TMC Announces MVP Quality Award Winners

Accolades

TMC Announces MVP Quality Award Winners

By Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director  |  April 09, 2013

This article originally appeared in the March 2013 issue of CUSTOMER Magazine.

CUSTOMER magazine and TMC (News - Alert) proudly present the MVP Quality Awards. Though the technology they have at their disposal continues to evolve, these outsourcers represent the best of their community, leveraging the latest trends to set new standards for service excellence, customer care and support, without leaving behind their proven dedication to excellence in human interaction.

The members of this exclusive list have taken the time to complete an exhaustive 16-point essay, including a full customer case study detailing the program’s success, as well as providing specific statistics regarding call center volumes, staffing, and technology. As we have come to expect – and as anyone who works with clients in any capacity knows – these industry leaders demonstrate clearly that neither technology nor agent quality alone can succeed in such a competitive environment. Rather, these providers combine the two, along with management commitment and organizational standards, to provide the highest levels of service to their diverse and often longstanding customers.

We congratulate the 2013 MVP Quality Award winners and are pleased to share some of the compelling comments from their essays, which exemplify their elite status among their teleservices counterparts.

GOLD

Agero

www.agero.com

How has quality measurement evolved in your organization?

Over the last 30 years, Agero has continued to develop our call monitoring process. In the early years, we silently observed call monitoring in the live state from a supervisor workstation. In the early ‘90s, we invested in our first call recording system, Auto Quality. At the time, the new monitoring system enabled us to obtain and listen to a wide sample of recorded calls. The best feature of the system was that the associates did not know when they would be monitored. This allowed us to capture a true sample of their call quality. 

A few years ago, we purchased the Witness eQuality call monitoring system. Witness has enabled us to capture both the voice and data portions of a recorded call. As an added benefit, the monitor form has been integrated into the system to allow us to simultaneously monitor and grade phone calls. The ability to run complex queries on the quality database has enabled us to identify trends and create training modules to correct them faster than we have ever been able to do in the past. We are very proud to say that we have greatly improved our ability to measure quality and identify opportunities for improvement at every level of the organization.

InfoCision (News - Alert) Management Corp.

www.infocision.com

How has your organization leveraged technology to drive quality?

Whereas communicators used to wade through paper scripts of up to 30 pages, every appeal and conceivable objection is now easily and instantly accessible on their computer screens, which are custom-built by InfoCision’s IT staff into a user-friendly application, Inscription. We use the latest Microsoft (News - Alert) technology to ensure the script is on the communicator’s screen in three-tenths of a second after the call is answered so that the conversation flows naturally. Our scripted approach to client programs also ensures the accuracy and integrity of our message, as well as compliance with all applicable laws. Using another application, ScriptPad, the account staff can create and edit scripts quickly and efficiently and send them to the call centers instantly.

SILVER

Alorica

www.alorica.com

What key policies lead to operational quality in your organization?

Alorica customizes a quality plan for each client based on program-specific requirements and best practices within our enterprise. These requirements must be measurable and predictive of desired outcomes. Alorica Quality Assurance abides by regulated state laws regarding recorded calls. Our corporate counsel ensures that our clients and our company are compliant with federal and state telemarketing regulations. Alorica has customer care clients that require 100 percent recording of their calls. We utilize digital recording solutions to record calls for verification. Verifiers will listen to determine if all requirements have been met. Those requirements not met will be forwarded back to operations management to determine a course of action such as a customer call-back and re-verification process, retraining, or disciplinary action, depending on the severity of the infraction.

The Connection

www.the-connection.com

What elements make it easy to do business with your firm?

We offer our clients the best technology available in the industry. With this advanced technology, clients can rest assured that their calls are getting handled quickly by the appropriate trained agents. The Connection operates on a hub and spoke business model. Our Burnsville, Minn., headquarters contains our primary technology such as our Aspect (News - Alert) ACDs, servers and RAID technology in a secure, temperature-controlled environment. Because of this system, we have the ability to instantaneously route calls to all four call center facilities simultaneously. Our call centers provide complete redundancy to our clients, so that their customer calls are never missed.

 

Aegis Ltd.

www.aegisglobal.com

What is your policy on quality?

Aegis focuses on the use of appropriate metrics to measure performance. Most quality monitoring tools, metrics and scoring methodologies do not provide an accurate picture of business performance, and most quality programs fail to link quality scores with customer satisfaction and business performance. Rather, they use simplistic or overall scoring measures that do not properly weigh evaluations or calculate quality scores. With Aegis’ approach, we understand the attributes critical to our partner (client), end user transaction, as well as compliance requirements. The three quality scores are: customer affecting critical, business affecting critical, and compliance critical. We view the monitoring process as an opportunity to track the customer perspective and experience, providing an avenue to gather business intelligence on the customer experience and, hence, can respond to the ever-changing needs of the business and customers.

 

NCO Group/APAC Customer Services

www.ncogroup.com

www.apaccustomerservices.com

What elements make it easy to do business with your firm?

Long-term technology strategy – IT investments are central to our long-term strategy. Each of our objectives for growth and supporting seamless customer service require different levels of spending. APAC/NCO has focused on achieving flexibility to meet the need of its various customer segments. The higher costs of this approach to IT management are offset by the benefits of innovation and our ability to respond to customers’ needs. APAC/NCO uses its investments in technology to provide consistent service across all customer segments. APAC/NCO’s continued success is matched to our spending levels related to improvements in the IT strategy, not industry benchmarks. As an outsourcing partner, we understand the impact that technology can generate when cutting costs, and we have to be proactive with our solution delivery to include cutting edge products that will impact your ROI.

BRONZE

Synergy (News - Alert) Solutions

www.synergysolutionsinc.com

What elements make it easy to do business with your firm?

We have uniform processes and organizational structure across all contact center facilities, which allows us to easily migrate from site to site as needed for program growth and redundancy and allows for efficient operations for clients whose program spans multiple centers. All of our technology is enterprise-wide, so there is no confusion with the communication of disparate systems. Our switching platforms are centralized and all data at the contact center level is collected real-time to provide redundancy and the ability to report across all channels in an integrated web platform. Our open systems are configured to easily communicate with our clients’ systems, and our seasoned team of IT professionals is committed to client service and maximum flexibility.

Although pricing for each client program is specific to the requirements of the program, we believe in comprehensive pricing and we bundle all ancillary services into our call handling rate. Consequently, there are no hidden charges and clients are able to effectively forecast and budget for our services.

Ansafone Contact Centers

www.ansafone.com

What do you do for customers that give them the impression of quality and high ethical standards?

Providing clients with the impression of quality and high ethical standards begins with having a solid, accountable quality program and actually having high ethical standards. Truth always speaks louder than impression. Through our Eye of the Customer program, which serves as our pathway to clearly understand our clients’ vision, we are able to define and reinforce specific requirements and goals, our role in the process, and performance management strategies.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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