Quality Monitoring

Quality monitoring forms the core of any call center’s effective customer management strategy. And, at the core of quality monitoring itself is the recording and analysis of customer interactions. How this interaction capturing is performed, and how the data is processed, however, can make a big difference in whether or not quality monitoring successfully helps call centers achieve their goals.

 

According to a recent white paper from Co-nexus, the implementation of quality monitoring often varies a great deal depending on the size of the call center. More than 90 percent of very large call centers use sophisticated quality monitoring systems. These systems include a good deal of automation, making it possible to process and make sense of the data gathered. By contrast, only about a quarter of call centers with fewer than 30 agents make use of automated systems.

 

Because automation is a key best practice for quality monitoring, the disparity between large and small call centers puts the littler guys at a distinct disadvantage. This disadvantage is magnified by the fact that a smaller call center has limited staff to perform manual recording, storing, archiving and retrieving of customer interaction data. Yet without an automated solution, a small call center may need to devote an inordinate amount of its resources to just such tasks.

 

Picture a small call center in which, to perform quality monitoring, a supervisors must monitor the performance of agents by physically sitting side-by-side with them to observe calls, or listening in real-time through ACD’s observation function. When their time is tied up in this way, supervisors are unable to devote time to other important functions, such as targeted training. Plus, supervisors waste a lot of time waiting for coachable calls.

 

A further problem with manual quality monitoring is that agents often don’t perform naturally when they’re aware of being directly observed; many will either perform uncharacteristically well or falter under the pressure. This can be solved by remote monitoring, but even that has a downside: there’s no tangible record of the call for later use as a coaching tool.

 

A call center that uses an automated quality monitoring system, by contrast, can utilize best practices for ensuring that agents are properly trained and are efficiently using their knowledge. One such best practice is to record all calls, rather than a select few; this creates a deep database that can be mined to find representative calls for evaluation and coaching. In recent years, the cost of system hardware needed to record and store all calls has come down significantly, meaning that even smaller call centers now can take advantage of this ability.

 

Recording all calls is not just a best practice; in many cases it’s a requirement to meet government regulations related to up-selling, cross-selling and outbound telemarketing.

 

For a smaller call center just getting started with automated quality monitoring, the Co-nexus white paper outlined a list of best practices to keep in mind:

 

That’s a pretty big list of best practices, and it may seem daunting to a call center that’s migrating toward automated quality monitoring. This is where a robust quality monitoring solution comes into play; many of the best practices will be built in (with ability to customize functions as needed).

 

For example, take Co-nexus’ Customer eXperience Management (CXM). This solution, which offers a variety of modules to meet various call center needs, is scalable and can be configured in a variety of ways to enable comprehensive recording without a prohibitive price tag. CXM supports integration with a variety of call center functions, including trunk size, station side, select observe and VoIP recording. After recording, calls are compressed and indexed; business rules data can be attached for further value.

 

CXM goes beyond merely recording voice calls, though. It also captures agent PC activity, and archives this information along with the calls. Supervisors can then later use the resulting information to coach agents on call handling and workflow processes.

 

Clearly, these types of functions are vital to a modern, automated quality monitoring solution. To learn about other features of CXM, and about Co-nexus’ approach to quality monitoring, please visit the Quality Monitoring channel on TMCnet.com.