Six Pitfalls to Avoid with Quality Monitoring Systems

six-pitfalls-to-avoid-with-quality-monitoring-systems

As you evaluate your quality assurance systems you are probably asking yourself, whether they are delivering the results that you and your stakeholders anticipated. If this is not true for your current situation, investigate the root cause and implement any change required to avoid negative impact to your operations and to your brand.A sound quality monitoring system is a foundation for driving agent performance, managing operational costs, revealing training needs and increasing customer satisfaction among many other benefits.

Unfortunately, there are certain things which may hinder successful implementation of a quality monitoring system. Here are six pitfalls to look for and tips on how to overcome them.

  1. Documentation of Deliverables

    Lack of fully defined and documented deliverables presents a huge risk of failure, because if you have incorrect or insufficient information regarding your deliverables, you will create risk of failure in your implementation. Quality monitoring goes beyond technology; you need to understand what you it is that you want to achieve and create the necessary plans to achieve each objective. Your input into the software and program details determines your results.

    Tip: Develop and document a strategic quality framework that will guide all your efforts, and make it public for everyone on the project team to read and understand it.

  2. Allocation of Time for Evaluation

    At the core of any quality monitoring system is evaluation of the customer interaction through the contact medium whether it is a call or chat or other contact means. Allocating sufficient time for contact evaluation and assessing the correct sample size per agent is critical to effective implementation of the quality monitoring system. When you allocate too little time or a small sample size, you affect the accuracy and validity of the results. It is practically impossible to review all contacts, so evaluators need to determine the number of calls to review during what period of time.

    Tip: Consider using tools that can help you with planning, scheduling and replay/review function.

  3. Insufficient Coaching

    It is one thing to evaluate agents, and it is another to use that information for proper coaching. Inadequate coaching is a huge pitfall because the agents will not understand fully their areas of opportunity, and how to improve them. Coaching is the most effective way to continually improve employee performance by giving them an opportunity to point out their own mistakes and develop their own solutions. He or she will quickly implement the quality program through ownership of the process.

    Tip: Effective and efficient coaching starts with individualized feedback; empower and encourage agents to self-evaluate.

  4. Perceived Favoritism

    When agents receive evaluation feedback, some may feel that it was unfair especially if it was negative and others got positive feedback. This may lead to resentment and hurt feelings, which eventually affects service delivery. Lack of transparency in the scoring and grading procedures increases this perception.

    Tip: Use advanced solutions that allow you to incorporate an agent learning center. Reviewed contacts are tagged and notated to facilitate agent self-evaluation and coaching. Evaluators should be trained and calibrated to be fair and partial during scoring for uniform scoring results.

  5. Failure to Target

    Thousands of interactions between customer representatives and customers take place each day. It can be a challenge to determine which ones to evaluate for valuable insight into agent performance and areas that need development and improvement. Evaluating the right calls will ensure that you tackle the right problems, save time and improve agent performance.

    Tip: Install and utilize software that will allow you to target contacts for monitoring. Depending on which problem areas you want to monitor, you can set parameters to receive notifications regarding targeted behaviors.

  6. Ignoring External Factors

    External factors can paralyze your implementation efforts as much as internal ones. Ignoring the factors that are not within the evaluators and agents control can be a big issue. These factors not only produce difficulties for the agents during their customer interactions, they also generate unreliable quality monitoring results. For example, a product malfunction is a typical external factor which can generate a poor customer experience survey but be entirely outside the control of the customer service representative.

    Tip: Upgrade your software to include screen recording, because it will give you a 360 view of the process.

In summary, lack of defined deliverables, insufficient time for contact evaluation, ineffective coaching, perceived feelings of favoritism, failure to target contacts for evaluation and ignoring external factors are pitfalls that will derail your quality implementation process. Follow these tips and reap the benefits of a sound quality monitoring system.

This blog post was first published on LinkedIN

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