3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Like other intangibles, ‘quality’ is not something that is easily defined, but most folks know it when they experience it. It leaves a feeling of satisfaction, and is a strong reflection on the positive aspects of a brand.

In contact centers, quality is everything. Customers have been known to leave for good if they get the impression that they’re dealing with a less-than-quality organization.

To that end, Martin Teasdale, Quality Solutions Director for the UK and EMEA at BPA Quality UK, asked some prominent folks in the business how they define quality for their organization, in a recent blog post. Teasdale’s company, BPA Quality, was formed by a group of like-minded people who were interested in radically altering the approach to the development of customer service delivery, sales and support principally within call centers. As such, the company has the experience, knowledge and ingenuity to help its clients achieve the highest possible customer engagement and experience from customer-facing teams.

What follows are the responses in Teasdale’s post from various leaders to the question, “What does ‘Quality’ mean for you in the Contact Center Industry?” Their answers are quite telling:

Martin Hill Wilson, Service, Customer Experience & Digital Business Strategist – Author, Keynote Speaker & Teacher of Master Classes: “A water company I have recently been working with produced the following working definition of quality, which I would not disagree with: ‘Culture of care which delivers what matters; when it matters to our customers. Reflecting each moment of truth and recognizing quality isn’t absolute but is relative to each customer journey.”

Ann-Marie Stagg, Chief Executive of Call Centre Management Association (UK): “Quality means never having to say [you’re] sorry -- know the customer and their history with your organization, deliver the service that the customer expects and then repeat the experience every time they contact you using whatever channel they choose.”

Rob Wilkinson, Award-Winning Call Centre Leader, Trainer, Recruiter, Blogger and Speaker: “It’s so easy to over-engineer this and so many contact centers make things more complicated than they need to be, often focusing on what they think their customers want instead of what they know their customers want. For me, it’s best kept simple because that means it’s easier for our agents to understand, easier to measure and easier to improve. Poor quality = not delivering. Good quality = delivering. Great quality = exceeding. This makes the first step to improving quality easy too = learn what your customers expect from you. This applies to any industry and product, both sales and service.”

Andrew Mutch, Chief Customer Officer UK & EMEA at BPA Quality with over 30 years Contact Center experience: “Quality underpins everything, from identifying customer expectations and having a culture and processes in place that ensure that these expectations are met and exceeded, to constantly strive for continuous improvement and evolution” 

The common thread in all their definitions seems to be consistency. Deliver what the customer expects with every instance of contact, and the quality will take care of itself.