Today’s consumers expect exceptional service. They want to receive personalized, efficient, and convenient support across every channel. Living up to those expectations pays off, with studies showing that 93% of consumers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer fantastic experiences. But delivering consistently great service isn’t easy.
The smallest mishap in the contact center, from an issue with call quality, to a problem with an agent’s response, can lead to lost revenue, and damage to your brand’s reputation. That’s where contact center quality assurance (QA) comes in.
With the right QA strategy, you can gather the insights you need to enhance customer satisfaction, improve compliance with industry standards, and boost agent performance.
What is Contact Center QA (Quality Assurance)?
Contact Center QA (Quality Assurance) is a process of evaluating interactions between call center staff and customers, to ensure they adhere to pre-defined quality standards. It involves various activities, such as recording and reviewing calls, reading emails and transcripts, using software to track sentiment, and scoring calls.
The overall purpose of Contact Center QA is to help companies maintain high service quality, ensuring all interactions are handled effectively and professionally. Plus, it can help businesses provide valuable feedback to agents they can use to improve their skills over time.
With the right QA strategy you can:
- Improve customer satisfaction: The more you learn about the interactions customers have with your company, as well as the friction points they encounter, the more you can improve customer service. QA gives you the insights you need to enhance interaction handling and problem solving on a significant scale.
- Optimize agent performance: With insights into agent performance, such as their strengths and weaknesses in relation to certain KPIs, you can improve agent performance. QA offers an excellent way to evaluate agent skills, and determine what type of personalized training each team member needs.
- Boost compliance: With call recording and analysis tools, companies can ensure that their agents are adhering to compliance best practices. They can monitor issues with ethical, legal, and industry-specific guidelines, reducing the risk of fines and maintaining customer trust.
Tim Peters, Global Marketing Leader at Enghouse Systems says:
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Tim Peters[/caption]
“Investment in quality management has always underpinned both improved agent engagement and premium customer service. Organizations that recognize this and develop robust QA practices to coach agents and develop their skills not only improve the experience they offer their customers, but also have more success in retaining agents, as studies show a direct link between poor agent development and attrition.
Closely and consistently monitoring agent-customer engagement also gives contact center leaders an improved understanding of their customers, and of the experience they offer – as well as a better comprehension of the service they’re expecting from their agents.
Enghouse has been developing and supporting our Quality Management Suite customers around the world for over 25 years, offering QA in the cloud and on-premises while connecting to all leading contact center solutions.”
Best Practices for Enhanced Quality Assurance
The solutions available for optimizing quality assurance in the contact center are constantly evolving, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence, making it easier to monitor calls and track sentiment in real-time. However, it’s still important to follow the right strategy for success.
1. Know Which Metrics You Need to Monitor
Effective contact center quality assurance is all about collecting the right data you can use to proactively improve customer interactions. Defining which metrics you need to monitor to achieve the best results is crucial. A few options to consider include:
- FCR (First call resolution): The percentage of inquiries resolved during the first call.
- AHT (Average handling time): How long it takes for agents to handle customer interactions.
- CSAT (Customer satisfaction): How satisfied customers feel with your level of service (often measured using post-interaction surveys).
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): How likely customers are to recommend your company to someone else (measured using a scale).
- QA Score: The score assigned to each agent based on their performance during the interaction (often based on other metrics).
- Abandonment rate: How many callers hang up before connecting with an agent.
A strong QA solution should enable you to create customized reports and scorecards based on the metrics that matter most to your organization.
2. Take an Omnichannel Approach
Today’s customers expect to be able to connect with companies on various channels, from the phone to social media, messaging apps, and more. This means your quality assurance solution needs to be able to capture information from every channel you use for customer service.
Solutions like Enghouse Interactive’s Quality Management Suite allow companies to capture, record, and transcribe interactions from every channel. You can consolidate recordings from various channels and data sources into a single place, and create custom profiles for call capture.
You can even capture and analyze media on any channel routed to and from Microsoft Teams, giving you even more freedom to connect the dots in customer journeys. The more holistic your quality assurance strategy is, the more data you’ll gather about your customers, and the strategies you can use to improve customer service.
Steve Nattress[/caption]