The Quality Paradigm Mindshift: QA's Expanding Role in the Contact Center

The days of monitoring contact center agents randomly to find out what they have been doing wrong on calls is history. In these days of enlightened leadership and sophisticated intelligent routing technology, call quality monitoring has also evolved from the days of internal surveillance to performance improvement and skill development.
 

The good news today is that quality monitoring is all about creating a continuous quality improvement mindset which leads to much higher levels of organizational performance and improved customer experience. This phenomenon is catching on and is getting noticed by other parts of the organization. I walked into a contact center last month and noticed that they were preparing for a debriefing with their CEO on the role of the Quality teams in the contact center. Isn't that exciting? They were doing quick huddles and a town hall to introduce the new elements of the call quality evaluation forms that will impact the overall customer experience. The CEO also participated by taking the 'Quiz on Call Quality.' I was blown away by this simple and effective concept displayed by the leadership of this organization.
 

In another leading organization, the contact center director found a way to use their Quality Assurance program to position a contact center as a strategic asset within this organization and bring much-needed clarity, direction and a sense of urgency into solving customer and business issues. She overcame skepticism and passivity she saw from executives in response to traditional contact center reports with much stronger type of evidence. She schedules a monthly "Voice of the Customer" meeting with executives within and outside of the contact center to listen to customer calls. Every month, she identifies a different critical topic of interest (i.e. billing, canceled accounts, repeat calls, collections, new product sales, etc.) and then chooses five targeted customer calls to listen to related to that area of interest. The results have been outstanding. Each month, more and more executives attend the meeting - they love listening to eye-opening customer call recordings and have taken a greater interest in the contact center - increasingly viewing it as a profit center versus a cost center.

Depending on the environment (Inbound, Outbound, Sales or Tech Support) and the type of skill the agent has been trained on, it is critical to ensure that agents have the proper product training early on in their role and how quality monitoring can enable them as an aid to shorten their learning curve. Secondly, the Contact Center Quality Monitoring program should be introduced appropriately and with significance with the expectations of their customers. Ultimately, it is the perception of the customer that counts. Also, many contact center managers fail to discuss the key metrics or drivers in a simple and meaningful scorecard for review on a regular basis. Metrics and scores should be reviewed regularly based on the analytics compiled and in conjunction with all the other relevant indicators such as abandonment rates, service levels and call volumes. For example, on a particular day of the week, the contact center was able to manage to keep their metrics within acceptable limits and fell below the targets but were able to maintain the integrity of the call monitoring criteria which in turn lends credibility and realism to the QA program.
 

Getting the agents to focus on speeding up while there are calls bunching up can cause unnecessary distress to the new agent and mistakes could occur. Furthermore, a customer can sense this from the agent which in turn could turn an ordinary routine call to a lengthy one and the vicious cycle never ends. Like so many other measures, these cannot be interpreted in isolation and requires further investigation. Perhaps it would be advisable to have a conversation with the Workforce Management team to understand staffing levels and how coaching evaluations are scheduled in an agent's schedule. Perhaps, the issue is related to a lack of resources, or worse, there could be no coaching scheduled.
 

Whichever path is chosen, it is critical to stay on the path to ensure that Quality is at the forefront of all the stakeholders within the organization especially your front-line agents. When some organizations in the post recession have begun to lose their way towards Quality and Continuous Improvement, some organizations like the one above continue to lead the way. This phenomenon will make the difference in the coming years.