With new, multi-vendor AI, data, and analytics tools and hybrid working models, contact center environments are becoming even more complex than just five years ago.
Yet, each solution plays its part in the patchwork quilt that enables the desired customer experience outcomes. Unfortunately, the stitching that holds everything together is not always reliable.
Indeed, a next-generation, growing CX stack is not always easy to maintain. And, when journey frictions and outages arise, it is much more difficult to detect and diagnose technology issues before they significantly impact customer, employee, and business outcomes.
What is User Journey Monitoring?
Our CX suite “hammers” the contact center with simulated customer interactions to test resiliency. In doing so, operations garner unique insights that pave the way for smooth service experiences.
Its latest addition to this platform is User Journey Monitoring (formerly VoiceWatch). By emulating real-world customer interactions, the solution scours the entire telephony system for current and potential technical problems. These occur as contacts pass between the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the IVR application.
Such a tool is helpful to test contact center deployments and accelerate digital transformation. Yet, perhaps more pertinently, it makes it easy to find the root cause when technology errors arise.
Building on this point, Mark Kowal, Director of Product Marketing, says:
Typically, contact center administrators search for areas that they believe could be causing the issue but may not address the complete problem, leading to unintended consequences of not correcting the root cause. Our solution covers the entire call experience from the cradle to the grave.
What’s more, the solution develops forecasts to proactively solve customer issues before they happen. Through such capabilities, companies can simplify cloud migrations, reduce time to market, and continuously safeguard customer satisfaction and effort.
What differentiates User Journey Monitoring?
Bad brand interactions stay with customers. 2020 Shep Hyken research suggests that 96% of customers leave brands because of poor customer service. Consider the voice channel as an example. Delays, awful audio, and chaotic conversations have a lasting effect.
For this reason – alongside others – many companies turn to CX testing tools. Four factors are significant differentiators:
Customization – A worthwhile CX user journey monitoring solution enables users to create, configure, and run tests across almost any contact center ecosystem, no matter the vendor. No submission of change requests. The control is in your hands.
Omnichannel – Harnessing the power of VistaOne, our user journey monitoring solution assesses contacts as they shift across channels – such as web live chats, texts, and email – facilitating high-quality omnichannel experiences.
End-to-End Experience – Unlike other solutions, our User Journey Monitoring capability can test the entire end-to-end experience, not only ensuring every call reaches its destination but also that the right information is delivered with it. For example, a customer may test a true end-to-end experience where calls are monitored through the IVR to the agents at a BPOs, complex integrations and transfers, and multiple domains.
Data Analytics – Offering real-time visibility of how the contact center is running, User Journey Monitoring allows access to trending analysis, customized reporting, and a transparent view of where failures occur.
The top 3 critical benefits for CX
Without a proactive CX monitoring solution, contact centers must perform manual testing that does not emulate real customer scenarios, making root-cause analysis much more difficult. Aside from streamlining this process, user journey monitoring offers a wealth of benefits to enterprise CX teams.
1) Higher Quality of Experience (QoE)
End-to-end testing, which includes automated customer conversations, allows contact centers to customize tests across various customer journeys – not just through the IVR.
Also, by swiftly removing the risk of audio and network issues, proactive monitoring tools protect business’ reputations and remove infuriating customer pain points.
2) Performance accuracy
With our CX solutions, companies can gain quick insights into how each component of the contact center journey is functioning.
Sharing an excellent example, Kowal says:
Get detailed information on exactly where your IVR and system are breaking – not just a warning that something is wrong. This minimizes diagnostic time and gets issues fixed fast.
In doing so, contact centers can track the availability, accuracy, and performance of network components, voice solutions, and back-end database systems.
As such, operations leaders may monitor all aspects of the system, ensuring integrations operate correctly and that the system is fully functional.
3) Proactive issue discovery
User Journey Monitoring can cut contact center downtime by 95 percent, through proactive issue detection, early discovery, and the diagnosis of troublesome faults.
In some industries this is mission-critical: system issues are more than just an incredible expense. They need to be reported to government agencies, regulators, and various institutions. The utilities sector is a prime example of this.
As such, forecasting potential issues is both a money and reputation saver, which User Journey Monitoring achieves by isolating persistent bottlenecks and concerning system trends. Building on this point, Kowal adds:
Complement existing system management and passive monitoring tools with ongoing customer experience monitoring is critical.
With User Journey Monitoring, companies can find issues before they cause significant problems, saving time, money, and sanity for agents and customers alike.
Charlie Mitchell, CX Today - Read the original article here.
