The tried-and-true quality assurance processes that many contact center practitioners relied on for years are probably well out of date. It is time to reevaluate how quality is tracked and measured, and to implement some sensible new practices that take into consideration the ways in which operations have evolved.
Traditional quality starts with recording—grabbing the actual contents of the interaction and storing it for later review. Most centers have a solid set of guidelines for supervisors (or dedicated quality control professionals) to listen to a selection of calls for each agent on a regular basis. There is usually a calibration process to ensure consistency and a mechanism for sharing the findings with agents for improvement. In recent years, many centers have acquired technology that can capture and store 100% of calls, including the agents’ desktops. This has provided a greater pool of interactions to review, but the portion of interactions typically scored remains very low, as little as 1% to 3% of the total.
That gives you only a slim view into what might be happening in your interactions. For many organizations that operate under compliance rules, missing 90% or more of the interaction content could be a risky proposition. Risking fines under the TCPA, PCI or other regulatory regimes might have been an acceptable business practice when it was impossible to review them all. Now that tools exist to cover 100% of interactions, there is no good reason for taking those risks.
The nature of the interactions has also scrambled the quality calculation. Audio and screen recordings are great when the interactions you care about are primarily voice calls. But now that we rely so heavily on digital interactions in many different forms and across many channels, evaluating only voice risks missing significant issues. Ventana Research asserts that by 2024, a majority of customer interactions will take place using digital channels instead of traditional voice calls.
Another area of concern is customer feedback, which is not factored into the quality process often enough. It may be analyzed separately for other reasons, but putting together the two sides of the interaction, agent and customer, creates a more robust picture of agent performance, along with the customer’s view of the experience.
Today’s center has gone through many changes due to advancing technology and the pandemic. Collectively, the industry is spending a lot of energy rethinking how agents are managed, measured, incented, trained and retained. With this in mind, it makes good operational sense to revisit the quality processes in place and to explore some of the newer best practices that align better with the modern work-from-anywhere world.
When rethinking the quality process, start by incorporating all of the interactions, not just voice. For example, the portion of customer contacts captured entirely within self-service systems keeps rising. Those digital interactions with chatbots and virtual assistants also contain potential rough spots, customer frustrations, even compliance violations that might be happening at great scale because of automation. Customer interactions are often combinations of voice and digital. It is long past time to be including the digital components in standard quality measurement processes.
Additionally, incorporate direct customer feedback across all digital and voice channels into the customer service quality program. Very few organizations currently do this, but it is likely to become standard practice within short order. The rationale is compelling—standard quality evaluations aren’t designed to assess the totality of the interaction but to focus on the agent’s performance and compliance to standards. But the process should be seen as a key component of a rigorous customer experience process that balances an assessment of what the agent is doing with the customer’s assessment of that same interaction. Contact centers need to remove this blind spot as soon as possible.
One of the most exciting developments in contact center technology has been the ability to use automated evaluation and scoring to actually review 100% of the recorded interactions, not just the paltry 1% to 3%. Doing this is a win for everyone involved: every agent is subject to exactly the same criteria in the same way, removing any bias or subjectivity from the equation. This can be a significant morale boost and an element of a stronger agent retention effort. The organization benefits from the complete view by not missing any potential compliance violations or agent performance issues, and by having a deeper set of data for customer analysis. And customers will have their “voices” heard in every interaction.
As organizations revisit their quality protocols, the maturation of the process improves both the overall customer experience and agent engagement, two areas that are now seen as differentiators for many businesses. When you look at the total quality landscape, incorporating all channels and all interactions, you also position the center for further innovations like real-time coaching and guidance based on context or using in-the-moment linguistic or acoustical signals to determine agent and customer sentiment.
Quality isn’t a process that can stand still. It has to be reinvigorated to take into account the changing dynamic in communication between organizations and their customers. Fortunately, technology advancements now enable contact centers to look deeply into the contents of their calls and digital interactions without exploding costs or requiring more human input. Practitioners should explore how modern quality assurance tells a more complete story about their customer and agent experiences.