Expecting the best customer service is not just the right of customers, but a necessity. With buyer preferences constantly changing and evolving, contact center quality monitoring is not only a goal to be achieved but rather a continuous journey of optimization. As a result, organizations must always fine-tune their quality monitoring parameters to ensure that they stay effective.
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.
When it comes to contact center quality assurance, there are several reasons you should implement a strategy and stop just checking boxes. The 9 reasons we will discuss below will help your team provide exceptional service for your customers and create a remarkable customer experience. 1. Know What’s Most Important One of the first advantages associated with contact center quality monitoring is that your team will know precisely what is essential. Define the key performance indicators that matter to you and that your customers. By seeing these indicators, they will know where they need to focus even more of their attention to increase customer Experience. 2. Recognize Negative Behavior If your team is engaging in negative behavior with customers it will reflect poorly on your business as a whole. By going through the process of a true quality assurance plan, you will be able to highlight these negative behaviors as soon as they occur, and you will then be able to correct them. 3. Maintain Regulatory Compliance There are several regulatory concerns when it comes to contact centers, data security, customer privacy, and more. By employing methods of quality monitoring, you can recognize potential regulatory concerns before they become serious. This will allow you to correct the problem before it results in a breach of security or fines from the regulatory body. 4. Highlight Positive Behavior Through monitoring, you can learn how team members are interacting with customers in positive behaviors as well. This enables you to highlight those behaviors and provide feedback and encouragement to the entire team. 5. Provide Better Feedback Coaching sessions with team members are essential to be able to retain people. Retaining the team is far more efficient than hiring new people, which means you will have to provide constant feedback to help the teams improve their positive behaviors and resolve the negative ones. Through quality monitoring, you can observe the behaviors that each of your team members are participating in and provide specific feedback on the behaviors that will directly improve the customer experience. 6. Track Employee Improvement Through the process of continuous monitoring, you will be able to evaluate the behavior of a particular team member over time. This means you will be able to consider how they interacted with customers on Day 1, versus their customer interactions on Day 20, Day 50, and Day 100. This will allow you to clearly see where each of your team members is improving and where they still need training. Developing an action plan and using this type of information will provide you the ability to retain your team more easily. 7. Speed Up Training and Promotion By monitoring call center performance, you will be able to pinpoint the positive behaviors that you want to see repeated in all of your team members. Then you can easily showcase these behaviors to the rest of your team, including new hires. As a result, you will be able to speed up the training process by starting new hires off with the skills you want them to possess rather than having a steep learning curve along the way. 8. Improve Your Team Environment When team members feel that they don’t know what you expect from them or what you want, it can cause them to feel overwhelmed. Team members who understand what is expected of them, even if that expectation is out of their reach at that time, are more likely to feel content, happy, and satisfied at work, and deliver their best performance. And if they know what is expected of them, then they know what goals they need to work toward. 9. Improve Customer Experience Finally, you will be able to improve the overall experience of your customers through the process of call monitoring. By ensuring that your customers’ voices are heard and that your team members are responding to calls in a way that fits the needs of the business, you will improve the experience your customers have when they interact with you. This will, in turn, foster a relationship with your customers and encourage them to continue using your services because they know that you will provide them with the help they need when they need it. By maintaining quality and monitoring contact center performance, you can improve how your team interacts with customers. It also makes it possible to ensure you retain customers. But first, you need someone who can help you do it. That’s where Etech Global Services comes in. At Etech, we know the market, including the changing landscape of customer experience. With over 20 years of experience, we can take care of your quality monitoring needs. All you need to do is visit our website to find out more. This blog was earlier published on LinkedIn.
Are you a quality assurance manager in any contact center? If so, you know that it is a part of your work to make decisions that directly impact the contact center’s bottom line. You have to keenly monitor the performance of your contact center and figure out how your team members can deliver better customer experience each time they interact with customers. How can you do this effectively? An excellent way to monitor call center performance is by measuring the productivity of your team members with stable and reliable metrics. There are several contact center software options available in the market that might give you a variety of metrics in real-time, however, you need to measure crucial and useful metrics for the most valuable insights information. Read the following to explore these crucial contact center performance metrics you want to track in order to take your contact center performance to the next level: Average Rate of Call Abandonment Every contact center wants to deliver memorable customer experience, and so does yours! Right? Therefore, it is important to be available when your customers contact you for any assistance, otherwise, you should be able to give them a logical reason why you are unavailable and timeline about how soon you can get back to them. It is one of the effective ways to build a good rapport with your customers and keep them satisfied. But, it has been observed that most of the time, it is just the opposite that happens in contact centers. Customers often hang up before they can even connect with a team member. This is what we call the average call abandonment rate. Monitoring this metric can give you an overall idea about your team members’ performance. If this rate is higher, try to identify the reasons behind why your people are unable to serve your customers in time, and take necessary steps to improve the scenario. You may want to communicate with your customers what exactly they can expect their hold time to be based on the availability of your team members and, if needed, hire more people for frontline work when the inflow of customer calls is more, coach and empower your team members on how they can be faster in answering customer calls, or give the busy callers an option to leave a voicemail or request a call back instead. It all depends on what problem your contact center is facing. Once you are able to identify that, your contact center can take the relevant steps to solve these issues. Blocked Calls Percentage Blocked calls percentage is nothing but the proportion of incoming calls from customers that receive a busy tone. In an inbound contact center, even one blocked call can result in losing a customer forever. So, if you want to ensure your team is connecting with each inbound caller, you need to identify the common causes of blocked calls and encourage practices that can remarkably reduce them. One of the reasons behind increased blocked calls percentage could be that not enough team members are available in a specific shift and there are no call queues configured, so callers hear a busy tone. In such a scenario, you want to figure out the possible effective ways to solve this issue. Some of the major ones could be making sure your contact center software can support the call volume, optimizing call queuing, improving agent scheduling and adherence, as well as call forecasting, etc. Average Duration of Time in Queue Another important metric to keep an eye on is the measure of overall performance for your contact center. The measurement of overall performance is the average customer wait time in the queue. How you can derive this metric is by dividing the total time callers wait in the queue by the total number of calls answered. It is important to measure the average time that your customers have to wait in the queue to improve the experience that they are receiving from your end. If you see that your customers end up waiting in line longer than usual, you can ask your team to be more efficient in handling calls and coach them accordingly so that they can drive this KPI to score lower. Also, you may choose to provide your customers with a facility to call back so that they don’t have to keep waiting. When it’s about measuring contact center productivity Approximate Speed of Answer One of the best metrics you need to consider is the average speed in which your team members answer your customers’ questions. If you notice that this metric is too high, it may mean your people are not able to assist customers, as expected. In such a situation, you want to figure out the reason why they are slow to answer customer calls. It has been observed, most of the time, that the use of improved work tools can help increase your team members’ average answer speed. Average After Call Work Time You will see your team members’ work doesn’t end when calls are finished. In fact, they often end up spending quite a bit of time updating databases, sending emails and informing teammates about the call, etc. The time that your people spend completing a transaction after the caller has disengaged is the after call work time. As a quality assurance manager, you need to craft and leverage smart processes to reduce your team members’ after call work so that they can make the best use of their time interacting with customers while they are on the clock. It can help your contact center to solve more customer problems and ultimately deliver an effortless and consistent customer experience. Summing Up The quality assurance managers at contact centers typically have a general sense of how the team members are performing, even before they look at the metrics. But, it’s crucial to measure the above specific key performance indicators to identify the areas of improvement and
When we speak to contact centers about what’s happening in their organizations, Quality Monitoring (QM) and Quality Assurance (QA) are the two challenges that they often mention. Although you can find there are several effective strategies of quality monitoring available on the internet, not everything makes sense. Instead, there are some ideal ideas and trends that are based on solid principles and drive great results. Being into the contact center business for more than a decade now, we, at Etech, believe that the below golden trends for contact center quality monitoring have helped us deliver effortless customer experience over the years. Dissection of interactions To break down a interactions into different parts and grade these respectively is a smart tactic rather than reviewing and scoring a interactions as a whole. Here’s the idea – You need to start with the standard welcome or greeting. Examine how a specific agent is delivering how most of the customers respond to it. Also, look for whether this approach has the desired effect. Next, you should assess product knowledge. Are the agents prepared to face the customers irrespective of whether it’s an order, a complaint, or a question? Do the agents put the interactions on hold to acquire the required information? Are they following the script? Are the agents speaking with a tone of courtesy and support? Does the agent have developed skills specific to the type of interaction? Lastly, you should review the closing of the interactions while examining what sort of the last impression the agents made on behalf of his/her company. This strategy might be a basic one, but many contact centers don’t practice dissecting the interactions into sections and, in turn, fail to 100% monitor the actual quality of the interactions. It’s worthwhile to note that a solid send-off reduces repeat contacts and improves first contact resolution. Feedback is a Gift Whether your contact center determines the quality performance based on internal scoring and KPIs, accumulated data, or solely on satisfaction measurements like NPS, CSAT, one impacts the other. In the end, the only thing that matters is the customers opinion and assessment of how they have been treated. Many times there is a disconnect in what managers think is the most crucial factor and what customers truly care about. Have the courage to let customers define quality of your contact center’s quality management program based on a frictionless and positive customer experience. Use of Speech Analytics In the contact center industry, it fields approximately more than 50 million interactions every day. Hence, even if they are all being recorded, is it possible to monitor all of them? Quite Impossible! Isn’t it? Here, the Speech Analytics comes into the picture. This technology helps generate automated alerts triggered by voice data. While being alerted to these interactions in real-time, managers can react in time to impact their outcome. It defines the difference between keeping and losing a customer. Additionally, with speech analytics being integrated into a interactions recording solution, it’s easy for contact centers to link customer feedback with specific customer interactions. Hence, you will not end up working from a random sampling. Instead, you will work with a subset of interactions that have been flagged as crucial because of the keywords or phrases that customers have used. AI powered speech analytics takes all the unstructured, valuable data in your interactions and makes it easy to organize, analyze and act upon. Analytics also helps deliver better marketing intelligence in diverse areas at a lower price than the traditional methods. It further impacts the contact center compliance with data protection regulations. Thus, if there is one trend in contact center quality monitoring that will remain consistently useful for years, it is nothing but the speech analytics. The critical business intelligence that speech analytics generates can amplify both agent performance and customer experience. The Importance of Kaizen Mindset The Kaizen Mindset is a business consulting practice that says prioritizing the quality part of any process in everything a company does and making little changes over time can eventually add up to the significant organizational improvement. It requires every employee to identify what are the areas of concern, identify the reasons behind the issues, develop, communicate and implement countermeasure strategies, and examine the results, to achieve success. When it’s followed right, the Kaizen Mindset can make a real difference irrespective of whether it’s an auto manufacturing plant or the quality management department of a contact center. With this strategy, you can embed quality through small incremental improvements in the interaction monitoring approaches, and it will finally help you achieve fantastic results. We, at Etech Global Services, believe that technology is just an enabler; it is the humans that create a remarkable difference. Our quality management department, i.e., Etech Insights, follows the above strategies and team up Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence so that they can listen to the customers, identify and analyze the unstructured data, generate actionable insights, improve the processes, and predict better approaches to make the most out of the customer insights. If you strive to implement the best of contact center quality monitoring, contact us today.
Whether you’ve utilized a contact center for your business needs, contacted one as a customer, or worked as a contact center team member, you have an idea of what to expect when it comes to measuring quality monitoring metrics. Some global best practices are aligning with what many people may think of when considering how contact centers and their team members are rated for effectiveness. Some standard metrics utilized in contact quality monitoring include how long a customer waits before their call is answered, the duration of the call, and how satisfied customers are with these interactions. While many of these recognizable metrics have been relied upon by contact centers for years, the importance of some should be reconsidered if businesses want to continue growing, evolving, and providing unbeatable customer experience. The demand for streamlined and uncomplicated customer experience continues to grow, and companies making this their focus when it comes to the benefits of contact center quality monitoring. The Importance of Deciphering the Right Metrics Often, the reason why monitoring contact center performance doesn’t result in both team members’ efficiency and happier customers is that the right quality monitoring metrics aren’t being measured. Sometimes the results aren’t focused on as closely as others, or they are underutilized. Many contact centers rely on quality assurance managers to evaluate and score team member performance based on the average handle time of their calls or the average speed in which calls are answered. There’s no doubt these particular quality monitoring metrics are essential. Still, too large of a focus on them results in rushed calls where customer issues are left mostly unresolved on the first go-round. Focusing mainly on the speed of interactions serves to ensure things that are immensely important to customers are missed, such as displays of empathy. When a company is reliant on data gained from the wrong metrics, numbers shared on the inside may look like they’re hitting their marks while on the outside, customers feel unheard and dissatisfied. What Metrics Should Be Your Company’s Focus? First and foremost, if you consider a good company to be made up of well-trained and valued team members serving satisfied customers, then the goal should be to focus on quality monitoring metrics aligning with that vision. Ultimately, the right parameters for gaining continuous improvement depend on your particular company, its needs, and the overarching business goals. This means there isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all kind of answer to which ones should be chosen for every company. However, no matter which metrics your business decides on, it’s essential to take the data provided through technology and intelligence, optimize it, and put it into an actionable plan. While focusing on metrics relaying the length of call times may be less than stellar for overall customer experience and satisfaction, they can be great for team efficiency and can’t be banished altogether. Instead of doing away with them, companies should pay equal attention to customer satisfaction-centric metrics when it comes to quality monitoring. To be effective at monitoring and providing appropriate feedback for the continued development of team members, managers must review calls and note displays of empathy and the willingness of team members to take the interaction above and beyond the basics. Some points for managers to consider may include if team members are great listeners for their customers and if they are knowledgeable and capable while working to resolve issues. Once metrics are chosen, putting the results into an actionable plan is essential to getting the most out of the time, effort, and money put into collecting data from quality assurance metrics in the first place. Reviewing team member and customer interactions, providing timely feedback and putting appropriate plans in place is how you make a change and gauge overall effectiveness. Trust Your Company’s Strengths and Rely on Experts to Fill the Gaps Looking toward the near future, Forrester predicts more companies will feel compelled to operate their in-house contact centers rather than relying on outside partners. They also predict this could be incredibly detrimental to many businesses. Many companies will benefit from continuing to focus on what they do best. If that doesn’t already include operating and managing their contact center and customer experience, it’s likely best to seek and rely on already established experts. When seeking contact center and quality monitoring services, take into consideration what’s offered and how data is derived and disseminated. A company offering a combination of advanced technologies, artificial intelligence, and continuously developed team members ensures your company benefits from extensive data, corresponding actionable plans, and team members ready to serve customers and provide exceptional experiences. If this sounds like the type of partnership that would benefit both your business and your customers, check out the difference that Etech has to offer. Contact Etech today for additional information.
Objectivity Contact center reliability in terms of delivering the value promised to customers depends largely on the performance of individual employees. Thus, in order to ensure that optimal effort is given on each and every call, management teams are required to implement contact center quality monitoring (QM). In most cases, this task is performed by a dedicated QM staff whose goal it is to ensure that required procedures are met while also conveying the messages and tones unique to each client. While QM focuses on assessing and improving an employee’s individual skills, its general purpose is two-fold: to meet the performance demands of contact center clients while also ensuring that operations remain compliant with industry standards. Manual Monitoring – An Inherently Challenging Process Typically, the QM process at most call centers involves an individual agent (be it a manager, supervisor or dedicated QM analyst) listening to individual calls and grading out an employee’s performance. After each assessment the results must then be shared through the appropriate channels, beginning with supervisors or shift managers and then with the individual employees themselves. These individual one-on-one sessions between employee and analyst or supervisor and analyst are essential in order to identify areas that need improvement. Finally, follow-up evaluations are required in order to ensure that education has been effective at helping employees improve the customer experience on his or her calls. While QM efforts are vital for improving contact center performance, the aforementioned process carries with it a number of inherent inefficiencies. These include: Resource management: Managing QM can force executive teams to walk a tight line between meeting the demands of client output and improving processes and performance. When developing a QM strategy, many often first look to supervisors and managers to perform these tasks. While their familiarity with the skills and weaknesses of their individual team members may offer valuable information to this process, adding QM to their already full schedules often requires asking them to sacrifice time and effort being dedicated to other areas. Oddly enough, the net impact of having supervisors perform QM is often a decrease in overall performance due to less attention being paid to other vital areas of operation. The next solution would then seem to be to create a dedicated QM staff whose workflow would be centered on call evaluations and employee training. This eliminates the need for management to be extensively involved in the QM process and creates a team of subject matter experts that employees may be able to rely upon as a resource. However, it is important to keep in mind that creating such a resource would likely require pulling employees that have demonstrated the highest levels of performance off of the phones in order to effectively perform this function. While the anticipated payoff is that they would then be able to convey their skills on to other employees, the question becomes how long the center would be able to wait for the rest of its staff to replace the newly named QM analysts’ levels of performance? This leads to the final concern that manual QM presents in regards to resource management: time. If a team of supervisors or QM analysts is expected to turn the trends discovered during call evaluations into actionable information that helps employees improve customer engagement, then they need the time to both listen to calls and provide education. While the expectation is already in place, that call monitoring will be a primary function of a QM team, the amount of time needed to follow up with employees and managers if often not accounted for. Once evaluations have been done, the QM team must then pull supervisors away from their regular tasks to share results, and then pull employees off the phone to provide education. For contact centers already straining to deliver optimal output levels, such allocations of time may prove to be too great of a cost. Limited sample sizes: Because the QM process can be so expensive and does require so much time, managers or analysts can only afford to perform their assessments using small sample sizes. In many cases, the actual rate of assessed calls may often represent less than one percent of a contact center’s total output. One has to wonder if such a limited volume is able to produce an accurate depiction of overall employee performance. Employees may argue that judging their capabilities on the phone off of a small random sample of their calls puts them at an inherent disadvantage. Depending upon their specific roles and responsibilities, they may feel more comfortable in certain areas than in others. Thus, while evaluating a call for a client or product with whom they are unfamiliar may serve to highlight their weaknesses, it fails to identify those areas which they may view as their strengths. Along with offering a potentially unbalanced assessment of an employee’s skills (or lack thereof), random call monitoring also may fail to show if employee education has truly taken hold. For example, if an employee were marked for a reassessment after having received training and education, reviewing a call from the week following said training may not show what he or she has learned and implemented than one from two-three weeks later. The trouble is, when pulling random call samples, QM analysts often have little control over the time frames from which their calls come from. One might argue that the solution to the problem of limited sample sizes is simply to increase his or her QM staff. However, wouldn’t such action simply serve as an example of throwing more resources at a process that’s already been proven to be somewhat ineffective? Objectivity: The final challenge that comes with manual QM monitoring is delivering objective results. When preparing the criteria that will be used to assess employee performance, the question has to be asked as to the basis used to develop it. Is it being prepared by upper-level executives based solely off of perceived client expectations, or former
