The 'Human' and 'Technology' Elements in Quality Monitoring

The hard facts of manual quality monitoring

Most contact centers today still manually evaluate only 1-3% of their monthly calls. Manually evaluating customer interactions is a painstaking, expensive process that is impossible to scale. The result – businesses lack accurate information about customer satisfaction, agent performance, and more. They miss out on valuable business insights while wasting resources. Additional risks of manual quality monitoring include:

• Diminishing revenue recovery
• Low Net Promotor and other CSAT scores
• Flat or declining sales
• High call abandonment rates
• Lost business to competitors
• Elevated compliance risk
• Low employee retention

A holistic approach to quality management can help overcome these challenges. Your quality monitoring process can be continuously improved, costs can be cut, and customers can receive the service that keeps them coming back.

The conversation intelligence solution

To optimize quality monitoring processes, businesses can employ a conversation intelligence solution to capture and analyze 100% of customer interactions. The right analytics tool provides automated performance feedback to agents and supervisors, and necessary insights to manage your quality assurance processes more efficiently.

Read on for our list of useful tips on how to make ‘human’ and ‘technology’ elements work together to achieve continuous improvement of your quality monitoring process.

1. Focus 80% of your team leaders’ time on developing people by removing administrative tasks. Use conversation intelligence to provide supervisors with the necessary insight to deliver more targeted and accurate coaching.
2. Remove fixed and scripted approaches to conversations. Instead, encourage a personalized customer experience with a holistic quality view. Giving agents the freedom to act with common sense – and not stick rigidly to a script regardless of the customer's circumstances – can deliver quick wins with customer satisfaction. By capturing and analyzing every interaction, it is possible to identify what impact a rigid script can have on satisfaction and brief agents accordingly.
3. Introduce self-assessments. If you provide each agent with a daily, personalized scorecard that identifies their performance against a range of key metrics and behaviors, it makes it easier for them to focus on specific areas that need improvement.
4. Create a complete picture of all your agents’ interactions to identify best practices. Use a 360-degree automated scorecard that does not rely on a single, manual assessment that may be subjective. By converting all interactions (calls, SMS, chat) into text, you can automatically tag certain language patterns, keywords, phrases, or other characteristics and score them against set criteria in one system.
5. Only give fair and honest feedback. Call monitoring and quality processes should be used as a way of building agents’ confidence and motivating them to do better. You can use the personalized agent scorecards to have constructive conversations. The insight on the scorecards will enable you to recognize and affirm good performance and provide helpful tips for areas that require improvement.
6. Make agents aware of how their performance is affecting the business. For example, if an agent repeatedly fails to disclose 3rd party content, they increase the risk of noncompliance fines. By having access to such information, you can quickly rectify the problem by coaching the agents appropriately and then continue monitoring their performance.
7. Encourage your agents to self-improve by allowing them to monitor their own calls. Conversation intelligence tools help identify individual coaching and training needs, as well as provide agents with actionable information they can use to improve their own performance and quality scores. Agents’ ability to monitor their scores and listen to problem areas reinforces their training, and helps them maintain high scores, creating a culture of self-improvement.
8. Be careful when linking pay/rewards to performance. Agents may not want to openly admit to making mistakes when there is a significant reward at stake. Instead, you can use gamification to encourage agents to up their game. Conversation intelligence can provide the option to tell an agent that today they are – for example - number 3 of 28 agents. This introduces a competitive drive to use the insight provided by the personal scorecard to improve.
9. Allow your agents to take a break after a difficult or negative call. It’s good to give agents some space to calm down after a bad call. With the help of automated personalized scorecards, it is possible to assess those difficult calls with a supervisor as quickly as the end of each shift.
10. Think of ways you can improve the delivery of your compliance statements. Keep them to a minimum – go back though your compliance statements, remove unnecessary repetition and automate as much of them as possible in advance in the IVR. Conversation intelligence can help by analyzing and scoring every single agent contact, either during or after the call, as opposed to traditional, random compliance checks.

Want to learn more about combining human and tech solutions to boost contact center performance? Check out our whitepaper How to Achieve Continuous Improvement of your Quality Monitoring for more information.