The main purpose of quality monitoring in the customer support industry is to measure and analyze every customer-agent interaction. The main objective to scrutinize these conversations is to get a clear customer insight and to ensure every threshold of conversation is followed by every agent simultaneously. To fulfill this task, contact center engages a quality assurance team that evaluate voice call interactions, read emails, review chat transcripts, and monitor social media interactions. So in one line, the principal task of a call quality monitoring team is to improve customer support representative’s performance and customer satisfaction.
Standing in 2020, customer experience (CX) is the major emerging force to remain survived in today’s market competition. And this is true for almost all brands of each industry, irrespective of their geographical location or market demand. Now as customer satisfaction is considered the “true” voice of customers, the degree of satisfaction level ultimately measures the level of CX. It should be highlighted that improving customer satisfaction is not only about sharing feedback with agents about sharing or fixing areas of improvement with agents. Rather quality management is about improving the level of overall service quality of the entire customer support team. Real-time call quality monitoring allows the quality assurance team to identify problems, maintaining pre-decided standards which in turn improve the customer experience and call center performance steadily. Thus quality monitoring works as the backbone for any customer support team as it ensures that the best practices are exercised to achieve a higher level of customer satisfaction.
Quality assurance is the fuel to create a high-performing customer support representative team that can ensure a consistent customer experience. However, to make quality management really effective, certain methodology and strategies can be followed:
The quality team supervisor or manager should ensure that the quality evaluator monitors customer interactions of every agent as per the prescribed guidelines and as per the schedule. Every quality monitoring schedule should have a clear definition and to the point. Not only about normal evaluation, identifying unethical practices or failure mode identification during a conversation, and highlighting the same with operation team supervisors are also crucial. So to make call-monitoring worthwhile, the quality evaluation program should be designed to make clear what agents may exercise to achieve a higher customer satisfaction platform.
Feedback refers to information describing an agent’s performance in a particular or overall conversation with customers that is intended to guide his/her future performance in that same or related activity. According to Gartner’s research, companies that successfully implement customer experience projects begin by focusing on how they collect and analyze customer feedback.
So once a call or chat is monitored and analyzed, the QA analyst should share the feedback mainly to improve the skills of the agent. Just like monitoring calls regularly, delivering feedback is also a major task for a quality evaluator. What’s important in this regard is:
Calibration is one of the primary processes used to maintain instrument accuracy. Under call calibration, the QA team shares some specific sample observations of customer interaction with both operation and training team supervisors simultaneously. The main target to do so is to keep every department of a customer support team on the same page before coaching and passing feedback to an individual agent. This helps to identify any variance or dispute within the entire team which diminishing customer experience or any major area of improvement while every departmental head from quality to the operation is on-board.
Publishing daily/weekly/ monthly scorecard of every agent and sharing the same report with both operation and training managers is also crucial. It makes it a bit easy for the top management team to draw a clear picture that covers agent performance to customer satisfaction figures. Or in other words, this scorecard report plays a paramount role to determine that every agent meets the quality standards set or not. It also helps to identify the “bottom quartile” and the need for any special training session as well.
Better customer support always ensures fast and helpful assistance for customers which in turn boosts overall experience with the brand. And this is where quality monitoring comes into place. To make quality monitoring effective, the QA team should help a contact center to maintain a consistent level of services over a period of time at each touch-point throughout the customer journey.