Featured in the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) newsletter
After over a decade of doing things the same way, traditional contact center quality monitoring is getting a major facelift. New analytics solutions and best practices are taking the ‘random’ out of and quality monitoring and transforming the way contact centers pursue and the speed in which they achieve their goals.
William A. Foster once said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Today, this quote seems quite appropriate with regard to the quest for improved quality management in the contact center. Contact centers are constantly searching for new ways to cut back without compromising on quality. This is by no means an easy feat, particularly when we take into account the complexities of modern contact center environments and the vast array of quality monitoring technologies available. Fortunately, some of the latest solutions and best practices have been designed to radically improve the effectiveness of the QM process – harnessing the power of a more refined, focused approach.
All Calls are Not Created Equal Many leading organizations have now rejected the concept of “random selection” as part of a viable QM program. They recognize the fact that all calls are not created equal. Some interactions are more relevant and important to achieving an organization’s objectives than others – the key is to determine which recorded interactions to evaluate in order to gain maximum insight and impact. In a traditional contact center quality monitoring program, analysts or supervisors typically select a random sample of calls to evaluate, and score a small number of calls associated to each agent. While traditional random evaluation of low value interactions can enable agent call quality and compliance to be measured to some extent, does not enable management to effectively assess, measure and execute accurate business decisions regarding important operational processes and the customer experience. In addition, the evaluation of low value interactions is a waste of resources – the available time of evaluators and supervisors is scarce, and it’s vital to ensure that their time is focused on high-value tasks, such as evaluating the most coachable calls that also contain the information most relevant to an organization’s business focus.
Progressive organizations are implementing analytics-enabled quality monitoring solutions to tag call recordings with more useful, relevant data. By using analytics-enabled quality monitoring software to tag recorded interactions with more meaningful information, organizations can take a unique targeted approach to improving quality based on the evaluation of pertinent business intelligence.
Powerful new desktop analytics-driven quality monitoring solutions are able to tag important events and data directly from employee’s desktop screen applications to call recordings without any extensive back-end integration work. This enables automated classification and analysis centered on key business issues, such as first contact resolution, customer churn, differences in call handling patterns between employees, frequency of holds/transfers associated with order cancellations, up-sell or cross-sell success of individuals or teams, and much more.
To illustrate the power of desktop analytics - if you were in a sound-proof booth, and could only watch the agent access or enter information, do you think you would have a handle on what the call was about? Sure you would. Using desktop analytics is like looking over their shoulder and automatically taking notes of the key information and events that happen within a call and appending your observations to the call record, so you can understand the call context from an at-glance view before you even listen. For example, you could pull Customer ID, Sales Value, Product Codes, Call Disposition, etc., and place these values in the database associated with the call record. Often the data about the interaction is more important than the call recording itself.
Once the valuable data has been tagged to the interaction, calls can then automatically classified based on the application screens opened and/or fields entered by their contact center agents. Obviously, there are considerable benefits to be reaped when organizations focus their resources on more valuable interactions, such as those associated with high value customers, high value transactions, missed up-sell opportunities, long hold and handle times, one or more transfers or escalations, costly repeat calls, or calls with a specific product focus.
Make the Most of Your Quality Assurance Forms
Another key area that many contact centers are now focusing upon is the development of strong, effective Quality Assurance (QA) forms. It’s crucial to keep QA forms brief and concise – long, rambling forms tend to force evaluators to spend more time completing the evaluations rather than gleaning any measurable, actionable results from them. When designing the QA form it is important to ask questions that are valuable and pertinent to the business. Every question should be owned and some should be held accountable for that question. For example, if up-selling falls below a certain threshold, which person within the team is accountable for making sure that the relevant interactions are being evaluated and the agents are properly trained? It’s also crucial to use different QA forms for different purposes or types of calls. For example, when evaluating sales calls and trying to understand which sales closing tactics are working best, it’s necessary to create a much targeted form. Forms should be reviewed and enhanced periodically — at least every nine to 12 months in order to keep them in sync and fresh with ever-changing business needs and customer expectations.
The Importance of Agent Awareness and Empowerment
The quality monitoring process is inherently agent-focused. However, many organizations don’t maximize the value of actively involving agents in the process. For example, top‐performing agents can be brought in to conduct side‐by‐side peer monitoring and training sessions with agents who are not meeting their potential and are “under‐performing.” Agents learn best from their peers. Using the top performers for this activity will recognize their outstanding performance and help gain their confidence and support of management objectives. It also creates a pathway to a career in management or training that often some top performers have not yet considered. Coaching is the new buzzword these days so why exclude them?
It’s vital for organizations to recognize and embrace the shift in culture from agent control to agent empowerment. Some of the best, most profitable ideas come from agents, and their direct feedback can lend credibility to the QA program. Most agents like being involved in activities like this because they feel that they can contribute enormously when involved in focus groups on improving operational processes and customer experience. Agents should also be included in calibration sessions — it helps them appreciate the effort management puts into accurately assessing calls and emails and fairly evaluating agent performance. It’s also good to invite agent participation in the quality monitoring feedback process, as they can find this quite empowering. This is one of the critical stages that should not be overlooked in the overall continuous improvement process.
Share the Wealth Throughout Your Enterprise
Clearly, delivering an exceptional customer experience is mission-critical and strategically crucial to virtually every enterprise. It is important to constantly advocate for and share the voice of the customer through collaboration with other departments. If quality monitoring reveals an inefficient process, such as billing, that needs attention, the call recording related to the billing process can be sent to the appropriate department managers for review and resolution. The wealth of information to be gleaned from the QM process is valuable to the entire organization and should be shared whenever possible.
Several leading contact centers are implementing executive quality monitoring programs, where senior managers from sales, marketing, operations and all other supporting areas sit with contact center agents as they handle calls, or they automatically receive a sample of high-value recorded interactions from the quality monitoring system to listen to. Often, executives stumble upon new insights and problem-solving solutions simply by listening in to calls or by observing how the agent is delivering quality as envisioned by the CEO. This has been proven to create customer‐focused awareness and foster collaboration between departments — rapid process change is facilitated when senior executives hear for themselves about the impact or lack thereof of their processes and programs on customers. When senior managers take this program seriously and fund it adequately with the relevant resources, it has a very positive impact on agent morale and job satisfaction because it validates and underscores the importance of their job. In addition, the profile of the contact center is raised to another level within the organization, resulting in significant breakthroughs and the emergence of a truly customer-centric organization.
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Just like a home that sometimes needs to be refreshed, traditional quality assurance has reached a fork in the road of its 30-year life. Now's the perfect time to re-evaluate the way we monitor and measure our call center agents and “cleaning house” in the Quality Assurance (QA) department to make room for analytics-oriented QA tools and best practices. By implementing this makeover in your contact center, you can radically reduce manual steps required by most QA applications by more than 60 percent. And, who among us can’t use 60% less manual work?
The holidays are right around the corner and that means everyone’s favorite day to shop, Black Friday, is too! The National Retail Federation recently released its estimates for the holiday shopping season and its expecting an increase this year with total spending reaching $465 billion. Is your call center workforce management team and help desk support center ready to handle the increased call, email and Web chat volume?
Ventana Research just released a new research perspective focused on the use of advanced analytics in the contact center, “
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