On Broadway, shows will run for weeks, months and even years. The length of the run is dependent upon how long they keep selling tickets, so the producers must be constantly monitoring ticket sales and making sure that the customer experience (in this case the audience experience) is positive, and one that elicits rave reviews and referralsDo you think that people would still come from around the world, purchasing high-priced tickets and packing themselves into seats for the opportunity to watch these productions if the actors only rehearsed up until opening night and then stopped rehearsals and just ran the show?
If that were the standard approach, the answer is surely no. No one would come. Why? Because actors would forget their lines or speak them blandly, becoming too comfortable with run-of-the-mill delivery as a result of daily performances. Stagehands and props masters may miss their cues. And after weeks of productions – sometimes multiple per day – the chemistry between actors would become stale. Perhaps most importantly, those on stage would miss the opportunity to learn from the audience, based on laughter, tears, and reactions, on what to beef up, do less or more of, and improve.
On Broadway, opening night is not the end… It’s the start of a new phase: careful, vigilant, and extremely important continuous improvement. And it’s the same for contact centers and customer experience (CX) teams. Deploying new or updated customer journeys into production, launching a new customer interaction channel, or debuting a new self-service chatbot is not the last step in a process, but actually just the beginning of the next and possibly most important phase of the CX lifecycle… customer experience monitoring.
What Is Customer Experience Monitoring?
CX monitoring is the practice of tracking, measuring, and evaluating any and all of the various interactions and touchpoints between customers and a business across each channel. It’s done with the goal of surveying the overall quality of every interaction that an enterprise and its representatives – whether human or conversational artificial intelligence (AI) – have with customers to gather insights and details about where things may be going wrong, and also to identify areas where it may be possible, with adjustments, to improve customer experience.
In order to be able to improve CX through the practice of customer experience monitoring, though, contact centers must have in place tools and technology solutions that enable them to systematically test in-production journeys, synthetically, in real time, or both. They must be able to collect and analyze data related to interactions, customer or agent feedback through voice-of-customer surveys and insights, the performance of third-party providers and integrations that contribute to the CX ecosystem, and the contact center platform that provides the foundation for the CX they offer their customers. With this data, contact center teams can understand where issues occur or mistakes are made, discover which processes need improvement, and find opportunities that are being missed. They can bring these insights to CX designers and developers who can tune, adjust, and improve the CX. It’s a rinse-and-repeat, never-ending process that customer-centric organizations that truly care about providing flawless customer experiences practice with rigor.
Modern Challenges of CX Monitoring
In today’s world, conducting meaningful, thorough, and accurate CX monitoring is extremely difficult. The dynamic and fast-paced landscape of modern business, rapidly evolving use of conversational AI in CX, and massive shift to cloud-based contact centers (CCaaS) presents those responsible for CX monitoring with many common challenges, including:
1. Technology Integration: Many organizations use multiple tools, systems, applications, and third-party services or providers for different ways of monitoring the CX. Integrating these technologies to work seamlessly and provide a unified view of performance is a massive challenge. This problem is greatly amplified for cloud-based contact centers. By moving to the cloud, operations teams have surrendered a level of control and visibility over their technology. And CCaaS operations involve layers upon layers of integrations and technology intersections that introduce numerous potential breakpoints, only some of which CX teams may be aware of. This makes it difficult or even impossible to understand the source of issues and resolve them.
2. Multichannel Complexity: Customers interact with businesses through various channels, such as websites, mobile apps, emails, and chatbots. Coordinating and integrating data from these diverse channels to get a complete, holistic view of the customer journey can be complex.
3. Data Overload: The abundance of data generated from different touchpoints can be overwhelming. Analyzing and extracting meaningful insights from vast amounts of data requires sophisticated tools and strategies.
4. Real-time Monitoring: Customers expect quick responses, solid connections, and swift resolutions. Real-time monitoring of live interactions between customers and agents is beneficial to monitor the quality of audio, connectivity, and transfer of data and ensure that contact center agents are able to help customers. However, this is often hard to do without interfering with CX and while ensuring data privacy is maintained.
5. Keeping Up with Technology Advances: The landscape of CX monitoring technologies is continually evolving. Adding single-purpose tools from different providers to handle various types of monitoring only contributes to the first challenge mentioned in this list, but finding a solution that provides an entire suite of monitoring services to cover all your needs can be tricky.
So like Broadway actors rehearsing for shows, companies must constantly hone their craft of building and delivering flawless customer experiences. To do this, they must overcome the above-listed customer experience monitoring challenges so that they may test in-production journeys, measure the quality of live interactions with customers, observe the accuracy and seamlessness of chatbot responses and handoffs to agents, and keep a close eye on CX to ensure they’re meeting the needs of customers, even as trends and preferences change.
