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Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №1
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Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support

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Updated: 06 Dec, 2024
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Businesses worldwide invest in customer services, including contact centers, to build a bridge of trust and loyalty between them and their customers. According to the surveys, 73% believe that good customer service is a chance to show the value of customer time. 58% of customers from the Forbes survey would willingly pay more to a business that can offer high-quality service. So, how can we make it real?

Contact center quality management is a crucial part of the workflow and an efficient solution for the reliable and trustworthy operation of the contact center. Monitoring call center performance will help you to see where your workflow needs an upgrade and how to improve the processes to reduce time and increase productivity. Let this article guide you into the world of quality management to discover its importance, benefits, and techniques.

What is call center quality management?

A quality management system is a structured mix of processes focused on monitoring, evaluating, and optimizing the contact center procedures and activities. Quality assurance will help you to ensure the effectiveness of business processes and their positive effect on customer experience. 

To make quality management effective, you must choose helpful tools, define required metrics, and engage in performance and feedback analytics. You need to develop a reliable system that will help you to identify inefficiencies in your processes and the weak points of your staff performance. 

We know all the pros and cons of outsourcing customer service centers and have long-term experience in quality management processes, so we would like to share a few tips with you. First, let's find out what makes quality management valuable for business.

Why Is call center quality management important?

Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №1

An opportunity to improve customer impression

Quality management will help you see the average customer satisfaction level from interactions with your call or customer support center. Knowing your drawbacks will help you fix the issues and improve the entire experience. By improving your staff performance, you will provide more prompt, accurate, and customer-oriented support service, raise the KPI, and build better loyalty and trust in the brand.

Information-driven insights

During the quality management process, you can analyze interactions and valuable customer feedback. The analysis can prepare a base for informed marketing and strategic decisions and show problematic issues with products and services. Insights will help you study customers' preferences, behavior patterns, and reasons for possible dissatisfaction so you can work it out.

Focused training

Quality management can show how your team maintains the company's standards and what quality they offer customers. It detects possible issues with agents' performance and knowledge. Considering the evaluation, you can focus the training on developing specific skills to improve agents' performance. Personalized training and coaching will also show your interest in staff development and boost their engagement.

Compliance

A quality management contact center may show how well the company complies with regulations and standards within the industry. You will be able to check the use of guidelines, reduce possible risks related to policies, and avoid any fines. Quality management ensures transparency and raises control over process compliance. If any violations are found, you can change them promptly.

Quality management allows you to become more familiar with your staff's capabilities, customers' needs, and requirements, and determine the effectiveness of your current workflow. It gives you more control over the situation and provides timely improvements when required.

Best practices for implementing a quality management process

Simply Contact considers quality management a crucial part of usual workflows, and we develop our strategies to enhance contact center quality. We have tried different approaches to our development and narrowed various techniques into the following vital points for effective quality management.

Let your agents know your expectations

Simple, but always true: the team works the best when each member knows the duties and expectations they need to match. Less doubt about the company's standards will lead to more confident work and better customer experience. Explain what impression your company should leave after interactions. Remember to set realistic targets and reachable goals for each support team member. 

Call audits will be reliable for detecting communication issues or product knowledge gaps. It will show you if anyone needs additional training or your knowledge base needs to be upgraded with new materials to support your team. Ensure transparent and helpful review of agents' work and apply clear and constructive feedback. Discussing the drawbacks in a comfortable atmosphere will motivate the staff to grow and improve.

Prepare your team for problematic scenarios

You can indicate the most common reasons for angry or unhappy customer calls to develop a strategy for the agent's behavior in such a situation. During quality management procedures, you can discover the most common issues, technical glitches that often happen, and what makes agents' work difficult. 

Applying this knowledge, you can develop an extra plan and rules for your agents to follow in such situations. If they know how to act, they will not get confused during real-time conversations.

Apply metrics for quality management call center

Transparent and understandable metrics are key to success during call monitoring in a call center. You can create a living document to keep information about quality measurements, like a scoring system or a scorecard. Set the goal and apply points according to whether the goal was achieved or not. This will simplify performance checks and help give prompt feedback on the agent's performance. 

Motivate your team

Working in a contact center can be a source of stress that can reduce common morale and, as a result, affect your team's performance and productivity. Remember to recognize your team members' achievements and appreciate hard work. You can initiate reward programs to add motivation to their everyday routine or create challenges to encourage their engagement. 

Make technology your best friend

The better your team is equipped, the better productivity and efficiency it can demonstrate, so consider providing them with advanced solutions required for work. 

For example, artificial intelligence in call center operations can become a life-changer. Automation can help to record, store, and structure information, giving instant access to more organized data. AI can take care of many routine procedures, including call routing and assistance with FAQs. Solutions for real-time translations can ensure multi-lingual support and faster reactions even for different language speakers.

Artificial intelligence can also help analyze phone calls faster than human managers and provide insights into agents' performance, customer reactions, and goal matches.

7 tips for quality management in customer service

Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №2

Effective and structured quality management is the key to efficient work, and these seven basic tips can help you take the most important steps in creating quality management.

Focus on customer

In the competition era, you need to do more than just meet customers' requirements — you need to exceed them. Focus on their satisfaction and make interactions customer-oriented to let them feel valued and heard. 

Create a professional environment

Focus on hiring competent candidates, pay attention to their skills, and recognize and encourage their work. Training and space for personal growth will boost your team's engagement. 

Connection with team

Engage your team in the process and interest them in meeting your business goals. Ensure that everyone has the same vision of the target and arrange clear communication with management.

Focus on efficiency

Process optimization will help allocate resources more efficiently. Focus on resource maximizing to make the desired outcome more clear for your team. 

Make improvements one of your goals

Develop a culture of personal growth and constant improvement in your company. Look for changes that will simplify processes, enhance execution, and raise customer satisfaction.

Concentrate on informed decisions

Utilize data evaluation and information collection to make all your strategic decisions data-driven. Regularly monitor performance, feedback, and processes to make changes to increase efficiency. 

Manage relationships

Invest time in creating stable relationships with your main vendors and partners to optimize performance. Reliable partnership, supply, and realization are the foundation of a successful company.

Would you like to check the quality of your customer support? Simply Contact is ready to evaluate your provider or in-house team.

Contact us
Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №3

Technology to enhance the contact center quality management process

Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №4

Advanced technologies can simplify the quality management process, extend opportunities, and improve the overall accuracy of the evaluation processes. For example, AI analysis capabilities can source valuable insights for contact center quality assurance. Let's review the technologies that can boost your quality management process, provide examples of solutions, and discuss their effect on business operations.

Solutions for monitoring through recording and transcription

Analyzing phone calls in real-time can be extremely challenging, considering the number of calls the contact center may receive during the day. On average, one agent in a contact center can handle up to 100 calls daily, while in automated contact centers, the number can reach several hundred. Manual analysis of such many interactions is nearly impossible, but automated recording and transcription can help.

You can review transcribed calls, analyze data, and prepare coaching programs. The transcriptions become available right after the conversation ends, significantly simplifying the workflow and reducing waiting time.

Here you can see a few solutions for recording and transcription that could help you to handle quality management processes:

It is a cloud-based platform with omnichannel support, advanced analytics, phone call routing, and recording capabilities.

It is a cloud-based solution with integrated call recording and analytics functionality, empowered with AI sentimental analysis.

This solution integrates via API and can offer accurate AI-powered speech-to-text transcriptions with the possibility of human review.

Aircall is a virtual software for call centers that enables call recording and transcription and easy CRM integration.

Speech analytics

Speech analytics leverages artificial intelligence and natural language processing to get meaningful insights from customer interactions. With the help of speech analytics, you can detect patterns during phone calls by identifying keywords and phrases used by your agents and customers.  

This approach will help develop the most efficient ways of handling conversations and the common issues customers may face when using your products or services. Speech analytics enables the detection of negative sentiment and compliance breaches. It can also warn if the conversation needs the supervisor's assistance. You can also evaluate conversation dynamics through speech analysis, such as talk-to-listen ratio, call duration, or hold time.

Solutions for speech analytics:

This solution offers AI-driven real-time and post-call speech and text analytics with sentiment analysis and quality scoring. Nexidia is oriented on large call centers with a focus on improvements.

This AI-driven cloud solution for contact centers has integrated speech and text analytics, an automated system for quality scoring and training recommendations. This solution works well with omnichannel contact centers.

This solution works as a part of the Verint Open Platform and enables real-time transcription and analysis, including customer sentiment and emotional ones. It leverages AI to analyze data and detect issues that affect customer experience.

The Eureka platform has pre-built analytics catalogs for automated performance insights creation and multi-language packs. The speaker separation feature analyzes agents' and customers' actions and reactions separately. 

Automated AI-driven solutions for contact center quality management

Automated AI-powered solutions simplify and speed up many workflow processes; quality management is no exception. Instant automated scoring will improve control and keep agents and managers informed about their call tracking and current efficiency. Artificial intelligence is not limited to quantity and can analyze 100% of interactions. Automated solutions can include real-time insights, guidance, evaluation, and sentiment analysis.

Nexidia, Vermit, Eureka, Aircall, and Genesys Cloud CX have already been mentioned above and can also offer automated analysis and evaluation functionality.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM systems automatically record and store information about all customer interactions, including calls, chats, emails, and messages on social media. They provide an all-covering comprehensive interaction history available for analysis and supply all related contexts to better understand the situation. CRM systems can track whether agents comply with GDPR, PCI DSS, or HIPAA regulations and mark violations.

CRM keeps all the information about customer calls and measures their duration, type of issues, and resolution status. It is a valuable monitoring, evaluation, training, and reporting tool. 

CRM systems for customer support and call centers

Salesforce is well-known among call centers for its scalability, customization capabilities, and robust integration into the existing ecosystem. The solution provides tools for case management, automates workflows, and offers AI-driven insights, including predictive and sentiment analysis.

Zendesk is a CRM and customer service platform combining simplicity and efficiency, offering ticketing, chat, and call center interaction tools. Zendesk enables a ticket and interaction view that significantly simplifies the QA process. It also provides real-time and historical reports to evaluate performance.

This free CRM system has marketing, sales, and customer support modules. It also has premium features that could be handy for large organizations. HubSpot has tools for ticketing, automation, and customer feedback. It offers post-interaction reports and enables evaluation of agent-customer interaction.

Artificial intelligence is used in many solutions as it is an advanced and powerful tool for automating many processes. Analytic capabilities and natural language processing help your managers evaluate each interaction. At Simply Contact, we use AI in many processes, including quality management, to boost the efficiency of our team and get outstanding results. 

How to measure and evaluate call center performance

Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №5

Contact center quality management heavily relies on performance evaluation, so choosing the KPI to help you get the whole picture is vital. KPIs are key performance indicators to measure each separate interaction's approximate success or overall performance. Let's look at the most commonly used for customer support and call center service.

AHT

The AHT, or average handle time, is an indicator that shows the approximate time the agent spends on phone calls. You can calculate it by measuring the whole conversation time, including initial calls, all follow-ups, and on-holds, and then dividing it by the number of process calls. Remember that a short or long call time does not always mean poor or good quality, and you need to consider the reason for the call and resolution status.

FCR

The FCR, also known as first-call resolution, indicates if the customers' requests were solved within one conversation without additional follow-ups. Problem-solving within one interaction is challenging, but success in this area significantly raises customer satisfaction. If the issue is solved within one conversation, FCR can also boost the team's productivity, and the team can process more customer requests. 

CSAT

The CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, is the goal of every contact center; the higher it is, the better the customer experience. The source of CSAT is the after-interaction survey that asks how successful the processing was and if the customer achieved the desired goal. CSAT shows the efficiency of a support team during interactions and can hint at whether any of the agents may need training. Keep in mind that a customer's mood can also affect CSAT.

CAR

The CAR, or call abandonment rate, is a critical indicator showing the percentage of calls the customer canceled before they reached your agent. This indicator can show if you have any problems with staffing during peak hours or long waiting times. Knowing the problem, you can apply solutions before customer dissatisfaction escalates and affects the brand.

NPS

NPS is a net promoter score that shows the possibility that your customer will recommend your company's products or services to a friend. NPS monitoring is one key to understanding how successful and positive the interaction between the contact center and the customer is.

Want to put your customer service in the hands of professionals? Simply Contact is ready to catch up.

Contact us
Contact Center Quality Management: The Secrets of Reliable Support: №6

Conclusion

Contact center quality management is vital for understanding how well your center operates and what quality it can provide to customers. The quality management system is a guardian of your brand's reputation, and investment in its efficiency is the investment in your business's success. QM processes will help you evaluate workflow efficiency, agents' productivity, and customer satisfaction, find problematic areas, and fix them. 

Combining effective techniques, robust AI-driven technologies, and set metrics will help you provide accurate evaluation and improve the overall quality.

Experience the unmatched quality of customer support

At Simply Contact, we specialize in creating personalized customer support solutions that drive business growth and customer satisfaction. Let us help you elevate your customer experience and stand out from the competition.

Get in touch today
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