[Part 1] Why The Time To Re-evaluate Your Contact Center’s Quality Monitoring Program Is Now!

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This is the first post in a 3-part series about outsourced contact center quality monitoring. Check back soon for the second and third installments!

In today’s business environment there is no question of the value of contact center quality monitoring and its role in driving an improved customer experience. The challenge remains how to ‘do more with less’ – less resources, less budget, less time. It is critical to look at the value of quality monitoring, not just from a check-the-box agent performance effort, but also as a vital tool for tapping into what is happening day-to-day and where the opportunities lie within your organization.

Too often, in-house quality monitoring falls short in delivering added-value benefit to the organization, and is destined to land in the ‘cost’ column when it should be seen as a strategic ‘benefit’. To capitalize on this valuable resource and improve the ROI, many organizations are looking to outsource their contact center’s quality monitoring. A decision to outsource quality monitoring isn’t just about saving money, although there are certainly cost savings to be had, but rather a way to capture insight into a customer’s behaviors and emotions that will help uncover untapped opportunities.

If you haven’t looked at your contact center’s quality monitoring efforts lately, consider these key trends:

Customers are evaluating their experience with you and comparing it against their experiences with companies across all It’s no longer good enough to be best-in-your-own-class. Having a third-party perspective will help close the gap.

Customer expectations have been changing… rapidly. Not only do you need to raise the bar to meet their expectations, you need to be tuned into their changing expectations so that you can meet them tomorrow. It’s time to think outside-of-the-box and re-evaluate how you are engaging customers.

Maintaining a consistent experience in the contact center is the greatest barrier to improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. The key to consistently delivering a great experience lies with coaching. Best-in-class organizations are freeing up frontline managers’ time and supporting them with targeted insight to improve overall coaching effectiveness … and seeing impressive returns.

We are all being asked to ‘do more with less.’ That’s not going to change. It’s important that you are able to demonstrate real value to the organization through your quality monitoring efforts. Do you have the right tools, training, management, etc.?

Just to be clear … contact center quality monitoring involves:

  1. Evaluating a customer interaction against pre-determined criteria for quality, compliance, sales effectiveness, etc.
  2. Highlighting best practices, opportunities for coaching and grievous customer situations.
  3. All contact center channels including calls, emails and chat interactions.
  4. Analyzing data captured for agent performance, business insights or both.
  5. Calibrating results to ensure they align with the reality of the customer’s experience.

Ensuring your quality monitoring touches on all these points is essential. If your efforts are falling short in any key area, it’s probably time to see how outsourcing your quality monitoring may help fill in the gaps.

Outsourced quality monitoring doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing arrangement. There are several ways to approach it. Choose one or a combination of the following options.

AUGMENT
Keep most of your QM in-house

Growing your internal QM department can be a challenging process given growing costs and/or stretched ‘expert’ resources. Leverage the support of a third party to supplement your internal QM efforts.

• Increase the volume of evaluations per agent

• Heavy-up the number of evaluations during periods of high growth, new hire training periods, new product/policy introduction, etc.

• Use your internal resources to evaluate compliance and accuracy and your external partner to evaluate the customer experience

ALL-IN
Outsource all/most of your QM

Outsourcing all/most of your QM allows you to redeploy valuable internal QM resources for coaching/training efforts or cost management measures. Frontline managers still listen to calls but only those that, after evaluation, offer insight related to coaching and development.

• Redeploy QM resources

• Remove responsibility for labor-intensive volume QM efforts from valuable frontline personnel

• Internal focus is directed toward coaching/training

• Your internal management emphasis is directed at improving outcomes … not gathering data

CALIBRATION
Keep all of your QM in-house … get some perspective

There are some environments were outsourcing QM is not possible or desirable. Over time, internal QM results can skew. Garner support from a third party to regulate your internal QM results.

• External QM experts review a sample of evaluations for alignment to pre-defined standards and a much-needed external customer perspective

Outsourced quality monitoring comes with a host of benefits including impartial point-of-view, timeliness, QM expertise, access to best practices and more. When it is done right, quality monitoring should (1) support and prioritize just-in-time coaching for frontline managers, (2) provide a measure of success for marketing, training and other key initiatives, (3) identify customer trends, pain points, opportunities, (4) measure sales effectiveness, (5) improve first contact resolution … and more.

Deciding to outsource some or all of your contact center’s quality monitoring is a big decision. That’s why we’ve put together an eBook to help walk you through the steps and pose the important questions to answer — all of which will help make driving your ROI targets more achievable. Just click on the link below to download a free copy.

Sharon Oatway
Sharon Oatway is a Customer Service, Sales and Marketing professional with more than three decades of hands-on experience elevating the overall customer experience along with multi-channel contact center performance.As President & Chief Experience Officer of VereQuest, Sharon and her team have listened to/read and analyzed several million customer interactions for some of North America’s leading brands.As a result, Sharon is a recognized thought-leader in what it takes to build and sustain great customer experiences.

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