changes are rolled out successfully, despite the new barriers and possible delays in communication between teams. Occam's monitoring tool will give you shareable reports on all configurations so that you can stay on top of recent launches and make sure that customers are receiving the right messages.
Ultimately, you want contact center operators to focus on what they do best – helping your customers. While it may be challenging to keep on top of your system's performance under your new remote working conditions, there are helpful tools available to assist you in making your contact center's operations as seamless as possible.
By implementing frequent automated monitoring and testing of your IVR system, you can stay ahead of any problems and take the necessary steps to fix them – before your customers encounter them.
We're pleased to offer a free monitoring service for your contact center environment over the next three months. Our team will provide you with constant insights into the performance of your contact center and alert you to any changes.
Don't miss out on this excellent opportunity to bolster your customer service delivery and ensure that your remote contact center operators are able to continue. Click here to find out more.
