What mistakes do companies make when trying to enhance quality in their contact center?
Many companies will implement a variety of programs to enhance the quality of service provided by their contact centers. But without direct input from the customer, they can't really be sure that the level of service provided by their agents is indeed satisfactory.
To better gauge customer response and avoid the mistake of misunderstanding the efficacy of a quality program, contact center managers need to be able to extract insight from customer interactions, by listening to the relevant customer calls, and correlating them to agent evaluations, customer feedback and screen activity.
By being able to reliably correlate agent evaluations to customer feedback, supervisors and QA managers can gain greater confidence that evaluations are truly reflective of what customers are saying and can reliably calibrate training sessions and maximize quality of service.
What advice would you give someone looking at a quality monitoring solution for the first time? It is critical for a
quality monitoring solution to provide supervisors and QA managers with the confidence that they are creating effective QA programs and that their agents are successful in their communication with customers.
This is easily achievable through a solution that integrates 100% quality monitoring with advanced content analytics and coaching tools that correlate customer feedback to evaluation reports and quality monitoring results. Such a solution enables managers to go beyond previous-generation Quality Monitoring programs, which capture only a small number of random calls.
Without performing 100% quality monitoring along with analytics, a QA supervisor must monitor a call before it can be determined whether high levels of service were provided. And since QA supervisors generally monitor no more than 20% of the calls, an immediate alert is critical to remedying poor service.
Furthermore, this kind of approach also enables precision monitoring, which also enables the contact center to quickly identify agent behaviors that are compromising quality and enables to take immediate corrective action.
How do companies generally measure the return on investment in this technology?
QM programs have evolved to include 100% monitoring, along with advanced speech analytics, such as, word-spotting, emotion detection, which are correlated to customer surveys, and call flow analysis tools, as well as precision vs. random monitoring. Accordingly, the ROI model has evolved as well to involve improvements in processes and performance both in the contact center and throughout the enterprise.
Advanced contact centers are leveraging customer interactions to extract insights on various enterprise issues such as the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, providing feedback to executives on what customers want, what is causing customers to switch to competitors, and to identify opportunities to fix broken processes and increase efficiencies throughout the organization.
These advancements in performance management applications have resulted in ROIs coming from areas including improved marketing campaign effectiveness and results, reduced customer turnover, reducing call volume by pinpointing calls that could have been avoided or handled through an IVR or the web, and increasing revenues.
Do you feel that enough contact center expenditure is spent on training agents these days?
A contact center will generally invest several weeks of training in an agent as they join the team, but not necessarily on an ongoing basis. Contact centers need to make sure that critical information on best practices or new campaigns is always accessible, and be able to tailor such information to the specific skill-set of an individual agent.
With a supervisor's schedule usually very full, there isn't always time to provide such feedback, coaching, to their agents. Nor do they always have the requisite inputs to provide focused feedback that is tailored to a specific agent's skill set. The key to answering these challenges is an agent coaching solution that is fully integrated with a customer interactions capture and analytics solution. This type of solution provides the ability to create personalized coaching packages and push them to agent's desktop. Agents can then independently review the coaching package, let their supervisors know that they have reviewed, send back comments, and re-visit the information whenever needed. They can also send comments or questions to a supervisor, or request a face-to-face training or coaching session through the system.
Such two-way, immediate communication empowers agents. Once an agent is engaged and empowered performance and quality of service is maximized.
How will we be using this technology in the future/what trends do you foresee?
Performing 100% quality monitoring along with advanced speech analytics helps a contact center improve quality of service and agent performance. Moreover, this technology enables an organization to gather critical business intelligence to help the enterprise make key business decisions. For example, key competitive insights can be extracted from customer interactions regarding product and pricing.
Leveraging this technology can also improve agent cross-sell and upsell effectiveness. Integrated customer interactions analytics enables the contact center to become a cross-selling and upselling success, and consequently a core, strategic operation that can contribute to profitability and the bottom line. The contact center, which has been the untapped hub for collecting customer wants, needs, and perceptions, will become one of the company's most valuable resources for customer insights and information.
How do the various industry rules and regulations impact quality monitoring in a contact center?
Industry rules and regulations are causing contact centers to re-examine their policies and procedures, with non-compliance leading to heavy fines, costly legal action and significant depreciation of the company's brand value.
Accordingly, contact center managers have realized that they need to go beyond previous-generation Quality Monitoring programs, which capture only a small number of random calls. In order to truly reduce risk and ensure compliance, forward-thinking contact centers are deploying 100% monitoring solutions.
By analyzing all customer interactions for any combination of words or phrases that trigger non-compliance, e.g. "do not call" or "this is the 3rd time I asked to remove," managers can provide immediate feedback to agents on how to improve upon their interactions with customers. The risk is further decreased with the capability of alerting a supervisor to such occurrence before the issue becomes a legal action.
Furthermore, today's availability of multi-dimensional speech analytics, incorporating word spotting, emotion detection and call flow analysis are helping these centers extract insight from their customer interactions. They are using this insight not only to assist with compliance but to perform precision monitoring, through which the contact center can more quickly identify the calls that require immediate action, resulting in more efficient damage control.
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