Can Your Quality Assurance Team Really Monitor 100% of Calls? Should It?

A client recently posed an interesting question to our team, asking,


“Is it possible to quality monitor 100% of our telephone calls?”


This is a great question. To answer it well, we first need to understand
the time commitment of a contact center quality process, understand the
reasons this is important, and then evaluate some of the available options
currently on the market.

If you’re not familiar with quality assurance (QA), it’s a necessary
process in all contact centers. It typically involves some sort of form
where reviewers listen to calls and rate them based on a set of criteria.
They then sit down with their agents to review the interactions and coach
them on ways to improve.

The numbers likely vary from company to company, but for phone support a QA
team might review anywhere from six to a dozen calls in a month per agent.
Let’s do some quick math here to see the percentage of the total call
volume the quality team is monitoring.

At six calls per month, you’re reviewing just 0.6% of the overall call
volume. Now, let’s consider the time commitment required to handle this
current QA workload.

Thirty minutes per QA monitor is a lot of time, and it’s important to note
that depending on the complexity of your quality process, a reviewer may
listen to a call more than once.

Another important consideration in the process is who’s doing the QA
monitoring for the team and how much time it takes them. Larger operations
might have dedicated quality teams whereas for others, the responsibility
falls on supervisors to complete them in balance with their other tasks.
Let’s look at what this time commitment involves.

I’ve made a lot of assumptions here but you can see that QA can eat up more
than a quarter of supervisor time in the contact center and that’s to
review a mere fraction of your overall call volume at 0.6%. At this rate,
reviewing 100% of interactions would require a huge expenditure of both
time and money. Is it even realistic?

Reasons for 100% of Calls Monitored

It really isn’t outlandish for a client to ask us how they can review 100%
of their calls. Here are a few very good reasons they’d want this:

Quality Control

At only a handful of reviewed calls per month, it’s only natural to worry
that you might not get a clear picture of the performance of the contact
center. It seems reasonable to think that the more interactions we review,
the more we can coach our agents to be consistently at their very best.
What if you had a way to ensure that the consistency was there on every
customer interaction and catch negative patterns before they cause too much
harm?

Churn Safety Net

I’ve often told my customer service team members that they may very well be
the only representative from our company that a customer ever speaks with.
That means if their attitude is off or they give a wrong answer, the
relationship with that customer might be forever damaged. The thought of
not getting a second chance to make it right with a customer was downright
terrifying for me as a manager.

Voice of Customer

Business leaders crave customer insights. They want to know what customers
are saying, doing, and thinking. No one has more insight than the frontline
customer service team that’s interacting with customers all day, every day.
But how do we move from anecdotal feedback to feedback backed with data
that illuminates what’s really going on in the customer experience?

Each of these reasons independent of the others makes it understandable why
companies would want a solution to review 100% of their customer
interactions. The ability to monitor quality, minimize churn, and gain
valuable customer insight should be the goal for any organization, right?

Quality Tools Available

Let’s take a look at some of the technologies on the market for QA. I see
these fitting into three groups. Also, this is by no means a comprehensive
view of the space but a survey of some of the popular ones I’ve
encountered.

Quality database

The first and most common tool we see for managing QA is what I would term
a QA database. Systems likeScorebuddy and MaestroQA are popular, offering
companies the following functionality:

• Create multiple quality forms for different departments and channels.
• Tie call recordings to quality monitors for easy review.
• Manage multiple levels of access. (i.e. Manager, supervisor, agent)
• Run efficient calibration sessions.
• Access detailed reporting.

Also, MaestroQA in particular has a terrific integration with Zendesk that
allows you to pull tickets right into their system for review.

These systems run somewhere between $5-10 per agent per month, making them
a fairly reasonable add on to your existing systems. While you won’t get
that much closer to that 100% goal, consider that if you’re still using
spreadsheets to track quality — and many companies do — a QA database can
free up the team to review more interactions and give valuable visibility into
the performance of the team.

Speech and Text Analytics

The next group of solutions are more in the category of workforce
optimization systems. These systems offer a full suite of services
including QA, scheduling, workforce management, and more. They include
companies like Verint, Callminer,
Virtual Observer, and NICE. Focusing on their QA
offering specifically, here are some of the features they offer:

• Quality database including forms, access levels, calibrations, and
  reporting similar to the above.
• Transcription of calls into text and the ability to analyze for patterns
  and keywords. For example, easily find how often customers mention
  canceling and drill down to understand the context.
• Gain insight into customer sentiment to see when customer or agent tone
  is elevated, allowing you to target interactions where the customer might
  either be close to churning, or the agent might need additional coaching.

These solutions do much more than I’ve represented here but it’s clear that
they offer more functionality than a simple QA database. They are also a
much more significant expenditure. To get the most of it, you’ll want to
make sure you have folks on your quality and customer experience teams with
an analytical skillset.

Automatic Call Grading with Machine Learning

The final set of solutions on the market are harnessing the power of AI and
machine learning. Gridspace and Simple Emotion are a couple
companies working to make reviewing 100% of calls a reality. The process to
do so involves providing them with a quality form along with several
thousand call recordings that have been monitored by your QA team. With
enough data, their systems can learn to rate calls automatically,
eventually without the assistance of humans, giving you complete visibility
into the quality of your team.

The systems have already found success in more scripted contact center
environments. The real opportunity here for the future is for them to pair
a quality database with machine learning so calls are fed into the system
and quality teams can train the machines to review the calls. These tools
are really at the forefront of what I think is going to be a big key to the
future of QA in the contact center.

Recommended Next Steps

Circling back to the original question our client posed at the beginning of
this article, yes, it’s totally possible to review 100% of the calls in
your contact center. Should you? That’s the more important question to
answer.

If your goal is purely to monitor as many interactions as you possibly can,
the Law of Diminishing Returns comes into play and at some point you have
to question the value you’re getting from that work.

If your company is more in a startup phase and your org structure is rather
flat, chances are that you’re already aware of the top pain points in your
customer experience. The question probably isn’t, “What are customers
saying?” but more like, “How do we find the resources to fix these issues?”

If either of these cases describe your organization and you’re not
convinced that monitoring 100% of your calls is necessary at this stage,
here are some practical recommendations that you can take right now to get
more value from your current quality process:

1.
Don’t forget about Kaizen.
I love the Japanese word, Kaizen, which means “continuous improvement.”
Before going straight from reviewing a handful of interactions to 100%,
consider that moving from spreadsheets to a real QA database is a big
improvement and allows your quality team to review more interactions —
especially for some of your lower performers who require more coaching.

2.
Give your culture attention.
In my last column I shared
a recipe for consistent customer service.
If the desire to review 100% of interactions comes from a place of
distrust in your customer service team, it’s time to evaluate your company
culture and make sure they’re empowered to deliver great customer service.

3.

You can get a holistic view of the voice of the customer with just a
bit of creativity.
If your goal is to have visibility into what customers are saying, the more
insight you can get from interactions, the better. Start with
post-interaction surveys, agent round table discussions, and even the
simple tweak of asking your QA team to note customer insights for each call
and you’ll get a good picture of what customers are saying.

If it is time to take the next step to gain insight from 100% of your
interactions, I’ve highlighted some of the exciting technology that’s
currently on the market. As you go down this path, remember that it’s a
tool and it’s completely dependent on the way you utilize it. Be sure to
devote the appropriate technical resources for implementation and empower
your QA team to move beyond checking boxes on a form, setting their focus
on the bigger goal of making the customer experience better.