When it comes to improving quality management do you find it challenging because you haven’t got time, you’re restricted by team leader skills or you’re just not sure what to measure?  A poll was conducted recently asking respondents what challenges they faced in improving Quality Monitoring and Performance Management and these were the three most common answers.

A challenge can be described as a test of one's abilities or resources in a demanding but stimulating undertaking. Quality management serves up many challenges, especially when it comes to improvement and it is difficult task to identify what new aspects warrant being measured, often it may be a case of trial and error.

61% of respondents said they found it challenging to measure the right thing. The notion of ‘not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted’ springs to mind. Taking the initial step of monitoring quality is not enough, deep analysis and dissection of results is required and current measurements should continuously be questioned and validated.

Take the following steps;

-Start with the basics and work your way up.

-Evaluate and rethink about what you are measuring periodically.

-Review what is most important to your customers

Then consider the following questions;

-What are you doing with the results?

-Which results are the most beneficial?

-What do you want to know?

-What would be beneficial to know?

Another interesting find from the poll was that 41% stated that being too busy for quality management was a challenge. Prioritization of tasks is crucial for this element to be tackled – how can one ever expect to improve if they don’t know where they currently stand – as difficult as it might be to get from A to B it will be a whole lot worse if you don’t know where A is. There is no doubt quality monitoring is an investment of time and effort but even the busiest managers have time to invest in activities that are important to them.

45% said they found a challenge in that they felt "Team Leaders need better skills". This is not surprising considering that in complex support settings managers or supervisors are often less technically up-to-date than the agents they supervise and therefore are unable to assess the technical accuracy of their representatives. However technical expertise should not be ignored from monitoring, it may be the primary reason why a customer is calling so getting this element correct is crucial. In an instance like this there should be dual monitoring or scoring of calls: the manager or supervisor should score the phonecall based on interaction and customer service skills and a senior technical engineer should score the technical content.

Leaving technical expertise aside there are 2 other solutions to this challenge;

a) A well-designed quality framework should be easy enough to utilize so that required skill is minimized i.e. the complexity is in the framework – not its implementation.

b) Quality monitoring will identify the gaps where team leads’ skills need improving and therefore give you the tools to up skill those leaders

There are challenges with most business practices and carrying out a cost benefit analysis can help in making the decision – Remember to ask; can your company ignore the opportunity to easily identify where they fall down most and where they excel in customer service on a daily basis?

What challenges are you finding with improving quality management? We would love to hear your feedback, comment below.