Quality Monitoring and CRM: A Perfect Couple
22 Oct, 2012
By: Verena WisselThe Complexity of Working Environments
In today’s contact centers, agents are expected to handle several programs and applications in parallel to handle address data, orders and complaints. Often, these programs are not integrated and lack the ability to exchange entered information. Without any search capability, customer history cannot be quickly reviewed. Post-processing of requests might take a lot of time because all the data must be added to the corresponding database manually. At the same time, agents must handle multiple communication channels such as calls, email, fax or chat.
These circumstances place excessive demands on agents with dire implications for customer service and the whole company’s image. But what can be done to maintain or even improve the quality of customer contact while facing the challenges of increasingly complex and demanding working environments?
One solution involves a combination of quality monitoring to improve agent efficiency and CRM systems to simplify working environments.
Improving Agent Efficiency
Quality monitoring solutions have become standard tools to improve agent efficiency. After agents’ sessions are recorded, supervisors can analyze interactions at their own rate and schedule. The reviews provide a more reliable “snapshot” of overall efficiency and service-level quality because they are distributed among all the agents and pre-filtered automatically by the quality monitoring system.
Current weak points can be identified, and customized agent development can be quickly initiated through training packages to let them develop skills at a convenient time. Agent results are incorporated in reports to show improvement in service quality over time.
But even skilled agents might stumble when handling so many different programs for each customer contact. Here CRM comes into play.
A Central Gateway to Access Customer Information
CRM solutions provide the complete customer history an agent needs for a thorough consultation, drawing from all required communications channels. With a few clicks, the agent is brought up to date without opening any time-consuming programs.
Information is processed centrally within the CRM system but is also automatically re-written in any original databases, thus ensuring data accuracy. With an efficient CRM system, controlling processes becomes streamlined and more cost-effective. By facilitating professional management of customer data and communications channels, CRM systems help agents concentrate more on the customer interaction itself.
Conclusion
In the future, recording for quality monitoring could be controlled directly out of the agent´s CRM interface and assigned to the customer’s contact history as well as call meta-data. Recordings would be available firsthand and could be re-played at any time. This all-in-one approach could be used for even more sophisticated analysis of agent performance, taking into account individual customer history.
