While I’ve covered a lot of different pieces of functionality from both the end customer & agent experience, I haven’t really touched on the Supervisor experience to date. With the release of a nice little piece of functionality for it around Sentiment Analysis, I’ve therefore decided that it would be a good time to take a look at it.
Now obviously supervisors exist, in the sense that any contact centre would have managers in place to manage the agents. Indeed, they may actually handle customer queries directly as well – miracles have been known to happen! 😉
Really the aim of the supervisor role within Omnichannel is intended to help customer service managers or supervisors enhance their team’s performance and improve customer satisfaction. They need to ensure that customer queries:
- Are being responded to quickly within an accepted period of time
- have agents that are providing the right information necessary to handle the query
- Are handled in a satisfactory way
- Leave the customer feeling positive & satisfied around the interaction
To this end, the supervisor role includes access to various dashboards & views on the sessions that are taking place. From this, they’re able to ensure that KPI’s are being met, that queues aren’t overflowing, and that agents are carrying out the right work.
Please note that PowerBI Pro or PowerBI Premium licenses are required for users with the Supervisor role in order to access & view these dashboards
On-going Conversation Dashboard
The on-going conversation dashboard is one of the first tools available to supervisors. In this, they can see the entire ‘landscape’ at one glance, covering:.
- Which conversations are currently active
- The queue that the conversation has come through
- The channel that the conversation has come through
- Which agent is currently handing the interaction
- The sentiment of the customer experience (more on this below)
Through this, there’s a wealth of knowledge that the supervisor can use. If a conversation doesn’t appear to be going well, they can reach out to the agent who’s handling it, and ask if they need assistance. They can be ready to offer escalation resolution should it be needed.
Supervisors are also able to allocate any conversation that’s an in ‘Open’ state (ie it hasn’t yet started) to a specific agent, or to a specific queue.. They would do this by selecting the conversation in the window, clicking the Assign button (which appears when the conversation is selected), & selecting either Agent or Queue. Depending on which option is selected, they can then select the agent or queue that they wish to.
Furthermore, supervisors are also able to monitor any conversation that is happening (as long as it’s in the Active or Wrap Up stage). When doing this, the customer & the agent don’t know that the supervisor is monitoring the conversation (unless the agent requests it, of course). Through this, they can keep an eye on how things are going, and if they feel it’s necessary, they can join it (without needing to be invited to it). Of course when they join the conversation as an active party, the customer is then notified about it.
To do this, a supervisor would select the conversation (providing it is in the ‘Active’ or Wrap Up’ state) and then can click ‘Monitor’. This action triggers a new session for the supervisor to be pulled into the conversation.
Sentiment Analysis for Supervisors
So one of the really cool features (in my opinion) that’s recently appeared is the ability to use sentiment analysis to automatically alert supervisors.
You’re able to choose the level of sentiment that you want supervisors to be alerted on. When a conversation reaches the predefined level, the supervisor will get a prompt like this:
They can then click through to either monitor the conversation (& help out if necessary), or to ignore it. This can be really helpful as it’s allowing the supervisor to be proactive, rather then needing to keep a close eye all the time on the supervisor dashboards. Indeed for a large contact centre, there could be dozens or even hundreds of conversations happening at the same time, so this will immediately flag these conversations to them.
Intraday Insights Dashboard
The Intraday Insights dashboard gives information around KPI’s that are in place for the company. This does need to be configured before supervisors are able to access it – I’d recommend looking at the extensive guide on how to do this at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/omnichannel/administrator/configure-intraday-dashboard-supervisor.
There are two sections that are included:
- Conversations insights
- Agent insights
Conversation Insights
This section gives supervisors insights into conversations that have occurred over the last 24 hours, against a range of KPI’s. This is therefore a ‘rolling state’ dashboard, without the ability to go back further over time, or pick a specific date-range. If this ability is needed, then the Agent Insights dashboard will be used.
As you can see from the image above, we’re looking at metrics across different sorts of KPI’s:
- Average wait times
- Average handling times
- Conversations exceeding specified criteria
This can be very helpful on an on-going basis to see how the contact centre is performing overall, over the time period. Drilling down into these items can help identify bottlenecks & choke points, which can then be worked on to provide better service & efficiencies.
Agent Insights
This part of the dashboard gives information across various health & status items on any given day. Using this, supervisors can drill down into issues that may not be visible through the conversation insights dashboard.
From the screen above, we can see that things like conversation states, agent status & participation modes are available to view.
Because these are PowerBI dashboards, it’s possible to drill down further into them, filter by item (eg queue, agent, etc), and see very specific stats about items.
I hope that this proves to be helpful in understanding some of the tools that are available within Omnichannel for supervisors, and the help that they can give in running an efficient and productive contact centre!
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