Workforce Management Featured Article
Is Your Quality Monitoring Process Working for the Contact Center or Its Customers?
The end of one year and the start of a next, represent a new opportunity for every contact center. There are few organizations today who can say their customer service is perfect (and if they are, they’re likely deluding themselves). Every company could stand to sit down and find a way to review and improve its existing procedures. This is especially true of its quality monitoring.
Quality monitoring is often done for the contact center’s benefit: to ensure agents are keeping calls short, for example, or hitting the right script points. In a recent blog post, Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo writes that a quality monitoring review should ensure that companies are measuring quality based on customer needs and not organizational needs.
“Clearly define your contact center quality monitoring goals, which should be based largely on what your customers deem as necessary to excellent service delivery,” he wrote. “You can discover the specifics of what your customers want through feedback from agents and operations teams, as well as customer satisfaction surveys.”
In addition to defining goals, the quality monitoring review should ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. Too often, different functions or departments measure quality based on different standards, and the resulting push-pull between these interests can affect the quality of customer service and frustrate employees. Often times, the very definition of quality can mean different things to different people.
“If a metric like average handle time has to occasionally be set aside so an agent can spend a few more moments and keep a customer, such actions should not only be allowed, but encouraged,” he wrote. “Also, check that your quality associates are scoring employees the same way, so the program remains consistent and repeatable.”
Once definitions and goals are in place, companies should take some time to ensure the following:
Do you have sufficient data? There is a lot of information available to a contact center, so use it and ensure you’re not only measuring quality in the phone channel.
Are you communicating the quality program to agents? When employees are confused about what they’re being measured for and how often, and what managers’ expectations are, they are less likely to turn in a high quality performance.
Is the process fair? It’s important to regularly calibrate the quality monitoring process to ensure fairness across the board. There should be accountability built in for the team that carries out quality monitoring processes.
Are you using the right technology? Attempting to do robust, useful and fair quality monitoring with insufficient resources is an exercise destined to fail. Ensure your quality solution is updated, fits well with your processes and allows for high quality reporting and employee evaluations. The point is to make quality monitoring easier, not harder.
Quality processes are simply too important to the customer experience to skimp on today. While you may be hungry to find places to cut your contact center budget, a customer-facing function like quality monitoring simply isn’t the place to do it.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi