A Solution to Call Centre Quality Management Systems
Author: Geouffrey Erasmus | Date: 22/04/2022
In an increasingly competitive business landscape, delivering an outstanding customer experience is crucial. How efficiently you attend to your customers’ queries and how satisfied they are after each interaction can significantly impact your bottom line.
Don’t take our word for it — the numbers are there to back it up. On average, brands with superior customer experience can earn five times more revenue than their competitors.1 Furthermore, 73% of consumers consider a good customer experience an important factor when it comes to brand loyalty.2
It’s clear that most businesses can’t afford to compromise on customer service if they’re serious about success. Given that call centres provide the primary point of contact for customer service delivery, effective call centre quality management (QM) needs to become central to business strategy moving forward.
Today, we’re going to look at call centre quality management systems, and how the latest technology-driven solutions can help you improve customer service outcomes.
Let’s get started.
Suggested reading: For more on the principles of successful call centre management, check out our blog — Call Centre Management — Getting it Right from the Start
What is call centre quality management?
Quality management is the process of ensuring that an organisation’s products and services adhere to specific quality standards. Generally speaking, quality management is comprised of:
- Quality planning
- Quality assurance
- Quality control
- Quality improvement
Within a call centre specifically, contact centre QA ensures that there is a continual monitoring of agent performance, assessments of customer interactions, and driving improvements based on insights.
In an environment where a single call can alter a customer’s impression of an entire brand, optimising performance in call centres has become an increasingly important focus for businesses. Quality management helps ensure that every customer interaction meets the required standard and stays aligned with business goals and objectives.
The key components of call centre quality management systems
Any effective call centre QM system should look to ensure that best practices are consistently implemented during customer-agent interactions. This requires call centre managers to incorporate several essential elements within their QM systems. Let’s take a look at some of these in detail.
The capture of all customer-agent interactions
Call recording has long been an integral part of quality management, but the legacy concept of random sampling leaves a lot to be desired. Analysing 100% of customer calls is the only way to comprehensively measure the quality of agent performance and identify areas for improvement.
Recording calls alone isn’t enough. Every recording needs to be stored and easily accessible for playback. If calls are stored without searching or filtering functionality, they will likely never be reviewed or analysed. Recordings can be used for quality control, continuous evaluation, and within training procedures for new recruits.
An even more comprehensive approach is needed in a contact centre environment that supports multiple customer communication channels, like live chat, social media messaging, or email. Contact centre QM systems need to capture and analyse customer interactions across all these channels to ensure quality and drive improvements.
Most traditional call centre QM systems analyse less than 10% of customer calls. However, at Awaken, we deploy cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) powered tools to facilitate the capture and analysis of 100% of customer-agent communications.
Automate your QA processes across 100% of interactions Call centre quality management software to help you consistently monitor 100% of calls.
Uncover training opportunities and improve compliance.
Quality Standard Definition Document
A Quality Standard Definition Document (QSDD) is another essential part of measuring and maintaining quality in a call centre environment. This document should be used to outline the information that needs to be evaluated during the processes of measuring quality in your call or contact centre.
The document should look to thoroughly outline procedures and guidelines for your QM program, including examples of both positive and negative agent behaviours to be observed during the call monitoring process. The QSDD can also be used to map quality processes to ensure alignment with the current and future goals of the organisation.
Cutting-edge call scripting
Well-defined and comprehensive call scripts are a great resource for improving agent efficiency and ensuring adherence to compliance obligations. Call scripts support agents during every interaction by providing prompts that help tailor the journey they need to take the customer on.
By deploying carefully constructed scripts with a quality call centre management system, call centre managers can ensure a degree of control over the quality of service their agents provide to customers on a day to day basis. However, new technology is starting to make legacy approaches to scripting seem outdated.
New AI-driven, intuitive call centre scripting tools are using a library of system controls as building blocks to provide a customisable, single point interface that links multiple systems together. This allows agents to manage all interactions from a single unified desktop that provides all the customer-specific information they need, right when they need it.
Prompting the Next Best Action (NBA)
Next Best Action (NBA) is an emerging call centre trend with tremendous potential. In the context of a call centre agent workflow, it refers to specific points where suggested next steps are automatically offered to help agents drive the customer journey more efficiently.
This is a trend that is utilising AI and machine learning, along with pre-configured business rules, to interpret customer data and provide guidance to the agent in real-time. These intelligent in-the-moment suggestions are helping to increase accuracy and improve First Call Resolution (FCR) rates.
The benefits of quality management systems in call centres
As we have covered above, an effective quality management system is now a necessity for businesses looking to obtain a competitive advantage. However, implementing these systems in call centres can also deliver a range of additional benefits. Let’s take a look at these in some detail:
- Enhanced understanding of customers: Effective QM systems capture every detail of customer calls and provide thorough insights and analytics, helping businesses better understand customer needs and expectations.
- Better customer service outcomes: Call centre QM systems support end-to-end contact centre quality monitoring and provide insights on customer engagement, helping quality assurance (QA) teams to accurately evaluate agent performance. A more comprehensive evaluation process with QA scores improves overall call centre quality, leading to better service outcomes.
- Improved customer loyalty: Correctly implemented, QM systems help to improve customer service and customer satisfaction, both of which are key to building loyalty. This brings added financial benefits, with one study suggesting a 5% rise in customer retention directly relates to at least a 25% growth in profit.3
- Resolving more queries on first contact: A better understanding of customers enables skilled agents to manage queries more efficiently. As a result, more queries are resolved without the need for multiple calls.
- Better employee satisfaction: Performance analysis means team leaders can provide regular, constructive feedback to the agents. This helps agents grow and progress within their roles, and can also be used to simplify training for staff as and when required.
Transform your call centre quality management today
Is your quality management system helping you solve call centre problems and gain a competitive advantage? If not, now is the time to transform your legacy systems with the help of technology.
At Awaken, we’re passionate about easy to use, technology-empowered call centre solutions. Our software helps you listen to customers, understand their needs, and guide agents through the delivery of exceptional customer service. You can also benefit from a range of capabilities that ensure first-class quality management, including:
- Automatic capture and recording of every call, email, chat and message
- Intelligent agent scripting that gives agents all the information they need in a single view
- Suggestions that guide agents to the next best action based on customer needs
On top of all this, seamless integrations with your legacy systems ensure minimal disruption to customers and agents. Get in touch with our team today to begin the process of optimising quality management in your call centre.
