Having a contact center quality assurance (QA) program is crucial if your business is scaling fast and wants to continue to deliver a consistent, remarkable customer experience. If not set up correctly, your planned quality monitoring program can end up backfiring.
Simply having a contact center quality assurance program is not enough. You need to begin your program with the expectations of your team members who work in the frontline. If you see that they are not able to deliver great results, they most likely are having issues and push backs that you might not be aware they are experiencing. So, the first step you need to take if your quality assurance program is not on track is to identify areas for improvement.
Working with a faulty quality assurance program runs the risk for low team morale and engagement instead of increasing your organizational productivity while creating an exceptional standard of customer experience. And this is not something that you will want to happen. Right?
In this blog, we will discuss the four biggest mistakes of quality assurance that could demotivate and make your team members feel miserable:
Mistake #1
Coming up with unreasonable metrics
While it is crucial to measure your people’s performance by setting goals to ensure and establish a consistent, high quality of customer experience, you don’t want your metrics to be unreachable. If you set extremely high goals, it might demotivate the team.
Your people can feel like they are continuously failing and are not good at their work. In turn, they will try to work harder, with a hope to achieve some unrealistic metrics, only to fall short every time. It might lead to higher productivity in the short term, but in the long run, you will have a higher attrition rate at the expense of your company’s customer experience.
Unreasonable metrics are not just about tough goals that are set for team members. It’s also about establishing metrics that do not align with your company’s customer experience values or culture. For instance, assume the purpose of your brand is to focus on improving customer experience. However, your metrics are set to hold team members responsible for keeping interactions short, regardless of customer sentiment or experience. An internal conflict like this can set your team up for failure before they even get started.
What’s the Solution?
You don’t have to pull your scorecard metrics out of a hat. Instead, it will be helpful for you to work with your team members when deciding on metrics they are comfortable with. You can work together to establish challenging yet achievable metrics and goals.
This can also be an excellent opportunity to refresh your team on the mission, core values, and culture of the company. If you work with the frontline team, it will give them a feeling of inclusion and a part of your quality assurance program.
Mistake #2
QA Program is More like Monitoring Your People
An important part of quality assurance is indeed monitoring your team members’ performance; however, you may not want it to look like you are tracking their every move.
Ideally, a quality assurance program is all about making sure that your company offers a memorable customer experience. It doesn’t have to be at the cost of your team members feeling like they are being constantly critiqued. This might bring down their morale and result in low productivity. When feeling like someone is always looking over their shoulder, your team members might feel insecure and not put their best foot forward. When dissatisfied, team members tend to work more like robots, doing their bare minimum just to pass the scorecards. It’s important to be clear on why interactions are monitored and have a common goal for the process.
What’s the Solution?
If your team members feel they are being monitored, chances are they are not part of your quality assurance process. Aligning the goals of both the company and your people can help make them a significant part of your Quality Assurance program. Contributing to a system that works for and not against them, team members will embrace the company’s goals as their own and have a firm belief that the QA team is working to develop them both personally and professionally.
Moreover, developing an engaging workplace is another terrific way to making your quality assurance program more effective. If you break down your goals into bite-sized steps and reward team members along the way, they will feel engaged and motivated, with an understanding of how they are progressing in their work while being excited about their future.
Mistake #3
Too Much Focus on Scorecards
Of course, a contact center QA program needs to use some scorecards or rubric to track how team members are performing. However, a common mistake quality assurance programs make is emphasizing scorecards too much and grading team members based solely on that.
If your quality assurance program mainly highlights scorecards, your team may feel that the QA process is only beneficial to the company and that it doesn’t work for them in any way. To avoid low morale and engagement among your team members, they need to feel like your quality assurance program also works in their favor.
What’s the Solution?
The coaching and learning process for team members should be an integral part of your quality assurance program. Although scorecards are essential, a successful QA program always emphasizes strengthening and developing your team members’ skills.
Create an onboarding curriculum that gives new team members a strong foundation to get started. You can also hold regular learning sessions to refresh and improve your people’s skillset. It is also important to coach those team members who are weak in their performance by providing them with all the necessary training and tools needed to succeed. In conclusion, it’s not only the quality assurance team that should always give feedback. Instead, set up your QA process so that team members receive real-time Voice of Customer feedback after each interaction. This allows the team member to focus not only on scorecards but to understand the Voice of the Customer.
Does your quality assurance program work well for you and your team members?
If not, contact us today. We help businesses make informed decisions and empower their team members effectively based on data-driven, population-level actionable insights. Etech’s multi-level approach uses contact center quality monitoring along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies to deliver customer experience analytics that improves customer experience, increases your profitability, boost team member performance, and Increase your span of influence.
