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.
Customer experience can be understood as the direct interaction between the customer buying a product and the representative of the business that is selling the product. Most businesses realize that this interaction is important when it comes to building customer loyalty because customers are unlikely to return if they don’t like the quality of service that they receive. For this reason, it is essential for every business to employ an effective contact center quality assurance approach. Having a quality assurance program will give your contact center the ability to monitor agent performance while revealing actionable insights for making necessary improvements to ensure your center is always on the right track. Below are some of the ways in which effective contact center quality assurance can take your contact center to the next level.
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.
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.
It’s crucial for call centers and QA managers to understand the Importance of using a call center QA scorecard and very few know how to build an ideal call center quality monitoring scorecard. With a successful call center monitoring strategy, companies can significantly improve customer satisfaction, employee retention, as well as their bottom line. Decision-makers can understand what does call center QA quality monitoring mean, quickly identify problems, maintain call quality standards, and improve team performance while enhancing customer satisfaction ratios. Putting in place a quality monitoring scorecard, however, can be tricky. Here is a guide to help you navigate the implementation of a functional call center monitoring scorecard strategy. Set Your Goals & Objectives What is call center quality monitoring? Most call centers have a system in place to track, evaluate and improve CX interactions, , however, every call center is unique in the way it monitors those experiences, so it’s crucial to ensure that all elements included in the scorecard are specific to your own customer and business needs, to help you measure what’s important. Ensure you know where you want to see yourself so you can create specific and actionable goals that make your support vision come to life. For instance, are you looking for ways to increase the quality of phone calls, provide faster solutions, ensure adherence to guidelines, or create a foundation for agent’s training and coaching? Accurately Define KPIs What KPIs are essential for your call center? Choosing optimal key performance indicators (KPIs) is the key in assessing call center performance. You will want to choose KPIs that align with your company’s mission, vision, and goals. Indicators that are considered to create the most significant impact on the desired goal must be prioritized. Some components to consider include customer service quality, protocol compliance, and agent’s problem-solving abilities, follow up service or call center etiquette. Make sure that the KPIs are clearly understood by everyone involved. Solicit the Input of Stakeholders Hold a meeting with your whole team to discuss the processes, strategies, and how you are going to execute the quality assurance process. See if anyone has inputs and recommendations to improve your plan. After all, agents are always on the front lines, dealing with customers daily so their experiences can provide valuable input that helps determine the benchmarks that make their customer interactions successful. When your whole team is actively involved in the process, you will have a better chance of adjusting behavior as people will show a stronger commitment to measuring up to the benchmarks they helped define. Determine the Call Center QA Monitoring Scorecard Criteria The effectiveness of your quality monitoring scorecard goes as far as the items included in the evaluation form. If you’re working with a poorly designed call scoring evaluation scorecard, you will eventually have inaccurate data that does not correctly assess agent performance or misses vital performance areas. Once you determine which metrics to hold your customer agents accountable to, creating QA criteria is easy. Develop a checklist taking into account the various metrics that suit your call center, your employees, and your company goals/values. Anywhere between 10 to 15 questions should be ideal. Instead of overwhelming your QA scorecard with dozens of questions, concentrate on the aspects of your team’s interactions that matter most to you. When it comes to the weighting criteria of each of the components, discuss how important each element is and from that determine how it should be weighted. Gather Data for Feedback QA analysts, team leaders, and analysts can gather invaluable data from a collection of scorecards, gaining a broad overview of the employees’ efficiency. From this data, you will have a better understanding of what opportunities are being missed, what areas demand improvement as well as where you are doing well. This paves the way for targeted training that builds your staff’s skills. Continually Review KPIs and Revise Your Plan as Necessary You’ll need to check your KPIs regularly to make sure your changes are maintaining an efficient and effective call center. Check your metrics and tweak them as desired to suit your workforce’s evolution and development. If the metrics on your scorecards fail to correlate with business goals, then you should consider updating them to reflect your company’s values and goals. Always solicit feedback from agents and communicate any changes you made as a result of their input. Multiple scorecards can be developed to evaluate calls, emails, live chats, social media engagements, or whatever elements you want to measure. Your call center scorecard is the foundation of your QA process, so take time to create a proper one that works perfectly for your unique business. With an effective call center monitoring system, your company not only benefits from improved quality scores but will also keep ahead of the competition and build a loyal following. To learn more about how Etech can optimize your current QA department, or help you develop/fine-tune your current QA Processes, feel free to contact us via our website.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly revolutionizing the world of business. Almost every process is now automated in one company or another. When it comes to contact centers, managers may even use AI for quality monitoring to provide call center quality assurance. This is just one of the many ways that businesses can ensure a consistently good customer experience. Before companies can expect customer service reps to meet quality standards, they must set quality monitoring parameters. These criteria help agents to know what expectations they need to meet. In a large contact center, however, the obvious problem is that it’s not possible to monitor every call. Here are some of the ways managers can pair artificial intelligence with a human touch to determine effective parameters. 1. Evaluate the Parameters When managers notice a quality problem, their go-to solution is often to try to improve how reality matches up with expectations. Instead, managers should first take a good look at the expectations. Parameters are not effective if they are not clear and reachable. Because these are objectives, they should meet the same criteria as SMART goals, i.e., they should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-constrained. When looking at the different aspects of SMART goals, managers must also be realistic. When managers do not play an active role in the day-to-day activities their team handles, they may fail to do this. Other times, managers may set big goals stretched over a long period. This makes it difficult to track progress. Creating milestones can help employees to better move from Point A to B as they work hard to meet company objectives. 2. Automate Some of the Process It is impossible for a supervisor to manually go over every phone call to or from the contact center. Because of this, many companies turn to automation with the assistance of artificial intelligence. In these instances, AI can transcribe and analyze phone calls. Bots can scan the transcripts for problematic words or phrases that indicate the need for a closer look. This is where the value of human touch comes in. Supervisors will need to listen to these flagged calls to better understand what went wrong if anything went wrong at all. AI systems do make mistakes, and tone can significantly change the meaning of a sentence or word. Sarcasm, for instance, may require a human ear to detect and understand. Some AI systems are even capable of alerting supervisors of noncompliance concerns in real-time, while the customer is on the phone. This creates the opportunity for timely intervention. Supervisors can then deescalate the situation before it costs the client a valued customer. 3. Use Artificial Intelligence for Sorting Managers focus most of their attention on the phone calls and chat histories that agents have with customers. However, this is not the customer’s first point of contact with a business. The first point of contact occurs when the customer calls or initiates a chat. An automated operator or chatbot then provides the customer with options to direct them to the best possible team for solutions. Sometimes customers become frustrated at this point before ever speaking to an agent. When consumers have to navigate numeric options, 73% skip the AI operator and press zero to reach a human being. In addition to this, 55% of customers prefer to speak to a human agent, but 54% would gladly take the chatbot instead if it saved them even just ten minutes. Even so, the first contact may have also occurred at 2:30 in the morning, while the business and customer service lines were closed. If the company has a chatbot at the ready, it could help to provide solutions to the customer. Failing this, it could schedule an appointment with the customer for a representative to follow up at a later time. The Bottom Line: The Need for a Human Touch While artificial intelligence provides many initial benefits for a company, it is the human touch that makes all the difference. Yes, when it comes to solving a problem, 56% of consumers prefer to reach out via chat before calling the company. However, as illustrated above, this is often to avoid the wait time before reaching a human being. At Etech, we understand the importance of an omnichannel approach to communicate with different employees in the ways they prefer. We also appreciate that they just want to have all the queries and problems solved as soon as possible. For more information on how we combine artificial intelligence with a human touch to satisfy the needs of our clients and their customers, contact us today. This blog was earlier published on LinkedIn.
We monitor calls to ensure that minimum quality standards are achieved. However, call monitoring is not only for identifying problems and agent opportunities but also for detecting what is working and cascading it to the entire team. Social media service is evolving and an increasing number of customers are reaching out through these channels, many more still turn to chat and inbound toll-free numbers for assistance. Omni-channel quality monitoring is an essential process to ensure that customers receive an exceptional customer experience no matter how they choose to interact with your business. Here are a few tips that can help you improve quality monitoring: Ensure you get the small things correct You already know the details of your operations and how your agents perform. To ensure consistent improvement — get the small things right. For example, verify that the agents have correct information about a product or service and responses to possible questions from customers. Also, ensure that agents are comfortable with and following prescribed interaction flow structure. With the small things in place, you can use your time to work on the big issues. Don’t make the employees nervous It’s natural for agents, especially newbies, to be apprehensive about having their interactions monitored. To get your employees engaged, you need to explain why you are carrying out monitoring. Emphasize your intention is to help them be successful and to ensure quality customer service is delivered. Your agents must clearly understand how monitoring benefits them or else you can expect challenges in adaptation. We have all used the acronym “WIIFM” and nothing will motivate people like knowing What’s In It For Me! To help your employees buy into the idea of quality monitoring, make the exercise collaborative and inclusive. Allow the agent to own the solution. It will help your employees understand the process better and what is required of them as they interact with customers. Remember to reprimand in private and praise in public. If you know there is a bad interaction, do not choose to play it in a calibration session that is attended by a large group. Take the agent into an individual coaching session to discuss the interaction whether it be a chat, call, or social media contact. The ideal coaching session takes no more than 15 minutes. Hire third party to monitor When a professional third-party monitors your team, they will produce unbiased evaluations. If you run a large contact center, you will need to have an internal team of quality analysts as well. They should stay calibrated with your third-party quality team to ensure that both groups deliver consistent results. Make sure that your internal team members have the right skills to monitor and provide feedback to agents in order to maintain the company quality standards. Reward positive performance Rewards are a great source of motivation. Come up with monthly awards like “quality agent of the month”. Non-monetary incentives oftentimes work as well as those with a cost to the company. The recognition of a “job well done” motivates employees to excel. Invest in coaching the agents You must invest in training and coaching your agents. In addition to new hire training, ongoing product and soft skill training will enable your agents to continue to grow. The time and resources you invest in training your employees will bear fruits in quality customer service. Also, use technology to guide your analysts and agents through the procedures. It might be costly at first, but in the long run, it will be worthwhile. Gather Feedback It is not enough to set quality processes without a feedback gathering mechanism. Internal calibration meetings should include both agents and supervisors to allow for an open question and answer session. Customer satisfaction surveys often tell the real picture. It can be surprising to learn that sometimes customers do not perceive the same quality of service that the internal team is assured they are providing. Monitor across multi-channels Today’s customer interacts with contact centers via multiple channels. It is advisable to monitor all sales and service channels to make an informed assessment. In conclusion, these seven tips will help you improve your quality monitoring. A quality interaction should provide an exceptional customer experience and showcase high performing teams. Until next time! This blog was published on LinkedIn.
Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into your call center quality monitoring can feel like an uncertain prospect. With over 80 percent of businesses already using or planning to acquire automated technology as a customer service strategy by 2020, it’s apparent that AI is quickly becoming a baseline requirement to compete in an increasingly globalized marketplace. However, many business owners still have concerns regarding the effects that AI will have on customer relations. While the efficiency and cost-cutting benefits of automated technology are well documented, there is a widespread myth that consumers will always prefer to resolve issues with a live customer service agent rather than a front-end AI-powered chatbot or interactive voice response system. The truth is that AI, when properly integrated with human intelligence, can vastly improve the effectiveness of your call center quality monitoring. Success depends on aptly assimilating technology into the existing corporate structure and promoting a workplace culture that embraces AI as a helpful resource. By keeping this philosophy in mind, you can use automation to develop an elevated front end experience that will dazzle your customers. Harness AI To Improve Overall Efficiency Surveys have shown that customers place a high level of importance in how quickly their issue with a company is resolved, while fiercely resenting the need to explain their problem to multiple people before reaching a solution. And nearly 70 percent of customers prefer the convenience of a messaging program over a live phone call to resolve an issue. Consequently, the speed and organization of your customer service matter just as much as the quality of engagement. This is where artificial intelligence in a call center can be a game changer. By streamlining some of your most repetitive, low level customer queries to a front-end AI-powered chatbot that consumers can communicate with at their own pace, you’re able to provide an immediate response to a simple question while freeing up time for your live call center service agents to address more complex issues or to speak with older customers who may not feel comfortable utilizing technology. Implementing AI to supply rote solutions to recurrent consumer complaints allows you to offer personalized, consistent service based on the level of engagement required. The result is a more effective system of call center quality monitoring. Use Automated Technology for Enhanced Training When humans are tasked with assessing customer service agent performance, limitations become evident. Most companies without a dedicated AI platform only have the resources to analyze a tiny fraction of recorded interactions. This means that they’re only getting a restricted sampling of vital call centers quality monitoring metrics such as voice analysis, predictive patterns of behavior, and productivity rates. By adopting an automated quality assurance program that can easily track every call, you’ll jump to a 100 percent monitoring rate that gives you the full picture of service center strengths and weaknesses. The analytic capabilities of a good AI quality assurance system also have the potential to transform your training strategies. Automated technology can easily identify hundreds of different variables to a human voice and develop predictive models for emotions that can be applied to specific customer queries and demographics. This data can then be used to formulate standard live agent responses to common consumer complaints, resulting in a higher level of satisfaction. By using AI to enhance the effectiveness of your live service team, you can channel the combined power of technology and human intelligence to provide a superior level of customer support. Ask for Live Agent Feedback on AI Systems While weaving artificial intelligence into call center structure can dramatically improve your customer satisfaction and retention rate, the truth is that no current AI software can operate completely independent of human supervision and interaction. Even the most sophisticated automated call center quality monitoring network will struggle with complex customer queries that require the empathy and emotional intelligence of a live agent. That’s why it’s imperative to develop appropriate escalation procedures with your customer support team in the event that a front-end AI-powered chatbot or interactive voice response system is unable to adequately resolve a consumer complaint. To prevent AI from mishandling customer service interactions, incorporate periodic reviews of call center transcripts to pinpoint areas of weakness in system analytics that may need to be supplemented by live agents. You should also assign a dedicated team to monitor all call center automated functions and make quality control adjustments as needed. Keep in mind that the purpose of AI is to delight your customers, so utilize insight from your live agents to continuously improve your automated systems and avoid frustration and confusion from consumers that may cause them to move on to a rival company. While upgrading your call center quality monitoring system to incorporate AI may seem like a big investment, the truth is that you can’t afford to forego automated quality assurance in today’s marketplace. With over 91 percent of top branded companies that boast superior levels of customer satisfaction utilizing AI, embracing technology is a fundamental strategy for converting and retaining a loyal consumer base. The key to providing the consistent, personalized service that customers now expect is to use AI in tandem with a talented pool of live agents who are trained to view automation as a useful tool, not a competitor. By implementing AI to improve efficiency and provide faster response times to customers, amplify training strategies, and integrate feedback from your call center team, you’ll be offering a premium level of service to consumers that will build long term brand loyalty. With over 20 years of experience in providing superior outsourcing solutions across a wide range of industries, Etech is a world leader in helping companies develop a seamless customer service experience. We offer a variety of artificial intelligence strategies including inbound and outbound call center service, live chat messaging, quality assurance monitoring, tech support, and software application. Systems are customized to meet your individualized needs while allowing you to compete in a diverse and globalized marketplace. Contact us
In the competitive marketplace today, your business is exactly what your customers say it is. The internet, and social media in particular, give voice to every customer, whether that voice is pleased, angry or somewhere in between. The interaction between your customers and your contact center employees may be the one interaction that customers take away with them. The one interaction they tell others about. Being willing to regularly review the principles that your contact center operates on, making changes where needed is of utmost importance as businesses work to increase customer satisfaction levels. Quality Must Be Based on Customer Needs and Expectations A company that fails to take customer needs and expectations into account may well be a company that fails. Conversely, companies that understand what their customers want and expect in a contact center interaction have made the first real step toward providing great customer service. In most situations, customers first desire is to interact with a real live agent instead of with an automated system. Second, customers expect to have a speedy resolution, no matter why they are calling. Thirdly, customers want to feel as if they have been assisted by an agent who knows the ins and outs of the business, can communicate quickly and effectively and has authority to either resolve the problem or quickly transfer the customer to someone who can. When human intelligence is combined with artificial intelligence, the result is almost always a higher percentage of contact center agents who meet or exceed customer expectations. This is because the AI system can monitor the effectiveness of each customer interaction which produces valuable data. A total quality monitoring solution not only keeps track of call trends, it can also track related customer feedback. Some systems can even take a few weeks of call history and analyze all the compiled data to see if current call center practices have been helping to meet customer expectations. High-Quality service Means Proportionally Lower Costs. Poor Quality is Expensive According to some recent studies, the cost of attracting a new customer is as much as 5-7 times more than the cost of keeping someone who is already a customer. This explains why high-quality service in the contact center is a must, as happy customers remain loyal customers. Customers who have consistently positive experiences when interacting with agents in your call center often become long-term valuable customers. Achieving and maintaining high quality service in the contact center is not something that can be done once and then dismissed. Instead, there must be a near constant review of calls to determine what is working and what may need to be changed. This is where AI comes in to play. A fully customizable AI solution paired with the human intelligence can be set up to enhance current call quality standards. The desired result is that when contact center employees learn and benefit from data gathered by implementing changes to positively change behaviors to reduce effort and drive customer experience. Quality and Service Level (Accessibility) Complement Each Other By using the right kind of quality monitoring system, contact centers are able to improve overall customer experience, meet compliance requirements and better sales results overall. Not only can AI gather information from each call, some programs can also engage in speech analysis, optimization and predictive analysis. Each of these tasks preformed by AI can provide valuable information for improving your contact center. For instance, when speech recognition software compiles data, the invaluable results can be used to teach reps how to improve the handling of each and every call. It may also be beneficial in running trial phone call scripts past customers and reviewing which is most effective. Call quality can be enhanced even more with AI tools such as the ability to listen to the Voice of Customers (VoC). Not only does this software help identify issues, it also helps point out sales opportunities. In essence, contact centers that use artificial intelligence in an effort to listen to customers, analyze data gained and adjust contact center policies accordingly have a higher level of both accessibility and quality. Etech Insights Because meeting and exceeding customer expectations should be a top priority in every contact center, Etech has created a software solution, Etech Insights, meant to work as an AI+HI solution. By synchronizing human intelligence with the data gained from artificial intelligence, Etech Insights can help call centers identify behaviors that will enhance performance. This solution will also help businesses to connect with what customers really want. Learn how to make use of 100% of interaction data while understanding insights that are sure to improve and enhance every part of the contact center with Etech Insights. If you would like to learn more about Etech, please contact us at info@etechgs.com. This blog was first published on LinkedIn
Quality analysis is an ongoing process in the call center to guarantee that agents are delivering superior customer service. Thus, monitoring is essential to keep your finger on the pulse of how your teams are interacting with the end customer. This allows for timely coaching and behavior modification as needed. A quality monitoring system must operate under established policies and procedures to consistently deliver calibrated results. You may have an experienced quality analysis team with an expert leading them, but if you lack commitment to adhering to policies and procedures you are at risk in the effectiveness of the analysis this team delivers. Here is a list of how you can maintain policies and procedures for effective quality analysis. Step 1: Outline the Policies and Procedures First you must create the policies and procedures that will govern the quality monitoring of the call center. Policies are documentation of rules, principles, and guidelines that an organization establishes to reach a long-term goal, in this case, quality control. Procedures, on the other hand, are the specific methods that will convey the policies in the day-to-day running of the organization. This process may take a while, but it is important to invest your resources in setting a good foundation. You can look at policies and procedures as your quality delivery strategy and tactics. Areas which need to be addressed include: Productivity measurements Workflow Calibration expectations Reporting standards Escalation process Dispute process Audit the Analyst (ATA) process and communication Monthly scorecard requirements and review Company policies Career Development Step 2: Document the Standards You should have an outline of the policies and procedures governing your quality assessment process within the call center, but you need to take it a step further and document it. By publishing your policies and procedures, you make them available to all within the company. This will easily facilitate the review with new hires and allow for documentation for all team members’ adherence to standards. Step 3: Train the quality analysts Leaders are responsible for formulating policies and procedures. However, the people to implement them are the quality analysts. You need to do an intensive training for the QA’s to ensure they understand the policies and procedures and thus be in a position to deliver quality service. Step 4: Coach the quality analysts Employee coaching is paramount for continuous performance improvement. When managers coach the team members on a regular basis, they further develop their knowledge and skills. Proper coaching supplements formal training and goes beyond on-the-job training. Matters relating to quality need reinforcement regularly so that the weaker QA’s can catch up and the strong performers can become better. There is always room for improvement and as a manager and coach your role is to guide all members of your team to engage in continuous performance improvement. Step 5: Monitor and review Finally, monitor the implementation of the policies and procedures. Policies should be formally reviewed annually to ensure that efficiencies are captured and modifications are made. Adding analysts to the review team will give you a hands-on perspective as well as allow for more ownership from the QA team. In conclusion, when you create policies and procedure, document them properly, train and coach your quality analysts on the best practices and then monitor and review the process, you will maintain the policies and procedure and carry out effective quality analysis. You can have an in-house quality monitoring team that is dedicated to only quality measuring and analysis. However, it is advisable to incorporate a third party audit team to audit your internal QA team. The external team will give you additional data based on their analysis that will help you improve your quality standards and provide the operations teams with actionable data to help modify agent behavior.
The communication that occurs between customers and agents in your call center hold incredibly valuable information. There are many industry advancements that make it easier to collect insights captured by those calls or text-based chats, but Artificial intelligence (AI) is one that has proven incredibly valuable for the call center sector. AI is an especially powerful tool regarding improving and maintaining quality levels in your customer interactions. It Lets You Monitor How Agents Handle Customer Queries Quality monitoring is crucial for the success of a call center, and using Artificial Intelligence to monitor the effectiveness of your customer relations can lead to better results than ever. With AI you are able to record and transcribe every call that comes in, and analyze what was said in the interaction. As a result, you can evaluate how agents deal with various types of questions and ensure they’re following best practices. If they aren’t, it’s easy to provide specific constructive feedback and keep quality levels high. It Detects Useful Business Patterns A powerful asset of artificial intelligence is automated quality monitoring. This gives you the ability to track trends in your customer feedback. For example, after launching a new login portal for a website, calls from users who don’t understand how to access their accounts might go up by an estimated 25%. That’s a shift worth your attention, but you might not notice the severity of the issue without an intelligent call center solution that includes automated quality monitoring. AI is able to report to you on the data that most needs your attention. Some interfaces allow you to look at history-related metrics. These break down the total number of calls received over a chosen time period, by analyzing data and discovering the most common topics. If metrics show that over the last two weeks a higher than average number of callers were highly satisfied and said they had come to your company after leaving a competitor, then your recent practices are worth continuing. Based on the knowledge gained from captured data, you can then determine whether there are problems that need to be fixed. The information also confirms if the business techniques you’re using are working as intended. It Helps You Stay Compliant Many call center managers have their staff members follow scripts. This approach ensures all customers get similar experiences and reduces your liability. Quality monitoring is an easy way to track this, and enjoy peace of mind, knowing for certain your team members are following the scripts as they’ve been trained to do. If necessary, you can intervene and give guidance to maintain compliant communications. Artificial Intelligence is the next step to managing your call center, and maintaining the level of success that your customers have come to expect. AI-derived knowledge from all your calls combines technology with a human touch. Consider investing in one soon. This blog is first published on LinkedIn.
Spreadsheets are the traditional method of maintaining data in a call center. However, inconvenient issues can arise when supervisors need to transfer data from a previous month and incorporate it into new documents. This process can become extremely time-consuming, and it is prone to errors. Also, it’s also very difficult to pinpoint trends in the data and take corrective action when needed. Automated quality monitoring has become a worthwhile solution for many managers, and especially those who are dealing with large volumes of communications. That’s especially true because the built-in technology often allows for spotlighting a particular month or even looking at data collected during a single day rather than looking at massive amounts of statistics at once. Improved Data Tracking Generates Better Insights Some quality monitoring solutions include information-rich dashboards that let you gain a complete understanding of what’s happening when customers call to speak to your agents. Get information about top issues or the number of times employees had to transfer calls to supervisors. You can also learn more about instances of channel switching. It occurs when a customer is trying to do something on line for an example and they are forces to call in, or if an agent has to transfer the caller to another department for further assistance. Spreadsheets usually don’t tell you all those things, and if they do, extracting the data takes a prohibitively long time. In contrast, a more robust quality monitoring system allows you to gain knowledge with a few clicks of a mouse. Save time and feel more equipped to make wise business decisions based on compiled data instead of just gut instinct. Keep Quality Levels Consistently High Whether your call center agents assist with sales or simply provide support, it’s important to remember that the level of service they provide can be thought of as a product itself. When people reach out for help, they expect similar experiences. Otherwise, your organization may develop a reputation for providing inconsistent assistance to callers. Think about investing in a smart platform that records all calls and analyzes them to detect patterns. It happens automatically and flags communications that require further review. That feature gives you peace of mind and prevents having to listen to all calls manually when assessing them for quality assurance purposes or trying to find out what else your customers are saying about you. Collective metrics can also reveal strengths and weaknesses associated with your agents, which leads to more relevant training and could be helpful when employees need periodic performance reviews. It’s time to look beyond spreadsheet-based methods of quality monitoring. A dedicated platform could help you meet your goals while reducing hassles related to manual approaches. This blog is first published on LinkedIn
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the gold standard in call center quality monitoring, and for good reason. Today’s automated call center quality monitoring software is so seamless in its integration that efficiencies resulting from its use can be pressed into action quickly, fairly and effectively. Active call centers record billions of hours of customer interactions every year, and it is spectacular to consider reviewing every minute for quality assessment. AI brings the task not only into the realm of reality, but also into position as a transformational tool in improving operations, agent performance and customer satisfaction. The call centers need to understand the basic before implementing Artificial Intelligence. Let’s take a look at the benefits of working with Artificial Intelligence and the multiple advantages it brings to any operation in the call center that strives to offer the best quality assurance at every point in the customer-interaction process. AI Interaction in the Customer Service Experience One of the best aspects of AI is that it is fully customizable to call center’s needs. Not only does the software “learns” and improves over time, but as in-house processes evolves, AI can be adjusted to augment the quality monitoring standards quickly and effectively. That said, it is vital that each company assess its needs and desires before investing in AI so that it achieves the most efficient fit. Here are some of the aspects to be considered when weighing whether to take the leap into AI quality assurance software: The people factor No computer can show human emotion, which is conceived as the major downside of AI when used in a call center. Companies don’t want their customers to feel as if they are not being heard, especially when they are frustrated or upset, because an automated system cannot properly assess and respond to human emotion. However, AI benefits the call center agents to understand the upset points where the customers want special attention. This can help the call center agents to include sympathetic words to solve the issue which the customer is facing. In addition, AI benefits the call center employees to handle some of the upset callers when a problem gets too emotional. “AI Technology Combined With Conventional People Skills Can Deliver A Seamless Customer Experience By Balance Customer Interactions With Empathy” Departmental universality Customer service is a chief concern in every aspect of working with patrons. AI can be programmed to anticipate people needs in the case of an emergency and begin the process before the person can even sort out how to respond. Plus, AI can inform customers of possible solutions and products immediately, which demonstrate a level of urgency and personalization that will help retain customers with monthly subscriptions. Resolution-based self-service Self-service is a tricky tool, and it doesn’t take much for callers to get frustrated with a dizzying path they don’t feel is solving their problem. But from a company’s standpoint, automated self-service is a vital tool for maximizing work done by people. When AI enters the picture, customers—especially high-value clients—can get personalized responses with language that doesn’t sound “canned” or rote. In addition, AI software is able to decide when a caller requires a personal touch, at which point it connects the caller to a live agent. AI can also read triggers that indicate a customer is a high-value client and make sure that caller is treated accordingly. All of these measures help ensure a positive customer service experience. Benefits of Automated Call Center Quality Monitoring With these customer service efficiencies in mind, the next step in the Artificial Intelligence assessment process is to consider the benefits of integrating the software into call center quality monitoring. Of course, the most obvious benefit is efficiency. Each call center generates hundreds of thousands of recorded interactions each year. The only way to effectively evaluate all those calls is with software. Here are some of the upsides to AI in quality assurance: Objectivity When people are the ones doing the QA assessments, there will always be a risk that interactions are not being evaluated objectively. Using AI, there can be no bias based on a preference for certain agents or a dislike for others. Objectivity is built into the assessment software. Universality : Rather than selecting a small fraction of calls for evaluation by people quality monitoring agent, AI allows every single call to be monitored in a quick and efficient manner. Every agent’s interactions can be evaluated, which means the leaders get a full picture of agents’ work and are prepared. Immediacy Because all calls are screened quickly, trends–both negative and positive–can be discovered quickly and adjustments can be made in an efficient manner. There is no rush in the leader’s ability to implement a correction or new innovation that helps boost customer satisfaction levels. Performance As a result of the three benefits above, agent performance is much more likely to improve quickly. Timely, accurate quality assurance evaluations can indicate which agents need additional training. The overall agent performance helps the leaders understand better which agent’s performance can limit the delivery of effortless customer experience. Of course, there is no AI software, to this point, that can run without the benefit of people’s insight and interaction. It is the combination of people and Artificial Intelligence that produces the most complete data, intelligent insights, and helpful recommendations. With the automated functions in the call center, it is imperative to have people to monitor the transactions for quality services. The people make the whole AI functionality work to offer exceptional customer experience to the customers. Customers have always wanted seamless and effortless form of responses for their issues. According to Forrester’s report of 2014, understanding customer emotion and empathy are the most critical components to gain successful customer experience. Here, to touch the heart of the customer services being delivered, human touch is required. When you have both, your investment in AI software can facilitate a marked improvement in agent
Ensuring that your agents are producing successful calls depends on much more than a thorough initial training. Quality management should be ongoing, involving regular training and constantly updated goals. Managers often implement a system of quality assurance using call monitoring to improve performance on a continuous basis. Here are a few frequently asked questions about call monitoring and quality management to get you started on the path to continuous call improvement. How Can I Engage Agents During Call Reviews? Regular team reviews are an essential part of quality management. Sharing good and bad calls to discuss what went wrong and what went right gives the group a glimpse into techniques that work for individuals and areas to improve on. It is also important to provide one-on-one monitoring with an agent and a manger after a call. This is an excellent way to give personalized attention and reinforce what managers look for when reviewing calls. Whether you are performing a group or individual evaluation, a few steps will further engage agents in the call reviews: Ask the agents to think of calls that would be helpful to review. Avoid pointing out every issue yourself during a call review. Let the agents find the mistakes and positive aspects of each call. This keeps the agents actively listening and thinking about quality. It also avoids the feeling of a management lecture. Add customer feedback into the discussion. How Do I Interest Agents in the Monitoring Process? Let the agents help decide quality measures you use during call monitoring. Involving agents in quality assurance helps them understand the process behind call monitoring and become invested in it. The focus should be on exceeding customer expectations and monitoring from a customer perspective. Asking agents to take a customer’s point of view creates better quality measures. It also reinforces the concept of customer respect and empathy. How Should I Schedule Call Monitoring? Make sure that you have a predictable schedule for coaching: Rotate listening and coaching through the teams on a weekly basis. Make sure each agent has recent feedback and is anticipating and working toward the next established review. Plan your staffing so that at least one agent at all times can be off of the phone and experiencing quality monitoring. How Can I Keep Agents From Returning to Bad Habits? Before a coaching session ends, make sure every agent agrees with the goals set during the session. Get verbal confirmation that each individual is 100 percent behind every goal. Monitoring and training should include clear goals and extend beyond listening to calls for lasting effects: Ask top performers what is working for them. Team up good performers and less successful agents. Do not end the session if anyone is wavering or seems unsure of goals. How Can I Reinforce Good Habits? Make sure to mention the positive to each agent during call monitoring. Immediate concerns tend to focus on negative aspects of an agent’s performance, but starting with a positive comment reinforces quality work, creates an incentive to continue good habits and opens an agent to your less positive feedback. Call monitoring is a powerful tool for improvement. Involving agents in the review process and in creating quality measurements gets them invested in monitoring and provides them with methods to improve performance. Continuous quality improvement starts with call monitoring, helpful reviews and reinforcement of excellent work.
If you’ve worked in a call center long enough, you’ll learn that customer complaint are among the least enjoyable to take. While complaints are simply part of the call center experience, there are four ideas you can put to good use to both reduce the number of customer complaints you receive and boost your quality monitoring capabilities. 1. Resolve the Issue on the First Call There are a few things that customers hate more than having to be put on hold, transferred, and made to call back before an issue is fully resolved. While you can’t prevent complaint calls, you can change the way customers feel about calling your company with an issue. Make sure your agents have the skill, authority, and knowledge they need to offer refunds, make promises that can be kept, and make it so customers don’t have to contact your business with the same complaint. 2. Implement the Right System You should also consider implementing a quality assurance system that gathers information on calls to provide you with valuable information you can put to good use improving your call center and your agents. The way QA technology works is it examines keywords used by your agents and callers so you can get a firm understanding of why customers are complaining and why your complaint resolution skills might not be as great as you’d like for them to be. 3. Keep the Lines of Communication Wide Open Not only do your agents need to maintain clear and constant communication with your customers, you also need to ensure your managers and agents can easily communicate with each other. You can take this one step further and see to it that your managers relate to other necessary departments and company personnel to allow them to be better. In addition to implementing quality monitoring solutions to help with this tip, it’s also a good idea to hold meetings to review past complaints, how they were resolved and how they can be better resolved in the future for even better results and happier customers. To make meetings more efficient, it’s a good idea to implement a complaint-logging system. 4. Stay Consistent Your agents should be consistent in their problem-resolution skills. If the same customer calls about two different issues and has two different experiences, that customer might feel you aren’t consistent or aren’t properly training your employees. Again, this is a good reason to hold regular meetings, to make sure your training efforts are the same across the line, and to see if any changes need to be made to your training. Make it so that when your customers have to call with a complaint, they know they’re going to be taken care of by your agents and fellow call center leaders. While you can’t please everyone, there’s most certainly no harm in trying. Put these tips to good use, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at Etech if you need more assistance or guidance in your quest to reduce customer complaints. This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
Is your call center quality assurance team currently overworked and overwhelmed? If so, they are less likely to consistently provide accurate performance assessments and may overlook negative interactions between agents and customers. Spot-checking phone calls due to limited resources is simply not an accurate way to measure performance or identify areas that need improvement. Thankfully, there is a fairly easy solution that involves outsourcing your contact center quality assurance responsibilities. When you automate quality assurance, you ensure that each and every phone interaction between your customers and your agents is recorded and analyzed. It is natural for QA staff to worry about being phased out in favor of automated systems, but the most effective automated systems are designed to be used in conjunction with a team of professionals who know how to interpret the data and use it to come up with improvement recommendations. So, how will an automated QA system really affect your team? Greater Efficiency Every good QA department is constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency, and an automated quality monitoring system can help. A standard speech analytics system reveals information about keywords used in phone conservations between customers and agents. This type of system gives your QA team the ability to rapidly review calls based on specific keywords. It also makes it easy to identify any agents who may be making forbidden statements while interacting with customers. If your QA department is expected to achieve higher level of analyzation detail without help from an automated system, a team member will have to listen to each call personally. This takes a significant amount of time and is not very efficient. By choosing to automate the process, you will give your QA department more time to review and analyze the data to identify specific reasons for poor call results. More Time for Call Center Improvement Tasks When your QA staff members are not expected to spend most of the day parsing through calls, they have more time to take care of other important responsibilities, including planning and implementing training for phone agents, reviewing automated analysis reports and coming up with recommendations for improvement. By choosing to automate quality assurance, you give your QA department greater freedom to work on big projects and long-term goals rather than being bogged down with day-to-day phone call analyzation responsibilities. Choosing to automate your contact center quality assurance does not mean you will need to eliminate your QA staff. Automation simply makes it easier for your QA team to quickly perform their daily responsibilities with maximum efficiency. Your QA team will still be needed to interpret the data received from automated systems and implement effective training solutions to continuously improve call center performance. For these reasons, QA automation should be seen as a way to improve your QA department rather than replace it. This blog was written by Jim Iyoob, Executive Vice President for Etech Global Services. For more advice on creating a quality assurance team that drives CX or if you would like to learn more about Etech, feel free to contact us at info@etechgs.com . This blog was first published on LinkedIn..
Did you know that contact centers throughout the United States generate more than 20 billion hours of audio files each year for the purpose of quality assurance? This data reveals that the average U.S. contact center generates more than 300,000 hours of audio recordings annually. It is little wonder that QA staff are often overworked and struggle to maintain high call center quality standards on a consistent basis. What if you could relieve some of the burden on your QA team by automating much of the contact center quality assurance process? When you automate quality assurance, you will have an easier time avoiding employee burnout in your QA department. Here are four benefits you should know before automating your quality monitoring system in your call center. 1. Data Analysis and Interpretation When your QA team is expected to process hundreds or even thousands of audio files in a week, they may have to sacrifice accuracy in order to meet their quota. Since accurate call center data is essential for assessing agent performance, you are doing yourself and your agents a great disservice if you overload your QA department and force them to work with an incomplete data set. When you automate your contact center quality assurance, you can have peace of mind that your performance assessments are based on complete and accurate information. This is because an automated QA program checks every phone call and assesses every interaction between agents and customers. The resulting data will help you understand how well each agent is performing. Although automated systems are good at providing data, they cannot analyze the data or give you recommendations for improvement. For this reason, it is recommended that you use analytics technology in combination with human services that can interpret the data and provide you with suggestions for improvement. 2. Superior Agent Performance When agents know that their performance is being assessed accurately and fairly, they are more likely to step up their game. Additionally, when they receive performance feedback quickly, they can focus their efforts on improving certain behaviors and achieving a higher assessment the next time around. 3. Ease of Establishing Performance Trends No two phone agents are exactly the same in experience and ability, so how do you set realistic performance trends for each one? When you automate quality assurance, you receive regular reports that include information about each agent’s strengths and weaknesses. Once armed with this information, you can determine agent retraining needs and quickly establish performance trends for each agent. 4. Objective Agent Performance Assessments It can be nearly impossible to achieve unbiased performance assessments when you have one person evaluating another person’s performance. To avoid personal bias on a small or large scale, consider implementing an automated quality monitoring system. Doing so will eliminate subjective performance assessments and deliver reliable results. While automating your quality assurance processes can provide you with quick and accurate data, it should not be used to completely eliminate your QA department. In order to interpret the data you receive from an automated system, human understanding and recommendations for improvement are essential. This blog was written by Jim Iyoob, Executive Vice President for Etech Global Services. For more advice on creating a quality assurance team that drives CX or if you would like to learn more about Etech, feel free to contact us at info@etechgs.com . This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
Companies are always looking for effective and cost-efficient ways to improve their bottom line, and one of the best ways to do that is by improving the customer experience. After all, it does not make much sense to offer the best products or services in your industry if your customers are not happy. Focusing more on quality assurance through quality monitoring can both help improve your customer experience and gather feedback to improve your products and services. The Facts Let’s look at some of the facts and figures associated with the current state of customer service. Research has shown that roughly 20 percent of consumers place price over customer service, nearly 40 percent of consumers do not reach out to the companies they do business with, and customers who do reach out don’t do so very often. What this data shows is that a majority of shoppers are willing to pay more for a product if the company is known for having great customer service. This means that a company should make sure their customer service is of the same caliber as the prices they’re asking for their services or products. If customers spend top dollar on an expensive product but have trouble getting in touch with someone who can answer a simple question, they’re unlikely to continue to do business with that company. Moreover, those individuals are likely to leave bad reviews and share their experiences on social media, which can cost the company future business. When consumers are not reaching out to companies, part of the reason might be that they have had poor customer service experiences in the past. Companies have an opportunity to set the bar for customer service and change consumers’ minds about what excellent customer service is, which can make customers more willing to reach out to them in the future if they ever have questions or concerns. In order to understand what works with their customers, companies need to assume a proactive role in discovering what their customers are saying by monitoring those interactions for quality assurance. How Monitoring Solutions Work The central purpose of quality assurance is to gauge representative performance and determine Key Performance Indicator (KPI) or Key Success Indicators (KSI) metrics. These metrics help companies develop their definition of success and keep track of the behaviors that support that definition. One of the most essential things to bear in mind when it comes to KPI and KSI is that the metrics differ from company to company. When cultivating indicator measurements, the monitoring solution gathers information such as the following: How many calls the customer service team or call center receives. The length of time it takes for representatives to answer calls. The number of customers pleased with the services they received. Even though customer service agents can potentially gather this information on their own, companies might prefer to implement software instead. The results are more accurate, easier to organize, more complete and free of personal opinion, which can skew the results. The results provided by software let companies know where they’re doing well in terms of customer services, which areas need improvement and whether there are potential opportunities of which they may not be aware. Properly Utilizing KPI and KSI Metrics To leverage the data generated by quality monitoring solutions, it’s not enough that you simply gather information; you have to know how to effectively use the data and engage your company hierarchy in the process. In addition to sharing data with managers and department heads, front-line employees should also be included. Customer service agents are critical to the customer experience, so they need to understand the rationale behind putting new technology in place. Knowing you’re taking steps to make their jobs easier and giving them the tools they need can enhance their employee satisfaction levels and they may also have suggestions of their own about improving customer service. Share the results of metrics both on an individual customer service agent level and on a team level. You can also use the results of the metrics and monitoring solution in future company decisions. For instance, the gathered data can help you decide which changes to your customer service department will be the most effective, and the metrics may even help with your next marketing campaign. Additional Steps for Effective Customer Service Improvement While using monitoring solutions is a great first step in making your customer service capabilities stronger, it’s only part of the equation. As you’re gathering, sharing and implementing data, be sure you ask customers and callers how they feel about your company’s customer service capabilities and alignment with promises made in your marketing or advertising. You might already know how difficult it can be to keep callers on the line, so give them a good reason to stick around such as a discount or a free service or product in exchange for their participation. In addition to monitoring phone calls, it’s also best to monitor all other forms of customer communication. This is an especially good idea since a majority of today’s consumers prefer not to communicate over the phone. Gather data from live chat and email correspondences to discover valuable information, such as customer pain points. These pain points indicate the issues customers have with your products, services and your company in general. Customers may not call or communicate with you to specifically discuss these pain points but they can be elicited naturally in a conversation and rather than brush the matter off, you can use it as an opportunity to make your company and customer service better. Customers will appreciate the fact that you actually listen to them, and your customer service representatives will be pleased that the issues are being resolved such that they will not have to hear the same pain point over and over. There are always opportunities for your customer service agents to improve, and KPI metrics create an excellent baseline. You can look at
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
