A recent study reveals that by 2022, global spending on CX is estimated to reach $640 billion.
This critical evaluation hints at the fact that the significance of customer experience can never be overstated. Consumers have high expectations for customer experience and aren't afraid to switch brands.
Moreover, customers no longer compare brands to their direct competitors but to the most satisfactory service they've ever had with any business, irrespective of industry or business type.
Thus, it is no surprise that the experience your customers get in the contact center is a critical piece of the buying journey.
In such a digital-first era, when retention is more challenging than ever, how can businesses create experiences to differentiate their brand from the rest and make customers want to stay?
One of the most significant steps of call center quality management must be to start giving your agents the required coaching & allowing them to be innovative while solving a problem for a customer.
It will boost their performance & give them more fulfillment in their roles. This will, in turn, lead to more happy & loyal customers that increase your revenue.
Using a well-drafted QA program is an ideal way to monitor, evaluate & improve your call center experience. Before we go in-depth into how you can build a successful QA program, it is crucial to understand what it is & how a well-tuned automated quality assurance program can help improve your call center performance.
This article will cover:
- What is Automated Quality Assurance?
- How to Build a QA Program?
- Effective Quality Assurance: Automating Call Monitoring & Scoring
- Visibility is The Key
- Effective Call Handling
- Turning Your Insights Into Action
- Meeting Compiance Guidelines
What is Automated Quality Assurance?
Call center quality assurance (QA) is a process of quality management that monitors and evaluates calls between customers & contact center agents, analyzes agent performance, ensuring that their service complements customer and business needs.
Although call center coaching is one aspect of QA, the entire methodology goes beyond that.
This strategy ensures everyone who calls receives a consistently positive experience and that your agents can efficiently convert callers into customers, thus helping maximize revenue, improve customer experience, and minimize call center costs.
A huge challenge faced by contact center managers that score calls manually is that most of the time is spent on searching for problems & very little on solving them.
When you manually score a sample of calls, there is no way to check even which calls you should evaluate. It thus creates an inaccurate view of performance metrics. And if your analysis isn't objective, it could become difficult to improve performance.
How to Build a QA Program?
According to McKinsey & Co, almost half of Americans said the pandemic caused them to reconsider their career path.
In other words, employees are now seeking purpose in the position they work. However, call center agents are often stuck in handling repetitive customer interactions. This pain point may make them feel disconnected from your business goals.
A suitable QA program ties your agents' daily tasks to a larger purpose & thus ensures fulfillment. Here are a few guidelines on creating an efficient automated QA program:
- It is essential to decide which metrics are the most crucial to you based on your business needs. You might prioritize Average Handle Time, Customer satisfaction (CSAT), and First-call resolution (FCR) over other metrics.
- Different metrics need different approaches. Deciding how to balance manual call monitoring and automatic data collection can significantly impact your call center quality management.
- Finally, after getting a hold of data, you should have a process for turning insights into action. This could indicate updating agent scripts or creating a Quality Standard Definition Document.
- Next, deciding which QA framework (operational, tactical, or strategic) works for your business is beneficial.
- An operational framework is mainly focused on measuring the real-time quality of service. It helps identify sub-par performers or quality benchmarks. A con for this framework is that it focuses on immediate issues over underlying trends since it relies on periodic evaluation.
- A tactical framework helps zoom out and use long-term trends to enable growth and scalability. It tackles issues like where the workflow is getting blocked & why, teams struggling with knowledge gaps, or changing your internal processes to improve the employee experience.
- A strategic QA framework ensures your call center aligns with your business vision. It focuses on your future goals that enable your call center quality management to improve customer experience & retention.
- These frameworks are not supposed to be exclusive. The most successful call centers leverage the combination of QA frameworks at any time to accomplish their goals.
Effective Quality Assurance: Automating Call Monitoring & Scoring
The key to a scalable & efficient quality assurance program is automating call monitoring & scoring with Convin's conversation intelligence software. It enables 100% call recording and analysis of customer calls. In combination with AI, its NLP (Natural Language Processing) allows you to transcribe the entire meeting conversation with minimal effort.
Here's how you can maximize your agents' performance using automated quality assurance:
1. Visibility is The Key
Much like the data that a quality assurance solution can potentially capture, it’s easy to go overboard on calls while monitoring. Listening may get so challenging that the point of monitoring (giving managers the insights they need to coach their agents) is entirely lost.
Convin's quality management tools use AI and NLP to record & analyze every call coming through the call center. This means you will always know which calls are critical for analysis & thus, improvement.
You can also lay out custom call scoring criteria to measure agent performance. Thus, understanding the difference between muddled monitoring and clear, actionable insights is critical.
Moreover, with the humungous volume of calls coming into a contact center, listening to each one, either live or recorded, is practically impossible.
A successful strategy is to focus on the calls that are different than average in any direction. This may include calls that performed very well, not well, or repeated calls from any customer.
Customer experience management tools can help filter these calls that serve as outliers. While the top-performing calls can serve as training tools for other agents on how to improve the call center experience, the others can help identify gaps & room for improvement.
2. Effective Call Handling
An ideal customer experience involves diagnosing & improving your agent call handling over time. Sub-par call handling can turn off the customers even before they have a chance to speak about their concerns.
Ensuring your calls are routed to accurate destinations based on call reason, line of business, customer repeat call identification, customer personality, dialed number, time of day, and other customer-defined criteria impact customer satisfaction broadly.
Apart from significantly impacting customer experience management, it also reduces your contact center costs, boosts efficiency, and enables your call center agents to spend more time with revenue-generating customers.
3. Turning Your Insights Into Action
An automated quality assurance process removes human bias, allowing you complete transparency and consistency across all business centers.
Data alone cannot suffice as long as you don't transform it into action that serves improvement. Convin helps you pinpoint patterns, trends, and anomalies in customer conversations. AI scoring helps identify top performers and their winning behaviors. You can also bet on the proactive alert mechanism to identify unsolicited agent behavior.
It, thus, helps your business reach key moments faster and identify profitable revenue opportunities while taking care of the daily, repetitive tasks.
4. Meeting Compiance Guidelines
To avoid costly penalties, especially in the healthcare & financial industries, your agents must comply with all the necessary guidelines on every call.
While handling particular queries, agents must follow stringent guidelines such as HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, and CCPA processes to ensure compliance. Convin's conversation intelligence helps you monitor all your agent conversations with complete transparency.
Since conversation analytics is delivered directly after the call ends, you always have time to address compliance issues (if any) immediately. Instead of waiting for days or weeks later when the agent could have potentially mishandled many calls in a non-compliant manner, it is always efficient to take action immediately after you have the analytics.
Thus, automated quality assurance ensures that agents stick to these compliances while regulating 100% of contact center interactions.
Don't Wait, Establish QA Criteria Early & Often
Automated quality assurance is one of the most critical processes in any business, especially when a company is dealing with an extensive volume of customer interactions.
It lets companies set a standard for the work they deliver, ensures that goals are identified correctly & met, and adequately addresses issues at the right time.
The QA benefits are multi-fold. While it offers proactive opportunities for agents to improve their performance, it also provides confidence internally to managers and externally to customers. It also helps to secure best practices that proactively identify revenue opportunities.
It is incredibly challenging for any team to provide a better experience if they don’t know what ‘better’ means for their business. For any automated QA program to be successful, it is imperative to establish the process well with the guidelines provided above.
Keeping your metrics consistent & knowing the metrics that matter most & why help improve customer experience. Once you're confident about your QA strategy & guidelines, revisiting them often helps with risk management & thus enhances business performance.
Sticking your head in the sand or throwing your hands up when customers get frustrated is easy. We at Convin view every interaction as another chance to improve & drive growth while keeping "happy agents & customers" the norm.
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