The Value Proposition of Quality Management
18 Aug, 2011
By: Peter FernandoSo why is quality management so important? In today’s economic climate, contact centers are under considerable pressure to offer prompt service to retain customers, increase sales and reduce costs, without compromising the quality of the interaction. Contact center managers have realized that their frontline staff, their contact center agents, represent a key business asset requiring investment through training, coaching and development. Quality management helps to meet these critical challenges.
Agent Performance
Today’s customers do not forgive easily when they experience poor service. The repercussions of bad service can be considerably detrimental to your business, affecting your ability to retain customer loyalty and protect your company’s reputation. Bad news travels fast, so a single failed interaction can spread to a customer’s family, friends and an entire database of contacts. Thus, one unhappy individual can affect a widespread network of prospects through adverse feedback.
Therefore, investing in quality management helps contact center managers increase agent efficiency and performance through training, coaching and development. Yet while many contact centers use voice recording as an auditing tool, they fail to complement it with professional quality management software.
Agent Evaluation
Quality management tools provide an automated process for agent evaluation so calls can be regularly accessed and audited in a smart and efficient manner, compared to much slower and protracted manual methods. Professional tools review more calls, at regular intervals, and any problems can be identified quickly. Calls can be audited using an automated template to facilitate scoring and evaluation of agents in terms of how effectively they handle each customer interaction. Regular audits ensure consistent service quality and increased customer retention.
Management reports on agent performance can be easily accessed to determine individual agent development needs. Moreover, new technologies such as speech analytics (SpA) take quality management to the next level by precisely identifying business weaknesses and service quality needs through new functions such as keyword spotting and emotion detection. These capabilities provide intelligent reporting on sorely needed areas of business and agent development.
Conclusion
Today’s savvy contact center managers have realized that quality management tools provide critical support to enable First Call Resolution and Workforce Optimization programs. The ability to ”Get it Right the First Time” means handling a customer request on the first call without the need for a call back. By using a quality management tool, contact centers are more likely to achieve First Call Resolution since their agents are well trained and coached to understand and accommodate customers’ needs. Quality management tools ultimately lead to greater ROI by improving service quality and agent performance to achieve increased sales and reduced costs. Thus, the value of quality management for contact centers is immense and best described as a “win -- win” proposition.
