Tag: service

Omnichannel Supervisor Tools

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:

Sentiment analysis notification

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.

Conversations insights dashboard

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!

Excelling in Customer Service

I was out with some friends from the Microsoft technical community over the weekend, and obviously we got to talking about what we’re passionate about, our visions and values, and what we’re trying to achieve – in essence, what drives us.

From my side of things, I believe very strongly in the vision of excelling in customer service. It’s one of the main reasons that I started this blog, to be able to share my passion for it with others, and help them with getting along the journey on this as well. Obviously I also talk about other things in the technical universe, and have some fun along the way as well (which is also very important!), but ultimately I generally try to have my material centred around customer service.

Now it might seem obvious as to why customer service is so important. After all, we all want to have the best experience possible.

Close-up of Human Hand

But hold on – take a moment or two, and ask yourself exactly what excelling in customer service actually means to you? What comes to mind when you say it to yourself, and what visions are conjured up?

Having spoken with many people along the way, some of the answers that come out of this exercise can be:

  • Being able to be understand by the retailer/service provider, and feeling that my custom is actually appreciated
  • Being able to resolve any issues quickly and easily, without having delays or mis-understandings
  • Knowing that they value me, and go above/beyond in what they’re providing
  • Being able to call up to check on the status of a support case, and the customer service agent seeing my past history; not that they have to ask me absolutely everything again, and start at the very beginning!

Now flip the scenario around, and imagine that you’re providing a service, or a brand. What does excellent customer service mean to you, and why is it so important?

Again, some of the common themes and concepts that come out of this include:

  • Knowing that my customers like my service, and will stay loyal
  • My customers aren’t just about the price that they pay. Even if we’re charging more than others, they appreciate the support and additional actions that we undertake for them
  • Our clients know that we’ll do whatever is necessary to handle any issues that occur

There are plenty of examples of companies who have not just good, but great customer service. I’ve experienced a few myself over the years.

There’s the amazing example of an Amazon support representative who took the initiative in a support conversation to say that they’re Thor (a Norse god). The customer wanted to play along, and well, the rest can be seen below:

Did the support agent solve the problem? Yes. Did the customer walk away feeling that the situation was resolved? Yes. But…did the customer feel that they were engaged and had a positive support experience, and would continue with the provider? YES!!

I had a support session once myself with Amazon (unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot of it anymore) where the support session turned into comparing different fruits, and the benefits of each. Was it germane to the support session? Nope – but I came out of it feeling that the agent was really trying to understand me, and go above/beyond the general support role.

In today’s day and age, where there are so many competitors in markets, it’s the customer service that REALLY can make a specific brand or service provider stand out. It’s this that ensures that customers stay loyal, feel rewarded and empowered, and even recommend to others (which is, at the end of the day, absolutely free marketing for the company!).

Two great examples of this have been demonstrated by Lego and Trader Joe’s:

Lego

Losing a favourite toy feels devastating to a young child. Longtime Lego fan Luka Apps spent all of his Christmas money on a Ninjago (Lego ninja). Against his dad’s advisement, he brought his Ninjago on a shopping trip … and lost it. Luka wrote a letter to Lego explaining his loss and assuring the Lego staff that he would take extra-special care of his action figure if they sent him another one:

The response he received from Lego customer support representative Richard was nothing short of amazing. Richard told Luke that he had talked to Sensei Wu (a Ninjago character), writing:

Trader Joe’s

An elderly man, 89 years of age, was snowed in at his Pennsylvanian home around the holidays, and his daughter was worried that he wasn’t going to have access to enough food due to the impending storm and bad weather in the area.

After calling multiple stores in a desperate attempt to find anyone who would deliver to her father’s home, she finally got hold of someone at Trader Joe’s, who told her that they also do not deliver … normally.

Given the extreme circumstance, they told her that they would gladly deliver directly to his home, and even suggested additional delivery items that would fit perfectly with his special low-sodium diet.

After the daughter placed the order for the food, the employee on the phone told her that she didn’t need to worry about the price; the food would be delivered free of charge. The employee then wished her a Merry Christmas.

Less than 30 minutes later the food was at the man’s doorstep — for free!
In refusing to let red tape get in the way of a customer in need, Trader Joe’s shows that customer service doesn’t need to be about the fanfare; it can simply be about doing the right thing.

The above two examples show how companies can go above and beyond, and deliver stellar customer service. In these stories, did they make anything on it financially? Well no, not immediately. But the customer appreciation and loyalty, not to mention the (eventual) publicity, is priceless. Customers WANT to have a company or service provider that would do this sort of thing for them in an emergency.

Having been involved with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 product for over a decade now, I’ve carefully followed the path that it’s taken, and where the roadmap seems to be pointing to.

Now, Unified Service Desk (USD) has been around for a while, and it’s a really good product. Neil Parkhurst has written extensively on the subject over the years (take a look at https://neilparkhurst.com/ for more information around it). Omnichannel is, in my opinion, NOT a replacement for USD, though it could play a part in it (one of the reasons it’s not a replacement is because Omnichannel can’t connect to legacy on-premise systems, whereas USD can).

However, I believe that for companies that have a cloud-centric approach, Omnichannel is really the key answer to bringing all of their customer engagements together. Together with the enterprise-grade routing that’s available within it, it can enable and empower organisations like nothing before (well, nothing without having to write a LOT of very custom code, of course).

Being able to effortlessly serve communication across all contact channels, seeing the history of these interactions, and building the customer appreciation and loyalty really is what is key for all businesses now. It’s what will make them stand out from their competition, draw customers in, and put themselves ahead of everyone else

three black escalators

This is where Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 has been positioned, and the value that it will bring to all. It’s an amazing journey, and it’s only getting started!