Developing Business Centric Call Center Quality Assurance – Asking the Right Questions

The saying in business that you can’t manage what you can’t measure is so true that it became cliché’.   When it comes to call center quality assurance at today’s organizations, latest generation technologies breathe new life into this over-used expression.   For more than a decade now, QA teams have been using agent centric approaches, listening to calls at random for the purpose of inspecting call handling skills (x or % of calls per Agent per month).    Agent-centric call monitoring will always have a place in call center quality assurance as an element of a broader quality program, but progressive contact centers should not be satisfied that this method is enough.

The amount of calls and transaction types that flow through the enterprise can be staggering; and let’s face it, not all contacts are of equal concern for inspection.   Sure, it is nice to know that an associate is handling an address change request with respect and professionalism, but the transaction itself is a low value interaction – so inspecting it simply adds cost to a transaction that tells you very little about the business.  

Latest technologies enable a practical and cost effective approach to increasing the business value of call center quality assurance - termed Precision Quality Monitoring.   Instead of relying on a solely agent based approach,  rules for inspection can be more concerned with call outcomes.   Precision Quality Monitoring recognizes that the best answers – those answers that lead to cost reduction and improved outcomes -- are a function of the most interesting questions.   Instead of asking, how is a particular associate doing with ten random calls per month, the questions can change within a Precision Quality Monitoring context to be customer or operations focused.    Instead of looking for random interactions, the questions driving inspection can be more focused: show me calls that resulted in a sale of product type X, that also included product Y, and had a value greater than $150.    In a service situation, the question may be framed this way: “Show me all calls where John Smith called me from Store 123 in the last 10 days,” or “Show me all calls from case #4567,” or “Show me all examples where calls related to issue XYZ has led to multiple calls from the same caller in the last 30 days.”   These types of questions are operations and outcome focused. They get to the heart of issues and help you uncover ways to improve the business – ways that transcend agent behavior, yet fully account for this key performance element.

To learn how to incorporate and leverage intelligent, business centric questions in your call center quality assurance process, visit: http://www.vpi-corp.com/Call-Center-Quality-Assurance-Management-Software.asp