For decades, contact centres have relied on “quality assurance” (QA) and “quality management” (QM) tools as a foundational strategy for improving agent performance, compliance, and customer experience.
While countless aspects of the contact centre landscape have evolved in this time, from the rise of omnichannel communication channels to the implementation of AI, QM hasn’t always kept up.
Many businesses and contact centre leaders are still reliant on old, decaying quality scorecards, built on previous assumptions held about customer desires and preferences. Failing to review and update the scorecards means many organisations are giving ineffective feedback and misdirected agent coaching.
What’s worse, these businesses continue to use archaic methods for scoring quality, missing out on exceptional learning opportunities made available by modern technologies.
Fortunately, innovators in the Quality Management space, like MiaRec, are beginning to change the game. Here’s how.
1. Upgrading Evaluation Forms
Scorecards are the central component of a Quality Management ecosystem. As Brian Gocher, Product Evangelist at MiaRec, says:
“Scorecards are an excellent way for contact centres to implement an agent-based CX strategy that helps retain both employees and customers.”
However, when companies fail to review and update them, they end up with disjointed, unreliable insights.
Moreover, businesses too often focus exclusively on old-fashioned scorecard criteria, like how many times the agent says the customer’s name.
As a result, such criteria provides little insights into the sentiment, experience, and effort of the customer.
MiaRec believes in “humanising” the contact centre and quality management strategy with AI-driven tools capable of going behind the scenes in customer conversations. Through tools designed with a focus on natural language processing (NLP), customer research, and sentiment analysis, contact centres can adjust their scorecards and begin to provide a more accurate view of what drives customer experience.
What’s more, the right scorecard will allow companies to think more carefully about how particular criteria connects to their primary goals, from a compliance and strategic perspective. A customisable scorecard will provide businesses with an easier way to evaluate the true impact of each insight and metric.
MiaRec also believes the key to a good scorecard is optimisation. Testing the strategy and conducting “regression analysis” allows businesses to see the correlations between customer satisfaction scores and quality more effectively. MiaRec allows for such analysis, alongside customisable scorecards, which allow each company to build the best insights into their business.
2. Automated QA Reporting for All Customer Conversations
Today’s contact centres are fast-paced, chaotic, and complex environments. Most business leaders, supervisors, and managers don’t have time to sit down and create comprehensive reports manually to ensure they have the clearest possible insight into their business operations. This can make it difficult to maintain an up-to-date view of what is happening in the contact centre.
Automation is a powerful tool in this environment. Through automated workflows, companies can capture information about agent performance and scorecard metrics instantly, at any time, without the need for manual data analysis.
MiaRec offers such an automatic agent evaluation system that autofills particular scorecard criteria across all contact centre conversations. As such, supervisors can quickly assess which calls are likely to offer the most learning opportunities and assess those manually. The result is that business users have the freedom to jump between clear overviews of the entire company or team’s performance, and more granular insights into the output of each employee.
With both real-time holistic views and custom insights, it’s easier for supervisors and managers to determine which parts of the company need immediate assistance to drive better results. What’s more, analysts can use the information collected from automated reports to discover trends and opportunities. For instance, a contact centre might discover certain employees need assistance with solving specific problems, or uncover best practices in handling particular contacts, which they can share across the operation.
Commenting on the value of QA automation, Tatiana Polyakova, CEO, MiaRec, concludes:
“Automating QA workflows allow companies to save costs and win back valuable time for their contact centre employees traditionally bogged down by manual evaluation processes that only provide visibility into a fraction of their interactions.”
3. Live Call Monitoring
Every day, contact centres receive hundreds, if not thousands of calls from customers. Every conversation held between a company and its customers has the potential to impact the overall quality score of the business, and it’s CSAT ratings. In order to maintain a consistent view of what’s going on within the company, supervisors and managers need to monitor calls in the moment.
Live call monitoring allows for a consistent and real-time view into agent performance at any moment. MiaRec’s live call monitoring technology gives business leaders the freedom to tune into a call at any moment and assess the quality first-hand. Most importantly, the cloud-based technology ensures supervisors can listen into any call, anywhere.
In a world where contact centres are quickly embracing the work-from-home and hybrid models, it’s not always possible for a supervisor to simply “sit in” on a call. Access to a live monitoring solution makes it easier to listen into calls remotely, tag calls for follow-up and review, and even deliver coaching in real-time to distributed staff.
A live call monitoring solution ensures managers who listen into a call which might be going south can jump into the conversation discreetly and offer guidance directly to the agent to help de-escalate the situation. This could significantly reduce the risk of churn and help to preserve the brand’s reputation.
Upgrade Your Quality Management Strategy
As the contact centre environment continues to evolve, it’s more important than ever for business leaders to make sure they’re investing correctly in quality management.
An excellent QM strategy can inform most decisions made in customer service. Without the right system in place, it’s impossible for leaders to gain the clear view they need of their customers.
MiaRec’s unique approach to quality management helps organisations to make the most of the insights they get into the customer journey and employee performance. The company even has a 30-day free trial available for contact centres new to QM software.
