This is the second post in a 3-part series about outsourced contact center quality monitoring. Click here to read the first post:
Check back soon for our third installment in this series!
In our last post, we discussed why you should re-evaluate your in-house quality monitoring and consider outsourcing some or all of your contact center quality monitoring. But is outsourced quality monitoring right for your business? We explore this question below.
There are generally three types of quality monitoring:
(1) Customer Experience monitoring across all types of interactions;
(2) Sales effectiveness monitoring to ensure every sales opportunity is being maximized; and
(3) Compliance monitoring to ensure legal, regulatory and/or procedural guidelines are being followed.
If you currently monitor the customer’s experience and/or sales effectiveness, then it almost always makes sense to outsource some or all of your quality monitoring to an independent third party.
When is outsourcing not a good fit?
Outsourcing your contact center’s quality monitoring is almost always an option – regardless of the size of your business. However, there are a couple of pre-requisites worth noting that will help make the best decision:
- Recorded interactions – It isn’t absolutely necessary, however, providing your third party partner with pre-recorded interactions makes things a lot easier (and less expensive than live monitoring). That means providing your partner with access to your call recording system, email system and/or chat system. Typically, this will be via a secure link (e.g. VPN) or, in some situations, you may be able to batch upload the interactions. This often requires the involvement of your internal privacy/compliance team, so you must make sure to plan for this.
- Confidential information – Don’t under-estimate the need to partner with a company that has a robust security infrastructure in place. Your interactions will often contain personal and confidential information. Therefore, you will want to do your due diligence on the outsourcer’s ability to handle this information according to your organization/industry guidelines. If your outsourcer doesn’t have a robust security infrastructure, look elsewhere. It is possible to outsource QM in highly regulated environments – but you need to understand what is involved.
- Complexity – There are certain elements of the interaction that may be challenging (but not impossible) for a third party to evaluate. Typically, this would be related to non-routine processes/procedures, advice, product questions, etc. If you want the outsourcer to evaluate this portion of the interaction, make sure you have a good plan in place related to how you will keep them informed and updated ongoing.
The Top 10 Benefits from Outsourcing Quality Monitoring
If the above three pre-requisites are fulfilled, the list of added-value benefits of outsourcing can be exhaustive. The following are the top 10 benefits companies who outsource their QM realize:
- Greater access to Quality Monitoring expertise and best practices
- Independent third party point-of-view; perspective closer to that of customers
- Greater cost efficiencies (based on type of contract)
- Online, real-time results
- Consolidation of contact center QM efforts across all channels
- Data capture to spot opportunities for improved customer experience, operational efficiencies, etc.
- Real-time measure of customer experience … most valuable when you can’t survey customers directly
- Improved agent performance (Sales, Churn, NPS, etc.)
- QM continuity during periods of high volume and/or contact center disruption
- Less management time required
Is outsourced quality monitoring right for your business? If these considerations and benefits have you saying, ‘yes,’ then we invite you to download our free eBook to help you make an informed decision about partnering with an outsourcer like VereQuest. Click here to download.
Image Source: Bigstock under license
