Despite contact center processes evolving, technologies advancing, and customer expectations rising, some contact centers have let their quality assurance (QA) programs become stale.
Indeed, Statista suggests that less than 40 percent of contact center leaders would say that their QA processes are fully optimized.
Moreover, 34 percent say that they are “somewhat” optimized. Meanwhile, the rest follow foundational practices that cannot always maintain a consistent benchmark of service quality across different interactions, teams, and locations.
As contact centers are such busy environments – where firefighting is often the nature of the beast – this is perhaps unsurprising.
Yet, to move past these stale practices, here are ten tips for contact centers to follow in the coming months:
- Define SMART KPIs: Our quality KPIs must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely or SMART. If they are not, it is difficult to set expectations, and confusion will likely follow.
- Demonstrate Unquantifiable Standards: The unquantifiable determiners of quality – like politeness, active listening, empathy, focus, etc. – should be demonstrated using call recordings. Roleplay-based training sessions may also help.
- Connect QA with Coaching: Use QA feedback to inform targeted coaching. Then, measure the success of such coaching with QA. Doing so will ensure QA feedback makes a difference to agent performance.
- Alight Quality Scores with Customer Satisfaction: Look for a correlation between quality scores and customer satisfaction (CSAT). If it exists, the contact center is likely using the best criteria to measure agent performance. If not, it must research what drives its CSAT and update its quality scorecard.
- Consider the Outliers: Assess outliers in handling time, transfer rates, and customer sentiment. These outliers are often where the greatest learning opportunities lie.
- Calibrate Quality Scoring: Set time aside every month to bring quality analysts into a room, score calls together, and discuss any disagreements. Doing so will ensure each analyst defines every criterion in the same way. Moreover, the contact center can score agent conversations more fairly.
- Adopt Peer-Evaluation: Playback interactions with the agent and evaluate them together against the quality standards. This aligns their view of performance with that of the analyst – clarifying performance expectations.
- Use Automation: An automated tool analyze call metadata and speech analytics results to identify which call recordings may require human intervention and further inspection for QA. Here is how to implement such a solution.
- Balance Learning Opportunities With Positive Feedback: Contact center isn’t only about eliminating issues or inefficiencies. Analysts must also reinforce positive behaviors by showing recognition.
- Start Early: Finally, ensure that quality assurance isn’t a remediation measure. Incorporate it into the agent onboarding experience from the get-go to make performance expectations more explicit. Doing so ensures agents understand what the business expects from them.
Looking for a more structured approach to managing QA? If so, read our article: Solving the Problems of Quality Assurance
