Time for a Makeover! Quality Assurance for Modern Contact Centers
Time for a Makeover!
Quality Assurance for Modern Contact Centers
Overview
For over 40 years, quality assurance (QA) has been an absolute necessity in contact centers. It’s foundational for improving agent performance, organizational compliance and overall customer experience—its value so entrenched that the underlying technology and techniques have remained fundamentally the same for many years.
But the foundation is cracking. Customer and employee expectations are changing, and so is technology. In an always-on world, the pace of business has intensified. These changes are pushing traditional QA techniques and resources far beyond their limits.
It’s time for QA to get a makeover.
Click on the above image to view the full infographic.
Changing Customer Expectations
Mobile devices are everywhere, and they’re changing the ways in which customers interact with your business.
"Consumers expect service anytime, anywhere—and experiences that can start on one device and finish on another." @Verint
Moreover, customers are leaning more toward self-service with every passing day, and many prefer to avoid contact with a contact center if at all possible. But they still expect the ability to escalate issues to a live agent at any point, across any device, and receive top-notch service.
Newer channels, such as chat or self-service, can be especially disruptive from a QA perspective.
Why? Because traditional QA processes were developed to focus on telephone interactions between agents and customers. They weren’t designed to address these modern customer experience scenarios.
What About the Employees?
Contact centers are growing increasingly concerned about employee engagement. In fact, agent attrition was cited as the No. 1 challenge in a recent survey by Contact Center Pipeline1 on contact center challenges and priorities. Not surprisingly, survey participants also reported they planned to prioritize coaching and development to help alleviate turnover.
Numerous studies have reported a correlation between high employee engagement and performance.
"By focusing on employee engagement, you can help decrease attrition and even give your organization a competitive advantage." @Verint
This means delivering better, faster feedback to employees to help them improve their performance. Reviewing a handful of calls each month won’t cut it. And with traditional QA processes, there’s often a gap between issue identification and remediation—between insights and action—creating a barrier to improving from good to great.
The growing use of self-service tools such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and social communities means there are fewer calls coming into the contact center. The calls that do arrive tend to be more complex in nature. They’re also rich with information that could be analyzed to identify potential issues.
But that poses a problem.
With so much data and so many metrics to quantify, it’s becoming impossible to do so manually for more than a very small number of calls. This tiny snapshot of information is seldom enough to provide meaningful insight for decision making. Imagine what’s slipping through your QA processes right now.
"Growing use of self-service translates into fewer, more complex calls into the contact center." @Verint
What Contact Center Pros Need to Know
Optimizing performance in the contact center is both an art and a science, and it’s evolving quickly.
As a contact center professional,
here are three key inflection
points that industry analysts
suggest you consider when
aligning your QA investments and
contact center roadmaps:
1. Automation
2. Analytics
3. Future of Work
Inflection Point #1: Automation
Automation offers great potential for making your QA processes “change-ready.” When it comes to contact center operations, analysts say:
“… it’s imperative to work toward a series of steps that clearly define data’s input into informing and improving measurable outcomes, such as an improved customer experience that is measurable by net promoter score (NPS) and/or decreased churn and increased revenue streams that are accompanied by healthy margins or reduced costs.”
“2018 Trends to Watch: Automation,” Miriam Deasy, Ovum, 17 October 2017.
Inflection Point #2: Analytics
Leveraging analytics is critical for gaining insights from your data and making the changes needed to optimize performance.
When it comes to contact center operations, analysts say:
“… if improved analytics is able to bridge the gaps from agent evaluation to changing business outcomes, historical to real-time analyses, and measuring agent improvement to powering customer success, the customer service business will take a giant leap into the future.”
“2018 Trends to Watch: Automation,” Miriam Deasy, Ovum, 17 October 2017.
Inflection Point #3: Future of Work
By 2015, more than one in three American workers were millennials, comprising the largest share of the workforce.
These workers have different expectations when it comes to their work life, which has significant implications for employers.
When it comes to business operations, analysts say:
“A number of studies conducted over the past several years reveal a set of Millennial generation work characteristics and preferences that will, we believe, prove to be increasingly important to the contact center industry in the years to come. Some of the best-known of these characteristics and preferences, especially relevant to the contact center industry, include: Maintaining a work/life balance, a collaborative approach to work in groups or teams, instant recognition and gratification for work performance, excellent multi-taskers, constant connectivity with peers and colleagues, open and honest relationships with management, and clearly defined paths for career development.”
“Employee Engagement: The Evolution of Contact Center Employee Relations,” Paul Stockford, Saddletree Research, Dec. 2017.
Getting the Makeover Started
While each of your agents may interact with customers hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times each month, you’re probably evaluating only a few of those calls. And as a result you’re probably getting an inaccurate view of agent performance, missing some problems, or even focusing coaching resources on areas that aren’t the most critical.
This approach presents a significant risk both in customer experience delivery and your contact center’s ability to meet compliance obligations, limiting your ability to provide the continuous, constructive feedback that is so critical to performance improvement and essential for employee engagement.
Automatic quality management (AQM) solutions such as Verint® Automated Quality ManagementTM can address the shortcomings of traditional contact center QA by leveraging automation and analytics to enable best-practice, next-generation quality initiatives.
"Automated quality management can leverage automation and analytics to enable best-practice, next-generation quality." @Verint
Introducing AQM doesn’t have to be hugely disruptive. By starting with a small scope, your organization can begin to transform its quality efforts, gain traction, and foster continued success. You can automate at your own pace, autoscoring just a few questions to gain employee confidence and improve adoption, and then automate more questions or entire forms over time.
A solution such as Verint Automated Quality Management can help you makeover your traditional QA approach. You can take advantage of an end-to-end quality management approach that effectively harnesses data, automation, people, and resources to help you meet and exceed customer expectations and reduce risk.
Contact us today to learn more
Click on the above image to view the full Executive Perspective.
