CALL CENTER QUALITY ASSURANCE

WHAT IS CALL CENTER QUALITY ASSURANCE?

A contact center’s most important function is to deliver a great customer experience, and call center quality assurance is the primary means to deliver what the customer wants with maximum effectiveness and efficiency.

Sometimes referred to as call center quality management, it is the method used to observe, measure, evaluate, and improve how well your communication channels and agents are delivering the optimal customer experience throughout the customer journey.

Effective call center quality assurance best practices allow a call center to proactively monitor interactions, discover areas for improvement, and provide remediation and training where required. It is the cornerstone of your call center because it delivers actionable insights and allows you to continuously improve interactions between your customers and agents while meeting business objectives.

WHY DO YOU NEED IT?

The purpose is to deliver a superior customer experience and improve call center quality  and agent performance through a series of activities that deliver continuous process improvement. Call center quality assurance helps align your agents, customers, and business expectations.

Adopting call center QA best practices is a must in today’s world. Optimizing your quality assurance processes will help improve the quality of service to your customers and increase agent efficiency. When done right it will improve first call resolution; reduce average handle time, transfer, and callbacks; identify process areas for improvement; improve both the customer and agent experience; and incorporate the voice of the customer through feedback.

Quality is a critical success factor for the organization and for customer satisfaction. Implementing a sound quality assurance program will improve the quality of service your team provides to customers, ensure consistency of performance, and reduce costs.

THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH

The traditional call center quality assurance approach focused primarily on call quality monitoring to ensure call quality. The focus was on evaluating agent performance and the customer experience when handling calls.

Most of these solutions were architected for voice, and they were not designed to handle other communication channels, such as SMS, chat, social media, and messaging. With the proliferation and rapid adoption of these new communication channels, traditional solutions have not been able to meet the needs of the modern enterprise.

In an effort to adapt to the requirements of the modern enterprise to communicate across all channels, traditional solutions added channels that they were never architected to work with. Complex integrations, data integrity integrity issues, and the ability to assess the entire customer journey across all channels are just a few of the problems that they are unable to solve.

THE MODERN OMNICHANNEL APPROACH

Call center QA requires a new approach due to the fact that call centers have been undergoing rapid change and transformation. They have evolved from call centers that only take calls to multichannel call centers that can handle multiple, yet siloed, channels of communication, to today’s omnichannel call centers that are nimble and can address customers across all communication channels while retaining context for a personalized experience.

In addition to call center monitoring tools that only address the voice channel, the omnichannel contact center requires the ability to measure other channels as well, including email, SMS, social media, chat, messengers, in-app messaging, and more. As customers increasingly use more digital channels, an omnichannel call center quality assurance solution becomes mandatory. It is critical to measure performance across all channels to deliver a positive customer experience while ensuring consistent levels of quality of service.

The modern approach must address all channels, incorporate new technologies (e.g., sentiment, transcription, speech analytics, AI, and others) and achieve maximum automation, so that agents’ time is spent on continuous process improvement and delivering optimal levels of customer satisfaction.

BRIGHT PATTERN: THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY

In order to deliver the best customer experience, your call center software solution must be designed from the beginning to be omnichannel. Built on a single unified architecture, the Bright Pattern omnichannel contact center solution enables you to deliver advanced call center quality assurance capabilities across all channels, including voice, chat, SMS, messengers, and more.

Bright Pattern”s QM Pro is the key to delivering consistent customer satisfaction. Embedded in the Bright Pattern’s omnichannel contact center solution, QM Pro provides the ability to automatically analyze 100 percent of all interactions across all channels. This removes the need for sampling and guessing which interactions to review. Quality managers and QA specialists only evaluate those interactions that fall outside of certain parameters or thresholds, such as sentiment score, transcription keyword search, survey scores, and the like. This greatly increases efficiency and effectiveness and allows more time for implementing process improvements, coaching, and agent training.

In addition, Bright Pattern incorporates a calibration process so that quality managers’ scoring is consistent throughout the organization. Advanced survey capabilities along all routes of the customer journey ensure that the voice of the customer is analyzed across all channels. With all of the power of the Bright Pattern call center quality assurance solution, you will have maximum time to train, coach, and address process improvement opportunities.

WHAT IS BRIGHT PATTERN QM PRO?

Bright Pattern QM Pro allows quality managers to evaluate only those interactions, positive or negative, that fall above or below a certain threshold or measurement. We utilize advanced technologies, including AI, sentiment, keyword search, and more, to help quality managers to quickly identify and review the interactions that are most important to the business.

QM Pro documents the criteria for each type of channel interaction so that your agents know exactly what the business is expecting of them. Evaluation forms can be developed by channel, and sections and questions can be weighted to focus and measure those activities that are most critical to the customer experience.

In designing your call center quality assurance process, it is important to eliminate as much subjectivity as possible so that agents consider the scoring process to be objective and fair. The QM Pro solution includes call center quality assurance calibration capabilities, such as the ability to compare multiple evaluators and close variations between them, which guarantee that the scoring process is objective and equitable for agents.

In addition to call center quality assurance evaluators being calibrated for consistency, it is also important that agents are included in the process to gain buy-in and create positive reinforcement for remediation activities. We provide you with the ability to allow agents to score themselves and then be evaluated by their supervisors, as well as a dispute resolution process in the event that the agent feels that the supervisor evaluation was unfair. By gaining agreement on performance scoring, agents and supervisors can engage in positive dialogue about how to improve performance.

With a fair and equitable call center quality assurance solution that has agent buy-in, agents must be given the tools they need to quickly remediate any deficiencies. QM Pro helps agents to receive immediate feedback via a dashboard showing their scores and evaluations. The dashboard directs agents to the specific interactions that were evaluated, with notes and attachments for quicker resolution and implementation.

Because QM Pro is fully contained within the Bright Pattern call center solution, there is no need for complex integrations in order to access interactions and data. All recordings, transcripts, and associated metadata are native to the solution. With one common user interface to set up, manage, and operate, you are able to maximize your time on improving the quality of the customer experience.

BRIGHT PATTERN: QM PRO SUMMARY

QM Pro is embedded natively in the Bright Pattern cloud call center solution. This completely eliminates the need for complex third-party integrations. You will vastly improve data accuracy as recordings, transcripts and the associated meta-data are all managed natively in a single unified platform.

A single user interface is used to manage both call center software for communications as well as call center quality assurance, resulting in higher productivity and easier administration. QMPro collects all transactions across all channels, analyzes those based on automated preset criteria, and allows you to optimize your channels, processes, and agents to provide a more uniform and consistent customer experience.