Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
For Customer Satisfaction, Ensure Quality Assurance and Agent Training Coordinate Efforts
Most contact centers – those that want to stay in business, anyway – have some kind of quality assurance process. It’s a way of ensuring that most customers are satisfied and not churning too much, and that there aren’t processes getting in the way of quality. At the same time, most contact centers have robust agent training procedures to ensure that agents are good ambassadors for the company, stay on schedule and are well versed in scripts, products and services and company policies.
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon that these two processes, quality assurance and agent training, never meet. This is highly illogical, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software’s CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Why do some call centers have training teams and quality assurance teams that rarely talk to each other?” wonders Ciarlo in the post. “It doesn’t make sense for two entities within a business to strive toward the same objective without working together.”
If you examine the goals of the quality assurance team – improve agent performance and customer satisfaction, boost schedule adherence, use collected data to enhance call center efficiency and boost productivity – and compare them to the goals of the agent training element, you’ll probably find that most of the goals are similar. So why duplicate processes, or risk inconsistent information being passed along to one group but not the other?
Ciarlo recommends that a good place to start integrating the two processes is with a weekly or monthly meeting designed to provide an opportunity for teams to set joint goals and create plans to achieve them. The two groups could use their own resources to complement one another’s operations, rather than duplicate them. By sharing information, they could bolster both programs with better data. Together, the two groups can share best practices in the form of real calls.
There is one technology that can help both groups immensely in their efforts: call recording.
“Call recording, which plays a key role in quality assurance, will provide examples of these calls,” writes Ciarlo. “The quality assurance team can study them to figure out how they can be wrapped up more efficiently and result in a satisfied customer. The role of the agent is critical here, so the training team can pick up on the QA results and coach agents on where they might need to change their approach.”
By combining their efforts, the two teams could not only save time and reduce duplicated efforts, but make the attainment of their mutual ultimate goals – pleasing the customer and selling more – easier and faster.
Edited by Alisen Downey