Planning, Analysis & Insights User Group : Multi-Channel Operations; Effective Tools & Best Practice

Thursday, 11 July 2024 at 10:00 am – 11am

Reserve your place today & join the discussion!

• What tools should we be looking at? For example, best practice for managing emails?
• Once you’ve multi-channel operational (voice, webchat, email +)  How do you optimally model? What are the tools to use and best practice?
• Effective multi-channel operations:

1. Most of us use two or more channels, top of which are the website (85%), phone (75%), email (65%) and live chat (58%). Despite this, a recent study found that 58% of retailers provide different answers to the same question across multiple channels. This is not a surprise, as too often, although a contact centre will support multichannel communication, these channels are managed in silos. For the planning department, this creates great complexity and manual effort if their workforce management system does not offer multichannel forecasting methods.
2.  Get the Technology Right – Most of the latest enterprise workforce management (WFM) solutions today facilitate automated or serviced queues across multiple channels. It may be difficult, but the “universal” queue or the integrated platform is possible, enabling the customer to move easily between channels.
3. Understand the demand and Get the Staffing Right – The WFM application will be able to forecast the requirements for each contact type across the day and provide proactive real-time management to cope with unexpected demand. Also, WFM will capture the volumes and handling times to build a set of historical profiles that can be used to improve the accuracy of forecasts across different contact types.
4. Empower the Employees – Consistency of service is critical for the multichannel experience, and this can only be achieved if the employees have access to knowledge and tools for delivering the service. Without a knowledge base and effective performance-management and quality-monitoring support, it will be a real challenge for the employee. Real-time process guidance can be used to assist and prompt employees, whereas other technologies, such as interaction analytics and business intelligence, can provide meaningful insight to the business to ensure processes are efficient and agents are fully supported.