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?

Get started with these key items of focus in the new article 'Extreme Makeover: Contact Center QA Edition' authored by Patrick Botz, VP of Workforce Optimization at VPI, featured this month’s issue of Contact Center Association’s Inbound Magazine:

• Random Selection = Random Results The focus is no longer just on recording calls or randomly checking on how well agents adhere to scripts and policies, but rather upon prioritizing customer interactions according to their business value – so that every minute of the in-depth quality evaluation is optimized by its potential to deliver business insights.
• Embrace the New Generation of QA The new generation of QA goes far beyond internal agent compliance – representing a rebirth and evolution of the concept of QA designed to meet the needs of today‘s contact centers. The new, intelligent QA systems rapidly identify and deliver insights into critical business issues and opportunities to improve the customer experience and revenue.
• Using Analytics to Focus QA on Desired Business Outcomes Tagging data directly from desktop screen analytics enables you to focus your QA resources on calls with outcomes such as: Was the call put on hold? Was it transferred? What level of employee was it handled by? Was it a VIP customer? Was there a sale or no sale? What was the value of the sale?
• Re-evaluate your current QA Evaluation Forms As your business evolves every year, so should your QA forms. Ask questions on your call center quality assurance forms that are interesting to your business. Any question that makes the form should be owned and some should be held accountable for that question. For example, if “Upselling” falls below a certain threshold, who is accountable for making sure that agents are being properly coached and trained on upselling? And consider using different QA forms for different call types to get more valuable information from your QA program.
• Rapidly Close Skill Gaps With an automated QA solution, instead of flying blind, every agent, supervisor and executive gets their own personalized desktop ticker, dashboard and scorecard displaying all the metrics or KPIs on which they’re measured in real-time. This level of transparency often leads to improved agent satisfaction and supervisor efficiency.

Spring cleaning may not have been enough this year. Is it time for an Extreme Makeover: QA Edition in your contact center? Check out the full article here. What are you doing to keep your contact center quality assurance program fresh?

Leading industry analyst firm, Gartner, predicts that employees will account for up to 80 percent of contact center budgets in the increasingly demanding world of customer interaction. Such a substantial investment cannot be left to chance, yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and rarely reviewed by managers.

Like many other industries in which employee performance is crucial to the customer experience, the utility industry provides an essential commodity to the public. As they are often under intense scrutiny, utility companies must also take steps to minimize their exposure to liability issues. For utilities that provide direct service to retail power customers, the large volume of customer service calls they manage demands both courtesy and accuracy on the part of call center agents. And, consequently, their contact centers need reliable and effective quality monitoring and training solutions. Similarly, "upstream" energy providers specializing in transmitting power to other utilities need interaction recording systems to accurately record 100% of their service and event calls to and from their technicians (and other utilities) for liability protection and to recreate major incidents.

By now, most successful utility contact centers have already adopted baseline call recording and quality monitoring solutions –  the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution. However, although useful, these solutions can be of limited value if they are outdated, early generation quality monitoring applications,  and may be due for review and reevaluation..

The good news is that quality assurance technologies have evolved significantly. They have now reached  the point where they can enable contact centers to focus the entire process on what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance – all without losing objectivity in the assessment of agent performance.

Anticipate and Plan for Agent Satisfaction to Maximize Operations and the Customer Experience

Customer service and help desk environments have traditionally been known as high-turnover environments, where employees tend to consider their positions to be transient or temporary. There are many things that contact centers can do to overcome this challenge.

To anticipate and reduce  turnover, it is best to give agents some time away from the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling. Allowing agents to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills of becoming expert contact center professionals makes their jobs feel more fulfilling and enables them to provide a better customer experience.

It is also crucial to provide ongoing training. This will keep agents engaged, alert and empowered to quickly and accurately resolve customer issues. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent.

The Right Technology Can Help

In addition to process improvements, implementation of the latest technologies can be crucial to the continued success of utility contact centers. When liability and accuracy are the challenges, it is vital to adopt an interactions recording solution that can record 100 percent of calls and data interactions. Using an advanced telephone call recording solution, utility companies can determine what to retain, for how long, and on which storage device by implementing flexible, intelligent business rules. Recordings can be unified across audio and data sources and multiple locations while users can freely search, locate, playback and share using instant searches and filters.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is the interoperability. Each technology application – recording, QA, performance management, analytics, coaching, E-earning – has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvements in contact center performance and lowering operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making, which helps resolve customer issues.

By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer service — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact center tasks — utility companies can dramatically improve performance and profitability. The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on the specific utility’s needs, goals and circumstances. However, with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

2011 is certainly shaping up to be VPI's year - VPI Quality Pro recently received the 2010 Product of the Year Award from Customer Interaction Solutions (CIS) magazine! Even better, this is the second consecutive year we've won the award. And while our most valued praise always comes from our customers, it never hurts to receive recognition from the industry. We know that selecting a call center Quality Assurance solution is a big decision, and most people rely on industry resources such as TMC and CIS magazine to help guide their decisions.

So, you may be wondering what this award is all about. Each year, CIS presents its Product of Year awards to products and companies in the contact center and CRM industries that help users deliver an enhanced customer experience. Why did CIS choose VPI Quality Pro? First, it's built on our secure and powerful VPI Empower platform. This gives users confidence and reliability. Plus, VPI Quality Pro allows users to automatically categorize and prioritize recordings by customer names, products offered, transaction values and more -- across multimedia communication channels -- so that contact centers can focus on their most critical business issues instead. Now managers have these crucial recordings at their fingertips and can act quickly to resolve issues, improve performance and increase productivity. We're proud to deliver this innovation to our customers and the industry.

Does your contact center use VPI Quality Pro? We'd love to hear what you think! Or click here to learn more about VPI Quality Pro.

Life has been very exciting around VPI lately. We recently launched our VPI Empower Suite 5.2 and several new capabilities, especially our Smart Evaluations and have received rave reviews from Ventana Research, DMG Consulting and our customers.

Quite frankly, Smart Evaluations is unlike anything I've seen to date in the contact center quality assurance marketplace. Managers now have the power to assign automated actions to QA forms based on customized triggers. Actions like training, coaching, emails and actionable alerts that immediately appear on an agent's screen. To give you an idea of the impact Smart Evaluations can have on contact center performance, let me give you a quick scenario:

Susan is a manager responsible for quality at a 300-agent contact center. She sets up triggers based on specific agent behaviors. For instance, did the agent state his name and the company name clearly and politely when answering a call? Or, did the agent confirm the spelling of the customer's first and last names? Obviously, for both of these questons the answer is either Yes or No. Susan can set up specific actions for the system to follow in the event of either answer. And depending on the question result, she can select the type of action she wants to take – suggest training, schedule a coaching session, send an email to his supervisor, send a reminder message to the agent on their desktop ticker, or even send an immediate screen pop-up alert. 

Now imagine establishing dozens of triggers and actions that all work automatically! The possibilities are seemingly endless, and you can even replace previously manually answered questions with metrics about that call. The impact on the productivity and performance of an entire contact center is huge. And, because the Smart Evaluation interface is designed specifically for non-technical users, it's easy to start using it quickly. Click here to see a brief demo video of the Smart Evaluations feature in action and share in our excitement. 

How do you think Smart Evaluations could change your contact center? 

So many of our customers today are conducting business over the phone, which frequently includes processing credit card transactions. We all know how crucial it is to keep that personal data safe and secure – protecting the identities of the buyers and the reputation of the companies taking their sensitive information.

What some companies don’t know, however, is that in October 2010, the Payment Card Industry Council made a major update to the PCI Data Security Standard that tightened the rules for recording and access to sensitive credit card data. Like many other regulations, the requirements are detailed, the information is overwhelming and it may be hard to discern whether or not you are truly prepared.

PCI DSS version 2.0 went into effect on January 1, 2011. Organizations that do not take action to ensure compliance with these new requirements by December 31^st, 2011 could face costly fines and possibly even revocation of their rights to process credit card transactions.  Larger organizations will be required to pass PCI security audit to prove their compliance. VPI is here to offer insights and guidance.

For a limited time, you can download your free copy of the Call Recording Guide to PCI DSS Compliance authored by chief analyst, Dick Bucci, from Pelorus Associates, to learn:

• How the new PCI DSS requirements will affect your organization
• Important PCI DSS requirements that impact telephone call recording and call center quality assruance
• How to protect against breaches of sensitive card and personal information without sacrificing performance management, quality assurance call monitoring and call center coaching and training
• Six alternatives for preventing unauthorized recording, storing and access to sensitive credit card authentication data
• Best practices for securing at-home and remote employees

Credit unions and community banks are increasingly coping with federal and local legislation, interest rate hikes and volatility in capital markets, all of which entails placing greater emphasis on local and regional customer retention, quality assurance, internal controls, as well as more careful compliance and risk management. Although these smaller banks share many common challenges with large contact centers, they have unique needs that can be addressed using today’s modular, highly customizable call quality monitoring and workforce optimization solutions.

Small- to mid-sized financial services contact centers face a number of operational challenges relatively unknown to the larger contact center. With limited resources and shrinking budgets, a Branch or Regional Manager for smaller contact center needs to carefully keep an eye out for inefficient practices to find opportunities for cost reduction. He or she needs to carefully plan capital expenditures, and training investments, while keeping up with significant hardware and software investments within their broader organization.

Traditionally, customer service and help desk environments are known as high-turnover environments. This is rather typical for smaller financial services contact centers as well, where employees tend to consider helpdesk positions to be transient or temporary. To anticipate and reduce the impact of this phenomenon, it is best in the early days of their careers to give agents some time off the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills to becoming expert contact center professionals.

Another necessity is ongoing training to keep them engaged, alert and empowered to resolve customer issues quickly, while they answer phone calls during their careers. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent and simultaneously targeted directly at business goals of the contact center as well as the broader home organization. Gartner predicts that staffing will account for up to 80% of contact center budgets in the new world of customer interaction. The need for such a substantial investment just cannot be left to a chance. Yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and not really routinely reviewed by managers.

Regardless of size, every contact center must provide excellent customer service, reduce costs and maintain a healthy profit margin to thrive in the new economic model. By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer-service and contact centers — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact-center and customer-service tasks — mortgage companies and credit unions can dramatically affect their performance and profitability.

By now, most successful contact centers have already adopted at least baseline grade digital call recording and quality monitoring solutions. They are the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution, but they are just a start that may be due for review and re-evaluation, especially if they come from early generations of quality monitoring that couldn’t see beyond the horizon of individual agent compliance with (possibly outdated) internal rules and policies. These older technologies did not really have a good way of connecting standards for customer/agent interactions with evolving business objectives of the bank, let alone being able to incorporate voice of the customer into any part of the quality management process. The good news is that the call center quality assurance technologies evolved to the point where contact centers can focus the entire process onto what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance, without losing any objectivity in assessing agent performance. In fact, evaluating agents based on their quantifiable contributions to the contact center’s business success supports their drive to do well, succeed in their jobs and avoid defection.

The proverbial “needle in a haystack” is now rather easy to find – with the implementation of advanced desktop screen analytics, supervisors can easily identify and evaluate the calls that resulted in a customer cancelling their account and taking their business elsewhere. Or the calls where agents attempted an upsale successfully or unsuccessfully, or where they saved a customer by resolving their issue during the first call – even without unnecessary concessions. Instead of wasting time and adding costs with reviewing completely random selection of low-value calls, why not concentrate on evaluating those calls that provide insights into the bank’s business practices every time, so that something could be done about it before opportunities are missed or lost forever?

Real-time performance management and automated E-Learning tools are the latest additions to the workforce optimization family of solutions that can be closely tied into quality management processes, to provide options for action mechanism whenever a manager needs to be notified or agent supported by just-in-time help.

The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on a company’s needs, goals and circumstances, but with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is interoperability. Each individual solution has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvement of contact center performance involving operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making which in turn helps resolve issues for customers. Easy access to call recordings can help contact centers give better customer service. Call records can be used to settle disputes quickly and with minimum inconvenience.

Recorded calls provide excellent material for training purposes – real-life examples of good and bad agent-customer interactions. This helps the manager effectively intervene when agents are underperforming. The latest-generation solutions have the capability to automatically select and assign coaching and training through courses, tips, quizzes, training flashes, pre-shift announcements and bulletins according to individual agent needs, identified through quality evaluations or simply by monitoring their performance metrics. This tool allows you to set rules that send targeted coaching and training to individual agents or groups when they reach predetermined thresholds based on their performance scores, customer survey results and more. By targeting the right training to the right person at the right time, your agents will be empowered with personalized guidance that will make it easier for them to offer improved service, thus heightening customer satisfaction and ultimately increasing both, agent productivity and satisfaction with the job. Managers can track sales and address marketing and service challenges quickly.

Integrated workforce optimization systems can accomplish this in a cost-effective manner while decreasing expenses, increasing revenues and enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction – all of which can lead to strengthened market position, customer loyalty and long-term bottom-line growth.

Highly Anticipated 4th Annual Call Center Optimization Forum Will Provide Contact Center Professionals with Groundbreaking Strategies and Proven Best Practices to Boost Performance and Profitability

A full schedule of cities and dates was released today for the highly anticipated 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum (http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com). The fourth annual event, which has garnered rave reviews from industry experts and attendees alike, will be hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), and Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) and CRMXchange, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero, Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies. The nationwide series of educational seminars is tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. In an effort to maintain a free and open exchange, the Forum is open to end-users only – registrations submitted by non-sponsoring vendors and consultants will not be accepted.

“Over the last three years, we have been delighted by the remarkable success of the Call Center Optimization Forum,” said David Hadobas, president and CEO at CCNG. “We’ve diligently maintained contact with attendees in order to ensure that they’ve had the most rewarding experience possible and we’ve been deeply gratified to hear their success stories upon having implemented the strategies and best practices learned at our events.” Hadobas went on to explain that attendee feedback is crucial to the success of future events. “We listen to our attendees and act upon their opinions and advice. As a result, the agenda for the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum is more informative and engaging than ever before.” In addition to the event’s various educational seminars and workshops, attendees that register and attend will receive many additional benefits, including a one-year full CCNG individual membership (a $150 value), connection to a 90-minute Call Center School Online Training Class of the attendee’s choice (a $275 value) and a registration to the 2011 CRMXchange Virtual Contact Center Conference.

Attendees will learn how to fully maximize the value of key contact center solutions for pre-hire assessment and simulation, workforce forecasting and scheduling, quality monitoring and performance management. They will also discover the importance of implementing the latest solutions for customer experience management and post-contact surveying and customer feedback. With support from leading call center industry networking and educational organizations including CCNG (Call Center Network Group), The Call Center School, CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars will outline breakthrough strategies and techniques that can be used to exceed customer expectations, raise performance standards, intelligently reduce costs and achieve attendees' personal career goals. The seminars will reveal powerful new, cost-effective ways to hire the right employees, set and track the right performance objectives, accurately forecast workload and schedules, improve quality of service, measure and boost customer satisfaction, and win the support of top executives.

Due to limited availability, early registration is recommended in order to guarantee a place at any of the following Call Center Optimization Forum seminars:  

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA (April 7^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Charlotte

WASHINGTON DC (June 2^nd) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/WashingtonDC

OMAHA, NEBRASKA (July 14^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Omaha

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (August 8^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Boston

ORLANDO, FLORIDA (September 15^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Orlando

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (November 10^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Las-Vegas

To register or for additional information on the upcoming 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars, please visit http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.

About Call Center Optimization Forum

The Call Center Optimization Forum is a worldwide series of educational seminars tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. Hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies – the event is designed for executives, managers and IT decision-makers who need to stay informed about the latest industry trends, best practices, and rapidly evolving contact center optimization technology. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to learn about industry best practices from multiple experts in the field at one time and see demonstrations of the latest advancements in call center technology. To learn more and register to attend, visit: http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.

You may have felt the pain yourself. For three decades now, the Quality Assurance (QA) process for most contact centers has been a cumbersome undertaking. But there is a light at the end of this tunnel. New research reveals that the next generation of call center quality assurance solutions is here and can seriously streamline your QA processes.

Among the findings are that workflow automation and contact center analytics can reduce the manual steps required by most QA applications by 60 to 80 percent, while ensuring that you still hear the very important voice of the customer (VOC).

There is so much to learn about what's next for call center quality assurance, and you can get your complimentary white paper with all of the details at http://www.VPI-corp.com/New-QA.

The paper discussed how this new generation of call center quality assurance and workforce optimization (WFO) solutions automate low-value tasks that do not require human cognitive capabilities. It illustrates the differences between the 'old' way of doing QA and new closed-loop automated processes, and how those processes can enhance the customer experience, increase agent satisfaction and improve QA specialist productivity by 15-20%.

It's time to see how you can adopt a new approach to contact center quality assurance today! Download your complimentary copy of the white paper now.

Are you interested in keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in contact center call recording, quality monitoring, analytics, performance management or eLearning technologies?

As organizations look to optimize the performance of their contact centers and the vital role agents play in providing customers with the right experiences as they handle interactions, the demand for thorough research into vendors and products that support agent performance management is becoming critical. Ventana Research has just released this ground-breaking independent research report on Contact Center Agent Performance Management solutions.

You can download your complimentary 2010 Value Index for Agent Performance Management Research Report by Ventana Research at http://www.VPI-corp.com/2010-Value-Index to learn:

• What tools can help you more effectively manage of all the business activities associated with handling customer interactions to ensure an optimal customer experience and alignment to a common set of customer and revenue goals and objectives.
• A framework for buyers to thoroughly review technology vendors as they seek to purchase new systems to support their efforts.
• How 13 agent performance management software vendors and their products were ranked in several categories.
• Why VPI achieved the highest 'Hot Vendor' rating and was rated #1 in Customer Assurance.

The contact center business can be a tricky one when it comes to motivating and praising agents. It’s a sentiment that was widely recognized and shared at the 2010 Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. I had the pleasure of attending and sponsoring this exceptional 3-day, information-packed event where we exchanged ideas and shared best practices with over 150 Call Center Quality Assurance and Training professionals.

One of the liveliest discussions we had was around the concept of a Call Center Quality Assurance Olympics as a creative way to maximize the value of quality monitoring technologies and processes. It got me thinking that there are some really creative, innovative ways to get call center staff involved and interested in what each of them are doing.

So, here are a few ideas for you to use if you want to put together your own Call Center Quality Assurance Olympics.

1. Create a set of categories into which agents, QA analysts and supervisors can enter their best recorded interactions. Categories may include Best Turnaround Call (i.e. customer was retained), Most Successful Sales Call, Most “Over-and-above” Expectations Call, Funniest Call

2. Have them enter their recordings into a category in the competition via email with their name and a brief synopsis of why they should win.

3. Offer unique prizes to really get their juices flowing. Ideas include one extra paid vacation day, dinner for two at a local restaurant, or movie or concert tickets.

4. Share winning recordings and give out prizes at a group Call Center Quality Assurance Olympics lunch catered by the company.

After the Olympics is finished, there is still more you can do with the greatness that has been uncovered. Setting up a “Model Call Library” with example of best-practice interactions can help with hiring, training and retention.

Hiring – By sharing these interactions with potential employees during the interview process, you’re giving them an inside look at the caliber of work your organization delivers and setting an expectation with the individual.

Training – Drawing from the Model Call Library during training is a great way to show employees examples of what you want them to be doing - - the recordings provide great illustration of things they should be  aware of when they review their own interactions. With the Web-based QA tools available today, it is easy to empower agents to access their own recorded calls, see feedback on their handling of the call, review quality ratings and comments, add their own feedback, and apply what they learn to future interactions.

Motivation and Retention - Employees that have an excellent call worthy of the Model Call Library should be recognized among their team peers or the entire contact center. Public praise in this regard goes a long way in motivating and retaining great employees. It also encourages healthy competition among other employees to achieve praiseworthy results.

How do you motivate your agents to share their best practices?

Measuring performance is fundamental to contact center operations of all sizes. The call center quality assurance (QA) measurement process is often one of the main performance data collection vehicles for management. However, few contact centers have implemented a program or have adequate resources in place for meaningfully tracking and improving performance, let alone providing feedback from customers to the rest of the organization to enable strategic-level business improvements. Many contact center managers operate with a haphazard collection of uncoordinated and often irrelevant performance statistics that require too much time and error-prone manual work to interpret, which often leads to misguided decisions. In these conditions of ad-hoc “analysis”, wasteful utilization of resources can go undetected for long periods of time and business objectives may not be achieved, as managers take ineffective actions to correct deficiencies which are aimed to attack symptoms instead of root causes. The problem is deepened by the fact that most quality and performance measurement tools are rigid or inflexible to change. Some efforts focus on compliance-driven performance tracking and call center reporting - in accordance with internally developed standards and procedures that are outdated, outmoded, or even assuming that the contact center is already providing the right products and services to its customers. What’s more, many contact centers have not discussed the business strategy with their front line agents or supervisors. Consequently, there is often a great need to go back and revisit their goals and objectives and to adjust the functions of their department in order to ensure that the right products and services are being provided by the agent.

To start recovering from this situation, managers must first recognize that measuring of performance in a coordinated, systematic, standardized way that provides true insights and direction for achieving business objectives is a basic need of an organization - and a fundamental responsibility of management. It is the key to any organization’s survival.

To achieve high-value business insights as they track performance, contact center managers should focus data collection, interpretation and analysis on a set of measures that answer the following questions:

·         Are we providing the correct services to our clients, using the most skilled agents?

·         Are we able to resolve customer issues and overcome objections in a timely manner?

·         Are our agents providing a positive and memorable experience to our customers?

·         Do our agents and their immediate supervisors really understand what is expected from them?

Using VPI Empower, you can consolidate all data that is periodically collected from disparate source systems in your contact center. Once you have all data in one place, apply real-time performance tracking tools, intuitive graphical call center reporting dashboards, and business rules-driven alert system to monitor key performance indicators. Now you can measure progress towards meeting business objectives for the contact center, gaining insights that can be acted upon in an effective and timely manner – for optimization of service delivery. Call center quality assurance goals can then be subordinated to the overall strategy, so that they support the mission and objectives of the organization. The specific call center quality assurance goals defined in this process should be strategic, tactical, and operational, depending on the level of service channel that is being supported. They may include the definition of quality, timeliness, resource utilization, or customer satisfaction from the customer’s point of view.  

Call center quality assurance processes should be guided and supported by performance measures as they define specific standards that allow the calibration of performance and overall quality, which, when made actionable and acted upon, ultimately leads to more business from happier customers. Performance measures should be selected carefully and funded proportionately to their value, in order to support corporate goals and strategy, contact center objectives, and critical success factors for an effective call center quality assurance program. Review them regularly to evaluate how well the delivery system is performing and whether the correct products and services are provided. The value of adequate recruitment, selection, training and education of line managers to execute these objectives should not be underestimated. Success ultimately rests on their coaching effectiveness and their ability to cultivate skill while inspiring their staff to higher levels of performance.
 

In today’s challenging economic climate, analytics is changing the way companies do business and dramatically improving contact  center operations, managers want quick and  accurate insights into the effectiveness of their contact center operations in order to make prudent, timely decisions, but they don't have the time or resources to listen to and review  the vast amount of customer interactions  handled by the agents every day. 

In addition to this there is no shortage of performance metrics available from their PBX and ACD. These days there seems to be more sophisticated tools including multimedia recording, desktop analytics, instant chat, self service options in the IVR, cloud computing,  etc. Managers and supervisors today are able to choose from a myriad of options to manage performance but where do they start to do their quality evaluations in a systematic manner using complex algorithmic mathematical formulas combined with scientific methodologies and their own intuition? Therein lies their dilemma. So little time, so much to accomplish in the course of a day...

Quality monitoring systems offered today are not only to evaluate agents but also to evaluate a contact center reputation. Yes, reputation, might sound obvious but too often contact centers seem to miss this critical view point. A customer's perception of service captured in a call recording or video file says a lot about the culture of the organization. Call Center Reporting and Call Monitoring Systems are a means to an end in that one has to learn from the information and who else to translate these to actions and outcomes than the Supervisor. This has to be one of the most critical and unforgiving roles within the contact center next to the agent. Sort of being a start quarterback being called in to throw a touchdown on each attempt when the offensive team is on and the line backer when the defensive line is on.

The role of the supervisor and their agent has been so devalued over the years that it is not a surprise the attrition rates for these roles are in double digits. This is not a malaise or a disease or caused by the recent global financial crisis or globalization. We did this to ourselves. We have become part of a culture that communicates via a keyboard than by voice skills and the traditional skills that our parents taught us about being polite and respectful. We complicate the connection with our customers and prospects through voice prompts and boring scripts to keep the agents from really having a connection with the customers.

Enter VPI and it's Empower suite of products. In my humble opinion, this product is a god-send for managers, supervisors and front-line agents. VPI has truly defined the new expectation of a customer through a fresh set of lenses. It shatters the level of "mediocrity" to "excellence" in quality and performance from the customer's point of view. The power of the data can now be turned into knowledge which in turn can be turned into wisdom for coaching to excellence and that translates to actionable analytics and outcomes.

Quality Assurance is everyone's responsibility and by giving power to the people who  influence agent behaviors, then the Supervisor should be the quarterback that determines the outcome of the game. Like they said in the movie, if you build, the customers will come. VPI has started this movement by building on a framework that is supervisor-friendly for QA success. If we synthesize all these goals, the aim of QA and Call Monitoring becomes a matter of linking outcomes of calls to a customer's behavior not only the agent's behavior. As a result, contact centers can also learn what effects, if any their approach to training and coaching agents have on customers and ultimately the outcomes.

Being proactive and giving agents a larger stake in the pie by identifying areas of strength, best practices and also key training to be used for modeling success. In this way, a contact center can leverage the VPI Empower suite of products and establish guidelines and standards for handling calls instead of dictating what agents should or should not do. In the larger picture, the role of the supervisor and the agent has to be supported through all levels of the organization. As a result, success and a best practice model will show up sooner than later!