QM, which stands for quality monitoring and/or quality management, is no longer just about monitoring calls to ensure regulatory compliance and to keep agents on their toes by letting them know that they are being observed. It is increasingly about enabling and ensuring customer-attracting performance. That requires stepped up training of both agents and supervisors.

To get insights on QM issues TMCnet recently interviewed Nina Kawalek, CEO, and Jean Luis Caamaño, manager, events and media relationships, RCCSP Professional Education Alliance. The organization offers a growing array of comprehensive and intensive QM-focused training courses. This includes the new Call Center Quality Assurance Web-Based Training Series, which will be delivered via a set of seven targeted sessions during 2011. Participants will learn best practices in satisfaction auditing, agent monitoring, monitoring form design and calibration, quality assurance tools and technologies and effective coaching techniques. There is also optional certification.

TMCnet: What shifts if any have you seen and are seeing in how quality management i.e. quality monitoring is used in contact centers and what is driving them? For example is there a greater emphasis on reviewing agents’ performance in their ability to cross-sell and up sell on service and support calls as a result of the tighter economy?

Nina Kawalek: The tight economy has highlighted the need to take aggressive action to gain, and more importantly, to maintain market share. This has led to a change in the focus of quality management strategies within call/contact centers.

Quality monitoring was typically used as a mechanism for measuring agent compliance with a set of internally-developed parameters. Contact centers have used quality monitoring to make corrective adjustments to agents’ handling of calls. Quality management was often employed as a back-end support for frontline operations rather than a vital driver of overall contact center success.

The economy has created a change in priorities with companies now more focused on customer acquisition and increased customer retention. At the same time, contact centers recognize that an effective quality management strategy can extend beyond measuring internal parameters only. Quality monitoring today incorporates into the quality management strategy key factors that affect customer satisfaction.

Quality management strategies now focus less on the end-result of a particular task (e.g. cross-selling and up-selling), and instead place more emphasis on how well the customer satisfaction drivers within a particular task were performed. The result is a customer-driven quality management strategy.     

TMCnet: There appears to be a trend for more surveys i.e. customer feedback being offered to callers while they are still on the line. Is there an integration taking place between feedback and quality monitoring and if so what are the benefits and any challenges?

NK: Is a high quality monitoring score indicative of high customer satisfaction? Call centers are realizing that unless their QM strategies are aligned with the main drivers of customer satisfaction, the answer to that question is “not necessarily”. This disconnect between quality and satisfaction can create real problems for a call center i.e. “Why are my customers unsatisfied with our service when our call quality is high?”

Call centers need to integrate customer satisfaction and quality within one holistic quality management strategy. Upgrading QA to a more strategic QM is exactly the type of advancement certified call center managers are taught. The benefits are many:

--Overall organizational alignment
--Direct correlation between quality and customer satisfaction
--Coaching provided on what matters most to the customers
--Increased customer retention
--Quality management becomes the main driver of continuous improvement in the call center
--Quality management drives the success of the call center

The challenge is how and more importantly when, to conduct the customer feedback survey, and who should do it. “Do I want to have an automated survey, or a live survey? Do I want the agent to conduct the survey during the call? Do I want the customer to be transferred after the call is finished, or do I want to conduct a separate post-call survey? Is a web-based survey an option?” All these are important questions that need to be considered, and they all have their own challenges. But the first thing that call centers need to determine is what will be done with the resulting feedback data.  Determining your intended post-survey actions will guide the strategy and help answer those questions. This should be the starting point.    

TMCnet: Are more departments getting involved with the agent quality management process and if so which ones, why, and what impact does this have on it on the actual monitoring and agent evaluation and coaching process?

NK: Quality management should be part of a lifecycle that incorporates other departments, such as HR, training, operations and IT. All major stakeholders of the quality management strategy should be part of the process. Quality management should not be an isolated function within the call center, but a collaborative approach to achieving overall operational success. Doing so ensures, first, that what matters most is actually being evaluated during quality monitoring sessions, and second, that the coaching strategy is based on those critical success factors. With this ample feedback will be generated; not just feedback for the agents, but also feedback to guide adjustments to processes, procedures, and systems. The results will be:

--Better recruitment and selection criteria
--Enhanced coaching strategy
--Better training manuals
--Optimizations to current systems and programs
--Better overall performance

TMCnet: Discuss QM of text-based interactions (e-mail, SMS, social media comments/response). Do you see more of this happening? How are contact centers managing this process? Do the technologies enable an integrated voice and text interaction capturing, analysis and coaching?

NK: Customer interactions, whether voice-based or text-based, automated or live, ALL need to be monitored and evaluated for quality. Many call centers forget that other channels of communication, like e-mail and web-chat, represent direct interactions with customers and need to be included in the overall customer service strategy of the company. The strategic purpose and result of these interactions are the same as voice-based interactions. The process itself should be the same as well. What might be adapted are the means – the technologies used to measure the quality of these interactions. Advanced QM technologies go beyond simple voice and text interaction capture, analysis, and coaching. For example, speech-recognition is now being used for quality purposes.

TMCnet: QM has long been focused on agent performance. Please discuss using QM for evaluating coaching and supervisor performance.

NK: The “quality monitoring is just for the agents” myth needs to be dispelled. Call centers that are not monitoring beyond the agents are failing to implement a comprehensive quality management Strategy.  Quality is not about identifying what agents are doing wrong; it’s about identifying how they can perform their job better. It’s about continuous improvement, and driving the operational success of the call center. This encompasses everyone in the call center, not just the agents. Take it a step further. Apply QM not only to agents, supervisors, and coaches, but also to the quality assurance department and monitors. The question of “who monitors the people doing the monitoring?” is an important one.

Every functional area within the call center is a major stakeholder in the achievement of customer satisfaction. Monitoring, evaluation, and coaching, at all job levels, in all functional areas, translates into improved performance throughout the organization, improved customer satisfaction, and ultimately into overall organizational success. Teaching call center management professionals to widen their horizons, beyond traditional agent call monitoring and toward a comprehensive, customer-focused quality management program is the basis of the RCCSP Professional Education Alliance’s forthcoming Quality Management Professional Certification (CQMP), scheduled for release in 2011.