Contact centers, like many other professional industries, must handle and integrate different types or channels of communications. Customers expect and demand seamless and professional services beyond the traditional method of picking up the telephone, the main way customers communicated in the past. Besides audio calls, contact centers must respond to text messages (e-mail, SMS, chat) and even video. For quality - and process optimization as well as compliance, these communications channels must be recorded and integrated into contact center software to fully enable workforce optimization (WFO).

Multichannel Recording and Workforce Optimization

Workforce optimization encompasses communications recording, quality monitoring, speech analytics, eLearning and workforce management. Speech analytics helps high-volume contact centers with an otherwise unmanageable volume of communications. eLearning creates a loop of continual training as it finds the weak points of individual agents and then eliminates them through customized instruction. Workforce management ensures the right agent is assigned to the right job at the right time.

Recording software should display all forms of customer communications in an integrated overview. Conversations should be searchable, then filtered and replayed in innovative and user-friendly templates. Moreover, the audio conversations must be accessed by WFO features such as speech or content analytics. With multichannel recording, agents’ and customers’ behavior can be analyzed, and the whole working process can be enhanced, leading to higher customer satisfaction as well as more efficient and satisfied agents.

Multichannel Recording and Screen Activities

Screen recording plays a major role in the contact center environment. It enables a full overview of agent activities as well as an analysis of their reaction to emerging screen events. For security reasons, the customers’ confidential information must remain hidden so screen recording software must recognize and hide credit card details entered by the customer. Screen recording can serve as a process optimizer as well. Special features and applications should recognize deviations from pre-defined processes. By doing so, agents can be more fully trained, and the whole customer-service process can be improved.

Perhaps, the most critical screen activity involves social media. This channel readily allows external communications outside of the contact center, and poor service can be easily magnified by an unsatisfied customer. For this reason, only agents familiar with social media culture should be assigned to these channels.

Conclusion

Multichannel recording enables sophisticated workforce optimization because many WFO applications and features are based on recorded communications by audio and text alike. It also improves agent capabilities and customer retention. A superior recording solution will adapt to various modes of communications and serve as a driving factor for improving contact center quality. To do so, the recording software must be flexible, scalable and adaptable.