Many companies underestimate just how much the customer experience on digital channels matter.
And as much as I hate succumbing to any of the Millennial stereotypes (thank you in advance, Generation Z for joining the workforce so everyone can talk about YOU now), I avoid talking on the phone as much as I can.
Short of breaking up with someone, I communicate most everything over text and email. So, it’s no surprise that when it comes to dealing with businesses, I prefer to use digital channels over live phone calls.
Studies show I am not alone in this preference. In our 2019 NICE Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark study, we found that businesses greatly underestimate customers’ likelihood to recommend their company based on their experiences with online chat, apps and websites.
Now think about service over your digital channels. Would you want those customer experiences factoring into your NPS?
If the answer is “no” or “I don’t know,” it might mean you’re among the vast majority not evaluating these channels as part of your quality program.
In a 2017 study titled Modern Standards for Managing Contact Center Quality, ICMI found a huge gap between the percentage of organizations that are using digital channels to communicate with customers and those that are using Quality Management (QM) to evaluate these channels.
- 90% of businesses support phone, and 83% measure phone quality — great!
- 78% of businesses support email, but only 45% measure email quality — not so great.
- 44% of businesses support chat, but only 27% measure chat quality — even worse!
And it only gets worse from here!
Customers expect high quality and consistent interactions with businesses every time, regardless of interaction channel. So, if QM is the main mechanism contact centers utilize to ensure high quality, then it only makes sense that QM programs should evolve to encompass evaluations and feedback on digital channels as well.
Not measuring the quality on your digital channels can create negative customer experiences and also can be a disservice to your agents. You may have agents who are strong on voice but struggle with other channels.
You keep telling the contact center they need to improve on digital channels, but just like on voice, agents need ongoing evaluation, feedback, and coaching to improve.
Without this evaluation, you may be overlooking some additional key facets to the customer experience that are specific to the written components of digital channels, such as agent grammar, word choice, and spelling.
Digital conversations laced with grammar and spelling mistakes can make your company look unprofessional and downright silly, and what consumer wants to entrust their dollars with a company that can’t even spell?
I am sure that the disparity between the use of digital channels in contact centers and their level of evaluation is not due to lack of desire. If you had all the time and resources in the world, of course you’d evaluate every interaction, across every channel you offer.
Well, now you don’t need all the time and resources in the world, you just need Quality Management Analytics.
Quality Management Analytics empowers you to create quality plans across all the different channels you offer — voice, email, chat, text, etc. You can automatically route interactions for evaluation based on specific criteria and sophisticated analytics engines.
For example, you only may want to evaluate emails or chats related to a new product you are offering to assess how well your agents are promoting it. Or you can evaluate interactions where specific words or phrases were used help you proactively identify trends in customer issues.
You can do all this and more plus seamlessly incorporate these evaluations into your current evaluation process for quality management.
By not evaluating how well your digital channels are serving your customers, you can put your entire business at risk.
If service is substandard, your customers will simply take their business elsewhere, and they won’t email or text to let you know they are leaving — and if they are Millennials or Gen Xers, they certainly won’t call!
