In the world of business, the customer is king. Many businesses need to respond to changes in the needs and wants of their consumers, or else they will fall behind. Customer service is a critical part of a business’s success, with many businesses becoming shining stars in their respective industries due to the exceptional quality of their customer service. This need for great customer service extends into all aspects of a company’s CX operations, including the contact center. The contact center often serves as the first point of contact between customers and businesses, so a contact center is a critical piece of the CX puzzle. So how can business owners and leaders ensure that their first point of contact with customers is effective and high quality? This is where quality assurance comes in.
What is Quality Assurance in a Business-Oriented Contact Center?
Quality assurance is usually conducted by contact center managers to ensure that all interactions between agents and customers are high quality. Quality assurance technology can be implemented in contact centers to monitor customer interactions. Using information from quality assurance systems, managers and supervisors can identify issues with how they are conducting CX operations and quickly solve them. This can include identifying and retraining agents, refining the process that customers have to go through to get service, or even intervening in real-time when an interaction goes negative. Quality assurance can be done in many different ways, like sending customer surveys and feedback forms, viewing recordings of interactions, and AI-powered sentiment analysis. Many of the world’s top CX innovators and leaders are implementing quality assurance systems in their contact centers to monitor and improve the customer journey.
Which Channels Need to Be Quality Assured?
Traditionally, quality assurance has always been done for voice channels. This involved recording interactions between customers and agents through the phone, then listening to these recordings later to ensure high quality interactions.
With the emergence of new digital channels, like SMS, text messaging, and messaging apps, quality assurance has been expanded to attempt to encompass these new channels. As more customers ditch the phone and move to mobile messaging channels, many CX operations have felt the need to expand their quality assurance operations to include these disruptive digital channels. In the modern day, all digital channels need to be quality assured on top of the traditional voice channels. This includes channels like video, chat, chat bots, email, text messaging, SMS, messaging apps, and more.
How Else Can Quality Assurance Help My Business?
Aside from ensuring high quality interactions, quality assurance provides other benefits that can streamline a contact center’s operations. One benefit quality assurance provides is turning a global, remote workforce-based contact center into a manageable unit. An effective quality assurance system that encompasses all channels and is cloud-based can tie together different working units from across the globe into one, manageable team. Contact center managers can see how employees across the globe are doing, and reach out to them quickly if any assistance is needed for an interaction. Agents from across the globe can be trained or retrained properly, while managers can streamline how they conduct their global CX operations.
Quality assurance can also empower agents and employees, helping them improve the service they provide while reducing things like turnover rates. Data and scores from quality assurance can assist in properly training agents. Through reducing things like turnover rates and improving agent empowerment, the contact center staff can become more experienced.
What Technology Do I Need for Business-Oriented Quality Assurance?
To implement effective quality assurance that ensures high-quality interactions, advanced contact center features are needed.
One important feature that is needed is artificial intelligence. AI is a necessity for quality assurance, because AI, through text analysis, sentiment analysis, and Natural Language Processing, can help businesses monitor interactions on any channel. Channels like email, text messaging, and SMS are all channels that are becoming increasingly popular with customers, and only technology like AI can help monitor all of these channels seamlessly and effortlessly. Many contact centers only monitor 1% of all voice interactions in the contact center. With AI, contact centers can easily monitor 100% of all interactions automatically on all channels.
Another important feature is omnichannel. With omnichannel, quality assurance can be done on many different channels in a seamless way. Rather than relying on bolted-on systems with each system handling a different channel, omnichannel combines all channels into one seamless experience. That means that rather than having many separate quality assurance systems and technologies to monitor interactions on different channels, an omnichannel system can help you monitor all interactions on all channels from a single platform. This makes it much easier and much more manageable to ensure quality on all channels and interactions.
Bright Pattern’s Omni QM
Omni QM, Bright Pattern’s latest AI-powered quality assurance offering, is innovative and has all of the features needed to ensure high quality interactions on all channels. Integrated onto an omnichannel platform and integrated with best-of-breed AI, Omni QM can help boost any contact center’s efficiency and customer service. Bright Pattern’s cloud platform can be used for a massive remote workforce that spans the globe. Omni QM was recently recognized by CCW for being one of the most disruptive and innovative pieces of CX technology this year.
