5 tips to monitor quality in a contact center

The new forms of interaction stimulate the person in charge of a contact center to look for new tools when it comes to knowing the results of their management. Here is a list of tips to keep in mind:

1) Monitor through multiple channels

The multiplication of points of contact with the customer requires to have a more comprehensive or holistic approach. Instead of looking at the quality of calls, e-mails or chat sessions in isolation, it is necessary to listen to them together, as if the customer’s voice was formed from the convergence of all these communication channels. Today the interaction occurs through two or more channels, so if you want to understand the quality of that experience, you must have control of its parts.

2) Involve the agents in the process

Increasingly the work of a customer service representative requires independent judgment. Allow them to listen to their calls and those of other agents.This will help them create their own judgment. Hold on to Bernal Nahela’s maxim: “In the medium term, teaching fishing is always better than serving fish on a platter”.

3) Do not confuse standards with quality

Make sure that all the elements of the scoring process are aimed at improving customer satisfaction. Don’t forget that the idea is not to follow a process in detail, but to know how the customer felt.

4) Automate is still business

Despite what one might expect, manual data collection and analysis systems for quality control in contact centers are commonplace. Nearly two-thirds of contact centers continue to prepare their agent control panels in spreadsheets, while another significant percentage still uses paper sheets. They are costly practices in time and money. Switching to an automated quality control system can reduce the total management time of an interaction by half.

5) Monitor live and leave the random selection of 2%

With traditional quality control it is very common to waste time listening to calls that ultimately are average. The true value is given with the really good or bad calls, which allows to reach the root cause of what is being done right or wrong.

The two key attributes of any contact center agent are a) know what to say and -even more importantly- b) know how to say it in order to gain the trust and respect of the person being contacted. Following each representative all the time, on a one-to-one basis by a real person, is simply impossible.

But today there are technologies that can do this task in a profitable way. The recognition of phrases during the call, or of circumstances in which the operator is speaking too loudly or too quickly, helps to improve the supervisory experience and offers the agent a tool of improvement of enormous value.

Thus, with this technological capability, which allows to analyze 100% of calls, at least 3 things are achieved:

a) Eliminate the statistical bias of small samples

b) Focus the quality team on the real added value of the calls -not in the averages-

c) And focus training on agents who need more support