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Every organization that operates on a large scale incorporates contact centers as a major element of customer support. And rapidly changing needs of customers worldwide requires organizations to ensure that their contact center quality is always up to date.
But how do you implement a first-class contact center quality management program? Let's find out.
But before that, we'll need to define what does quality management mean in a contact center.
What is Contact Center Quality Management?
In the context of a contact center, the quality management process ensures that every customer interaction adheres to certain quality standards. This standard has to be met by every agent.
The QM process is used to monitor agent performance on the basis of certain key performance indicators and trains them to improve performance.
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Why is this an important process in a contact center? Let's find out.
Why is Quality Management Important in a Contact Center?
Imagine that you're establishing a new brand that sells homemade desserts.
In such a business, wouldn't you conduct a taste test when you're creating a new dish? You wouldn't be selling something without ensuring that it is of the highest quality.
And once you start selling the recipe, wouldn't you occasionally taste it to ensure that it has the same taste as made initially?
Just like how taste tests are important in a culinary establishment, quality management is a key aspect of contact center operations. A quality management process helps agents to deliver better customer experience.
Now that we've understood the importance of quality management, let's look at different outcomes of implementing a comprehensive quality management program in your contact center.
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How can Quality Management Help a Call Center?
A well-planned quality management process can help you notice a lot of improvement in call center performance. Here are some ways that your contact center can benefit from it.
1. Automate Call Center Workflows
When organizations use an automated QA program (quality assurance), it can help agents to streamline their workflow. Call center software with extensive integration can help agents to reduce the amount of time spent in after-call work.
Similarly, the QA process becomes automated with the help of automated quality monitoring software.
2. Reduce Agent Attrition
"Contact centers have 1.3 times the annual attrition rates compared to other private sector averages." - US Bureau of Labor Statistics
One of the biggest hurdles that a contact center faces is high attrition rates. Continuously onboarding and training new contact center agents has become a repetitive and time-consuming process.
When agent training is done properly as part of the QA process, it gives them the required support to improve their performance. This enables agents to work better and reduces the chances of burnout.
3. Improve Agent Performance
Auditors or QA specialists evaluate agent-customer interactions to understand how well an agent is performing. These insights can be used to elevate the performance of every call center agent.
4. Elevate Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction relies on many factors such as agent performance, average hold time, first call resolutions, and more.
Since a well-planned quality management process caters to improving overall call center performance, it translates to an improvement in the customer satisfaction score.
Right quality management software for your contact center!
Now that we've seen how quality management can help a contact center, it's time to see the different features of such software.
How to Use Quality Management Software to Improve Call Center Performance?
Quality management software leverages artificial intelligence to improve various aspects of a call center's performance. Let's look at how they can boost overall performance in a contact center.
1. Gain detailed conversation insights
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Quality assurance software uses artificial intelligence to evaluate customer conversations as soon as they're completed.
Since these automated software evaluates all customer interactions, much deeper insights are available than manual call center QA. These software also leverages speech analytics to show insights from all these conversations.
Lack of insights into how the product is being perceived by the customers, customer sentiment, and conversation preferences is a thing of the past. All of this is made accessible with the help of these tools.
2. Personalized Agent Training
"83% of high-performing service agents say they get the training they need to do their job well compared to only 52% of underperformers." - Salesforce
When all call center agents are provided with the same coaching schedule, it doesn't improve overall agent effectiveness. Some agents might benefit from such schedules, but it isn't possible for all call center agents to improve with such generalized coaching routines.
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On the other hand, automated quality monitoring is able to identify each agent's strengths and weaknesses. This allows agents to receive personalized coaching sessions that help them improve their performance in a shorter span of time.
Agents are trained to replicate winning agent behavior. Assessments are also conducted to ensure that agents have completed their sessions.
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3. Lower Compliance Violations
"Compliance budgets of organizations in the US are increasing every year with JPMorgan Chase spending roughly double of the previous years budget in 2014" - Bain & Company
Capturing every compliance issue was a distant dream during a manual call center QA framework. Since many customer interactions go unaudited, there were many violations that go unnoticed.
Whereas when automated quality assurance tools are used, all compliance violations are flagged and brought to attention as soon as the corresponding customer interaction is over. This is easily done as every customer interaction gets evaluated as soon as it is over.
Since every compliance violation gets flagged, it becomes easier to take proactive measures. The agent who committed the violation can be informed on what went wrong as well as given the necessary coaching so this isn't repeated in the future.
4. Identify Winning Agent Behavior
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Call centers have their own guidelines for providing quality service. It often becomes difficult to track what parts of agent call scripts are working and what isn't.
Customer intelligence changes that. There are detailed win-loss analysis reports that allow QA managers to identify winning agent behavior.
These detailed insights also make it easier to make strategic decisions on changes in experience delivery.
Take the First Step to Improve Quality Management Today!
With so many benefits of implementing automated quality assurance software, let's look at creating a QA framework in your contact center.
How to Create a Call Center Quality Assurance Framework?
Creating a call center QA framework isn't simple. It requires detailed planning to ensure that it is steady and doesn't require changes in the immediate future.
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Let's look at how call center managers can create a solid quality assurance framework in your contact center.
1. Analyze your current framework
The first step is to analyze data regarding the currently implemented quality assurance framework. A lot of analysis and evaluation is required to identify areas of improvement.
2. Define your goals
Once the current framework is analyzed, call center managers should define the goals they want to reach in the next quality assurance framework. A QA framework becomes obsolete if there are no goals to be achieved with it.
3. Identify relevant tools
Once the goals are defined, managers should research different quality management software available in the market.
For call centers that want to streamline their call center QA standards without automation, there are free QMS (quality management software) options available. Similarly, there are completely automated tools available for call centers that want to implement automation in their quality management framework.
The best way to identify what tool is the best fit for your organization is by taking a demo.
Creating a Call Center Quality Assurance Checklist
Once a QA framework is in place, call centers should focus on implementing it. Creating a quality assurance checklist is simple.
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The checklist should consider items that are aligned with goals from your quality management framework.
Using an automated quality assurance software like Convin will help you streamline your checklist and reach your goals faster.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is quality management and quality assurance same?
While used interchangeably, there are some differences between these two.
Quality assurance focuses on how agents perform and the standards of customer experience. Quality management refers to maintaining the entire quality control in a call center.
2. What are the quality metrics for contact centers?
Some of the best metrics to assess contact center quality management are average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
3. What is the importance of quality in a BPO?
While BPO call centers work differently from in-house call centers regarding management, quality control is equally essential in BPOs. BPOs also need to adhere to a high-quality service level while interacting with customers.
4. What are the responsibilities of contact center quality assurance?
A quality assurance team in a contact center needs to ensure that quality management frameworks are able to achieve all the required goals. The team also needs to ensure that agent performance doesn't take a hit.
