Call Center Management Featured Article
A Robust Quality Management Program Can Make All the Difference in the Contact Center
Quality management in the contact center is one of those things everyone claims to do, but the reality – with so many unsatisfied customers out there – is that fewer companies than you might think actually do. It's perceived as a waste of time by call center management (“our processes have quality built in!”) or too expensive (“we can't afford that!”) or simply as unnecessary (“the call center is a necessary evil, why compound its complexity?”)
None of these are valid points.
The objectives of increased efficiency and outstanding customer service are achieved not just through efforts that improve individual agent performance, but also the overall operation of the entire business, wrote workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software in a recent blog post. Monet outlines some of the most important reasons why quality management results in better call center and wiser call center management.
For starters, a quality management solution will allow you to review individual calls. In doing so, you can begin to recognizing patterns across the customer interaction spectrum, says Monet, as well as the performance indicators that set the standard for the entire business. Understanding these indicators is critical to call center operations and customer satisfaction. Once issues are identified, you can use quality management data to find the root cause, and solve the issues.
Another area quality management helps is in unifying your reporting. Relying entirely on a manual system for reporting puts different people's personal biases and methodologies into the mix, meaning that your reporting is wildly inconsistent, which is unfair to agents. In addition, a unified quality management solution is the foundation for a better and more consistent program of training and coaching.
Finally, a good quality management program, backed up by technology, can help companies take concrete steps toward improving the customer relationship. If it's true that a single negative customer experience can kill future business from that customer forever, it's in a call center's best interest to make sure that the negative experiences don't happen in the first place. A quality management solution plays a key role in addressing and solving agent issues, so that negative experiences are reduced or, ideally, eliminated, writes Monet.