Today’s consumers expect exceptional service. They want to receive personalized, efficient, and convenient support across every channel. Living up to those expectations pays off, with studies showing that 93% of consumers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer fantastic experiences. But delivering consistently great service isn’t easy.
The smallest mishap in the contact center, from an issue with call quality, to a problem with an agent’s response, can lead to lost revenue, and damage to your brand’s reputation. That’s where contact center quality assurance (QA) comes in.
With the right QA strategy, you can gather the insights you need to enhance customer satisfaction, improve compliance with industry standards, and boost agent performance.
What is Contact Center QA (Quality Assurance)?
Contact Center QA (Quality Assurance) is a process of evaluating interactions between call center staff and customers, to ensure they adhere to pre-defined quality standards. It involves various activities, such as recording and reviewing calls, reading emails and transcripts, using software to track sentiment, and scoring calls.
The overall purpose of Contact Center QA is to help companies maintain high service quality, ensuring all interactions are handled effectively and professionally. Plus, it can help businesses provide valuable feedback to agents they can use to improve their skills over time.
With the right QA strategy you can:
- Improve customer satisfaction: The more you learn about the interactions customers have with your company, as well as the friction points they encounter, the more you can improve customer service. QA gives you the insights you need to enhance interaction handling and problem solving on a significant scale.
- Optimize agent performance: With insights into agent performance, such as their strengths and weaknesses in relation to certain KPIs, you can improve agent performance. QA offers an excellent way to evaluate agent skills, and determine what type of personalized training each team member needs.
- Boost compliance: With call recording and analysis tools, companies can ensure that their agents are adhering to compliance best practices. They can monitor issues with ethical, legal, and industry-specific guidelines, reducing the risk of fines and maintaining customer trust.
Tim Peters, Global Marketing Leader at Enghouse Systems says:
“Investment in quality management has always underpinned both improved agent engagement and premium customer service. Organizations that recognize this and develop robust QA practices to coach agents and develop their skills not only improve the experience they offer their customers, but also have more success in retaining agents, as studies show a direct link between poor agent development and attrition.
Closely and consistently monitoring agent-customer engagement also gives contact center leaders an improved understanding of their customers, and of the experience they offer – as well as a better comprehension of the service they’re expecting from their agents.
Enghouse has been developing and supporting our Quality Management Suite customers around the world for over 25 years, offering QA in the cloud and on-premises while connecting to all leading contact center solutions.”
Best Practices for Enhanced Quality Assurance
The solutions available for optimizing quality assurance in the contact center are constantly evolving, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence, making it easier to monitor calls and track sentiment in real-time. However, it’s still important to follow the right strategy for success.
1. Know Which Metrics You Need to Monitor
Effective contact center quality assurance is all about collecting the right data you can use to proactively improve customer interactions. Defining which metrics you need to monitor to achieve the best results is crucial. A few options to consider include:
- FCR (First call resolution): The percentage of inquiries resolved during the first call.
- AHT (Average handling time): How long it takes for agents to handle customer interactions.
- CSAT (Customer satisfaction): How satisfied customers feel with your level of service (often measured using post-interaction surveys).
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): How likely customers are to recommend your company to someone else (measured using a scale).
- QA Score: The score assigned to each agent based on their performance during the interaction (often based on other metrics).
- Abandonment rate: How many callers hang up before connecting with an agent.
A strong QA solution should enable you to create customized reports and scorecards based on the metrics that matter most to your organization.
2. Take an Omnichannel Approach
Today’s customers expect to be able to connect with companies on various channels, from the phone to social media, messaging apps, and more. This means your quality assurance solution needs to be able to capture information from every channel you use for customer service.
Solutions like Enghouse Interactive’s Quality Management Suite allow companies to capture, record, and transcribe interactions from every channel. You can consolidate recordings from various channels and data sources into a single place, and create custom profiles for call capture.
You can even capture and analyze media on any channel routed to and from Microsoft Teams, giving you even more freedom to connect the dots in customer journeys. The more holistic your quality assurance strategy is, the more data you’ll gather about your customers, and the strategies you can use to improve customer service.
3. Leverage Automation
As mentioned above, effective quality assurance requires a multi-faceted approach to capturing data, analyzing information, and sharing feedback with customers. Managing the whole process manually can be complex and time-consuming. Fortunately, many leading quality assurance and management solutions come with capabilities that allow you to automate:
- Recording: With the right software, you can create policies to determine which calls and conversations should be captured, transcribed, and stored in your database.
- Transcription: Intelligent solutions can automatically transcribe conversations into written content, making it easier to search for valuable information in the future.
- Agent evaluation: With innovative QA tools, you can automate agent assessments based on customizable scorecards designed to suit your specific business needs.
Some advanced tools even allow you to leverage a range of other automated systems for proactive customer outreach and customer self-service, enhancing the overall experience for your audience.
4. Embrace AI
Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a valuable resource for all forms of customer service tasks. Implementing artificial intelligence into your quality assurance strategy can help you to unlock additional insights, and simplify a range of processes.
For instance, AI-powered solutions can generate precise summaries of every customer service interaction for agents, highlighting action items and key topics that agents might need to focus on when following up with customers. AI powered tools can also help you to dive deeper into interactions, analyzing a customer’s sentiment or mood through every stage of the call.
A suite of powerful AI solutions will allow you to better understand what the biggest friction points are in your customer’s journey, and how you can improve your service options. It is important to choose vendors in this area who have their own AI expertise and can provide it with built-in guardrails as there are many examples where companies have deployed technologies which have resulted in missteps and even in lawsuits.
5. Optimize the Agent Experience
Finally, it’s worth remembering that a strong quality assurance strategy isn’t just focused on improving customer experiences. It’s also about enhancing the experience your agents have at work. Look for ways to motivate and engage your employees, by giving them access to real-time insights from every conversation, or dashboards where they can monitor key metrics.
Consider using gamification to encourage healthy competition between your team members, and reward employees who regularly exceed performance benchmarks. Additionally, make sure your quality assurance tools are easy to use and manage for administrators.
A centralized console for tracking interactions and KPIs will make it easier for supervisors and leaders to consistently support agents, and make positive changes to contact center processes.
Steve Nattress, Vice President, Product Management at Enghouse Interactive says:
“While we recognize the importance of Quality Assurance, we also appreciate its significant load on managers’ time. The average contact center leader only manages to review around 5% of customer engagements – many aren’t even managing that. Contact center leaders understand the benefits, they just don’t have the time or resources. That’s why evaluating agents is one of the strongest use cases for AI.
Take a current Enghouse customer, who formerly manually evaluated under 250 calls a month, but now with Enghouse’s Automated Agent Evaluation is able to review over 51,000 per month.
Not only are they now scoring 100% of agent interactions, but they are uncovering trends that couldn’t possibly be recognized at a lower scale. Additionally, agents now know that their rating is independent of any bias, leading to a better employee experience. All this is game changing – for the contact center, the customers, the agents, and the business.”
Mistakes to Avoid with Quality Assurance
The right quality assurance strategy will have a positive impact on your team’s performance, and your customer satisfaction rates. However, there are a few hurdles you’ll need to overcome. Here are some of the biggest mistakes to avoid with contact center QA:
- Relying on tickbox reviews: Don’t ask customers or agents to fill out checkbox lists at the end of each call, this harms both employee and customer satisfaction.
- Limited feedback: Ensure your agents have plenty of feedback from supervisors, and scorecard assessments they can use to improve their performance.
- Poor training: Use the information you gather from your QA strategies to deliver personalized, consistent training to your agents.
- Monitoring the wrong metrics: Be careful about which metrics you prioritize. For instance, slow call handling times aren’t always a sign of poor performance.
- Forgetting to review: Regularly review your data, feedback, and metrics to make constant adjustments to your quality assurance strategies.
Unlocking the Benefits of Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is something every contact center leader needs to focus on to ensure they’re making the most of their resources, empowering their teams, and improving customer experience. Fortunately, with cutting-edge software, enabling access to AI, automation, and omnichannel data capture, enhancing quality assurance has never been easier.
With the right quality assurance solution, you’ll be able to gather the data you need to make consistent, proactive improvements to your contact center’s performance.
