Quality Monitoring the Present, Instead of the Past
February 23, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
One way or another, quality monitoring has always been an element of call center operations. How it was accomplished is a different story. In the earliest days, it consisted of a manger roaming the aisles and listening in on conversations, or using a headset to jack into agents’ phone calls for the purpose of evaluation. Call recording technologies, which came later, helped managers review agents on their own time, and it had the added benefit of being invisible to the agent (who, after all, would be on his or her best behavior while a manager is listening).
But quality monitoring based entirely on recorded calls has its disadvantages. Sure, it helps managers determine what went wrong yesterday or last week or an hour ago, but its biggest drawback is that it’s a technology that applies to what has already happened, not to what is happening right now, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo. The hallmark of today’s quality monitoring solutions is that they can be used in real-time.
“What used to be comprised mainly of ‘after-the-fact’ performance reviews has now, with the benefit of sophisticated technology, become a real-time quest to collect and respond to intelligence related to customer service,” he wrote.
Thanks to technologies such as analytics, combined with speech recognition and real-time alerting, managers can keep track of quality issues happening right in the moment. High-quality performance management solutions combine a number of technologies to achieve this feat.
“Today’s advanced real time quality monitoring incorporates and integrates call recording, agent coaching, performance management reports, business analytics and customer intelligence,” wrote Ciarlo. “If you are already engaged in these efforts, expedited through a workforce optimization solution designed to enhance quality assurance strategies, it is important to keep doing so.”
Speech analytics are one of the most important features of a twenty-first century monitoring solution. This is where the “real-time” element comes in. Obviously, managers can’t listen to every call…but a computer can.
“Speech analytics generates automated alerts triggered by voice data, whether that’s the use of profanity, or the word ‘cancel,’ or the mention of a specific new product or service,” wrote Ciarlo. “By being alerted to these calls in real time, managers can react in time to impact their outcome, which could mean the difference between keeping and losing a customer.”
Ultimately, the value of a real-time quality monitoring solution will be felt not only by the contact center, but other departments, as well. Perhaps marketing wishes to collect feedback on a new launch, or the advertising department may wish to measure the results of a campaign. The sales department may wish to know what features customers find the most compelling, and product design wishes to “listen in” on customers’ biggest complaints.
By turning quality monitoring into “now” technology rather than a footnote on last month’s call center operations report, companies can reap enormous benefits. It’s the difference between diagnosing a problem and curing it immediately and only discovering what went wrong during the post-mortem.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi