Is Your Contact Center Having Quality Management?

Today, every business revolves around customer experience and so do contact centers. For offering consistent services, it is a must for businesses to have the right people pitching the right things at the right time. This is where quality management comes into play. It allows the call center to monitor and analyze the agent’s performance and improve customer interaction. Let’s understand quality management in detail by further knowing its benefits, techniques and more.

Benefits of quality management

From customer and agent to business, quality management benefits all

• A positive work environment promotes the stability of employees and brand loyalty. Further, interacting with similar names grow customer’s loyalty in the business.

• Constructive feedbacks received regularly enhance agents’ performance and process. They can further work on their skills respectively and improve the quality of interaction.

• Tools like supervisor desktop and contact center wallboards help in agent performance analysis, thereby giving full visibility and motivation to the better performers. Good performance eventually increases customer retention.

• With quality analysis and evaluation, there is a scope for identifying the areas where agents require training or guidance and hiring parameters. Also, it helps in the call routing process.

Techniques for quality management

There are various tools and modes of monitoring quality at a contact center. Quality Monitoring can be random or targeted monitoring. The former is generally selected on criteria such as the longest call or shortest call to see if the agent is following the script, has clear communication, behavior, and so on. Whereas the latter is focused on important calls such as interaction with a VIP customer or on issues related to poor feedback, order cancellations, etc. So, targeted monitoring is much preferred by the contact centers to analyze the real loopholes and areas of improvement for training selection.

Another monitoring is analytics-driven. This is an automated approach that analyzes quality with tools monitoring speech and text across channels to improve performance. Supervisors can have a deep understanding of issues and processes as these customer interactions are valuable data for setting trends.

Multichannel monitoring – Today customer prefers to interact with businesses via multiple channels such as voice, chat, social media, email, etc. This makes it imperative to monitor the quality and standard of interaction on all platforms. Businesses can be thus prepared for a multichannel customer experience strategy.

Outcome-based – This monitoring is based on the long-term effect i.e. customer retention. It is not just about the agent’s behavior but the overall performance that includes handling issues, product knowledge, etc. This boosts customer satisfaction, loyalty, and reputation.

Sustaining quality assurance

Clear defining of the contact center objectives is essential for quality assurance. Below are the areas that need to be focussed and analyzed for customer experience with quality management

Call Recording – Voice is still the most preferred form of interaction, so it is important to get it fixed in the first go itself. Prefer a tool that is capable of analyzing communication done via various channels such as chat, email, etc. This can be anytime heard or viewed for quality monitoring and assurance. Also, interaction history and custom metadata should be entered for evaluation purposes.

Agent Scripts – Contact center agent scripting tool is yet another effective method to assure quality. It has a series of guided scripts that are dynamic in nature. So, can be modified and updated whenever required. This will grow efficiency and adherence to compliance. Agents won’t go off track or deviate from the conversation that assures quality interactions.

Knowledge Base – For maintaining quality, it is essential that the agents are updated about all information related to business, product, and processes. When equipped with the required information, the agents are able to produce a better quality of interaction and positive experience for customers. This in-built gadget is a repository of all required data customer is looking forward to receiving from the company.

Supervisor Desktop – For live monitoring and evaluation of calls, supervisor desktop is the best option. A supervisor or senior can rigorously monitor and manage agents. It allows agents reskilling, chat with agents and guide when required, silently monitor conversations or barge in live interactions whenever required. Various 3rd party applications can be integrated for quality monitoring and management.

Training – Undoubtedly, call centers are always deficient in time as they need to attend numerous calls in a given time period. This reduces the count of training. With the help of quality monitoring, it gets easy for organizations to identify who needs training and on what topics. This focussed approach saves time and improves quality.

Evaluation Form – After providing all guidance and utilizing monitoring tools, it is important to evaluate agents regularly. The form should not be too long and include simple questions targeted to understand the agent’s score. Here, the scoring method needs to be a point-based system on a scale of 1-5. Some of the major fields the form can’t miss to have are

• Business awareness – Based on the knowledge base shared, agents should be aligned with company goals and well-versed with product information

• Customer experience – Analyse how smoothly a customer is able to walk through the process and website. The number of calls or interactions it took for resolving issues and so on.

• Communication skills – It is necessary that an agent possess good communication skill. An agent should be able to understand the customer’s concern and reply accordingly that meets customer satisfaction.

• Technical support – Agents should be well aware of the software being used. It should be analyzed on the grounds of integration and intuitive interface that further saves agents’ time lost in training/using a complex one.

To get the best results from the above-mentioned quality management efforts, it is essential to check that no blunders are repeated such as ignorance of QA and data analysis, inconsistent evaluation and that too by inefficient staff who are unable to guide agents.