Why QA is Important & How to Do It Right

Eighty-two percent of customers say they would switch suppliers after a bad call center experience. Meanwhile, 91 percent say they would stay loyal to a supplier after a good call. And 49 percent say their loyalty to organizations that quickly solve their problems with service goes a long way in building loyalty. That’s all according to CallMiner (News - Alert).

Meanwhile, Five 9-commissioned research by Zogby Analytics says 95 percent of those surveyed say a positive customer experience is very or somewhat likely to make them continue to do business with a company. And 69 percent are unlikely to do business with a company if it requires lots of effort to resolve a problem.

And Monet Software’s (News - Alert) white paper “Seven Strategies for More Effective Quality Assurance in Your Contact Center” explains how organizations can optimize their resources, and satisfy and keep customers.

QA helps businesses establish quality goals and assess their success in meeting them, Monet Software explains. Lack of clear goals and organizational alignment can create barriers to QA success, it adds, so it’s important to do the following things to enable quality assurance efforts to meet their promise.

The first thing organizations should do relative to QA initiatives is define what they want to make happen. Before they map out plans to get there, they should take stock of their resources and assess where they are at the outset, so they can measure their improvement throughout the life of the QA effort.

Getting input from everybody involved, educating all key stakeholders in the QA plan once it’s formulated, and keeping them engaged by explaining why the organization is doing what it’s doing – and reminding them of that over time – are all keys to QA success.

Employing technology and leveraging automation can go a long way in achieving QA goals. Software that provides alerts, dashboards, ranks and scores agents and calls, does recording, and uses speech analytics for real-time sentiment assessment are all great tools to enable contact center QA and to automate some tasks so people can do higher-level work.

“While QA helps to fix short-term issues, it should also be established and utilized to track and report on long-term trends and improvement,” Monet Software notes. “This is a process that should begin at the hiring stage, by selecting the new employees most likely to contribute to the quality mindset of the contact center. Once that mindset is established, it should be reinforced through employee performance reviews, automated processes, and training/coaching efforts. A sophisticated workforce optimization solution can play a key role in both establishing and supporting this quality mindset to establish and maintain a high performance service organization.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle