In today's environment, where a company's products, services, pricing and even customers' feedback can be compared over the Internet with the click of a button, it's not surprising that consumer expectations run high. Like it or not, this is the reality faced by every business, and the trend will almost certainly strengthen over time. In fact, for the vast majority of organizations, the contact center has become the front door, which means it falls to customer service agents to set out the welcome mat. And right now, the need for skilled agents has never been greater. Similarly, the need for effective training, performance monitoring and immediate responsiveness to customer feedback has intensified. This flies in the face of cost-cutting measures, putting the contact center manager into a difficult position - a situation for which yesterday's quality monitoring (QM) practices are challenged to provide a solution.
As contact centers become more strategic, their impact can be felt throughout the entire organization, including branch and store locations, satellite offices - even suppliers. The more forward-thinking these "reinvented" centers become, the more they can focus less on addressing one-off customer issues and more on correcting the underlying root causes that are prompting the customer interactions to begin with. The difference between fixing an immediate problem versus correcting a process goes beyond mere semantics.
As we welcome in a new year, here are five tips and best practices for renewing your focus on QM and how doing so can instill customer goodwill, optimize your center and more widespread customer service operations, and support the bottom line.
- Quality monitoring only works in a quality-focused culture.
The QM form should not drive the behavior - culture should drive the behavior, and this will involve all programs and efforts. Quality monitoring should be viewed by the agents as just a logical flow from the rest of the culture already established in the organization, and a way to have their efforts consistently noticed and acknowledged. The culture drives, QM follows. When that takes place, they will always be in sync. - Correlate organizational goals to quality monitoring forms.
The correct quality measures need to align with the organization's high-level goals and objectives. These not only help identify opportunities to improve customer and agent satisfaction, but also foster greater sales, reduced turnover, improved customer retention and even higher first call resolution. It is important to measure the behaviors that trend over time to operational KPIs. - Use quality monitoring to track and reward performance.
Tracking performance translates into an opportunity for employees to receive proactive feedback and one-on-one coaching - which can ultimately increase job satisfaction. With the correct us of QM, agents get to see the data associated with their progress, which allows them to celebrate accomplishments that come from numerical improvements, both individually and as a team. - Build quality monitoring forms that are concise and actionable.
An effective QM form measures the most critical behaviors to organizational success. Too many "objectives" result in a lack of focus and clarity. Think ahead about the data being generated from the forms by determining how the data will be used. Focus on priorities from the business and customer perspectives as understood via speech analytics and customer survey findings. - Evolve from far rear-view analysis to real-time service recovery.
With technologies available today, organizations can be alerted almost immediately when a customer is dissatisfied, a call has gone wrong or an account is in trouble. QM staff are uniquely qualified to identify what went wrong in the interaction and should play a key role in service recovery, either directly recontacting dissatisfied customers or via coordination of that activity. Their involvement yields multi-directional benefits, as direct engagement in correcting problems provides key insight into the correct building blocks for "quality" calls going forward.
Although monitoring has been used in contact centers for years, its importance, and the impact it can have, has become magnified due to cost-control pressures, executive focus on revenue and profit, the importance of retention, and customers' expectations. It's time to take a fresh look and a renewed QM focus. The end result: today's QM helps measure what matters, supports the right behaviors, fosters development and retention, instills process efficiencies, enhances service and fosters long-term customer relationships - all key ingredients to surviving and thriving in the new year.
Provided by Kristyn Emenecker, director, Solutions Marketing, Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions®
January 21, 1:00 Eastern: Contact Center in the Cloud: Focus on Customer Care, Not Your Infrastructure. Presented by SAP. According to Forrester Research, "contact center owners are leaning toward an increased emphasis on self-service and applications that provide greater insight into customer experience. and find increased interest in services delivered as hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) to reduce upfront expenses". Spend 45 minutes with us to learn how to eliminate upgrade costs, drive efficiencies into the workforce, and reduce your overall TCO in the contact center.
January 26, 1:00 Eastern: Solving Partner Problems Using Whole Call Analysis. Presented by BBN Technologies. Partners are necessary for today's large call centers, but they can add complications. Data you need to answer questions and solve problems is now split across multiple companies and systems. In this webcast, you'll learn how whole call analysis gives you complete visibility of how your partners are handling your customers.
January 28, 1:00 Eastern: A New Approach to Quality: Using Speech Analytics to Measure Agent Performance Against Corporate Goals. Presented by Nexidia. Measuring agent performance and developing the appropriate training and coaching is difficult across multiple sites and teams. With a complete analysis of all contact center activity, it is now possible to tell how agents throughout the company are performing against corporate objectives. You'll learn how you can improve satisfaction and reduce costs by targeting training and coaching to the initiatives that have the greatest impact on your customers.
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