How to report across multiple channels

Most customer service systems keep customer data siloed within each channel, i.e., in chat, phone, or email. A customer’s information and history with your company could be locked up in their chat history, but now that same customer is trying to solve their problem over the phone. Your agents who handle the phones might not have any previous customer context and so they ask the customer to repeat the issue and start the process all over, making the process more difficult for both your agents and customers. Without a natively-integrated reporting solution, workflow optimization is difficult and possibly nonexistent. You’ll need the right tools to be able to report across multiple channels, but first, there are some basics to think about when it comes to using data to improve operations across multiple channels.

3 ways to use your data to improve operations across multiple channels:

1. Define key metrics across channels

Align with your stakeholders and ask yourself, are you optimizing for CSAT? Resolution time? These need to be defined before rolling out any analytics. Work as a team to decide what your business defines as success before building out your dashboard. Your stakeholders don’t need all the details, they need key omnichannel metrics or KPIs, metrics like volume by channel, response time by channel, which groups are working each channel, and how they’re trending over time. Not only can this help you staff channels properly, it can help improve first reply times and general handle times. It’s also important to remember self-service metrics, such as self-service page abandon rate, content virality, escalation, and recontact rates.

2. Collect and understand data that encompasses the customer journey

If you want to improve operations, you’ll need to better understand your customers’ needs. To understand their needs, you’ll need to understand how they interact with your brand at each touchpoint. It’s important to collect and interpret data on customer profiles, behavior, workflows, and requests, etc. According to My Customer, here are some questions you should ask and collect data on:

• Why did the customer contact support?

• What touchpoints in the customer journey resulted in this interaction?

• How were these issues solved previously?

My Customer also touches on how important customer data is in real-time. Real-time data can provide a deeper look into the exact point in which a customer reaches out for help. With real-time data, you’ll have more information to make informed decisions about how to handle their query, which is why it’s important to collect data from as many sources as possible. For example, if a customer has reached out about a return multiple times via email, live chat, or even social media, you can use data from all these interactions to avoid repeating customer service workflows.

Collecting data is only one part of the puzzle. You can also use real-time customer data to help with company operations and optimization. For example, let’s say your agents are repeatedly linking a help article to customers about an area of your product. While you might be able to send out content to help serve the issue, there’s a much broader customer experience issue at hand. Using Zendesk’s Explore, it’s possible to turn this into an opportunity to obtain data and analyze what the customer experience looks like for customers, and where, or even if, the issue-related information is available for customers. When armed with specific data and information about your customers’ touchpoints, you’ll be able to ultimately optimize where information is shown on your website, making it easier for customers to navigate your product. With the data collected through Zendesk’s Explore, you’ll be able to drive a broader customer experience change.

3. Automate where you can

Typically, businesses spend a lot of time working on configurations before they can even analyze data. For example, businesses may export data from a variety of systems into excel files to run an analysis, which isn’t pretty and requires a ton of manual work. Or larger businesses equipped with customer service tools that have poor analytics abilities may have data engineers who work to pull data from their customer service system to build data models in SQL. That generally means spending a ton of time preparing data for people to analyze. However you cut it, businesses often have difficult work flows for analyzing data.

Businesses should consider out of the box, pre-built data dashboards that help take a deeper dive into metrics. Pre-built dashboards are often full of metrics that help CX leaders understand the omnichannel experience that their business provides. Explore handles data extraction and loading of data so that businesses can begin focusing on analyzing the data instantly. Explore’s charts and dashboards can also automatically refresh or update to specific timeframes, so you don’t have to build a chart each month to look at “this month’s data”. It simply happens automatically. Lastly, you can automate the delivery of data to anyone on your team. By simply setting up a schedule, you can send the dashboard in an email to anyone, so no-one has to spend time personally pulling data.

A unified tool

Support leaders need centralized KPIs across all of their channels so that in a single view, they can see how all their customers interact with their business—they need to be able to collect data that encompasses the entire customer journey. With one place to see metric, across channels, support leaders would then be able to see trends over time and could spot areas that need improvement.

Learn more about Explore here.