Four ideas to improve quality management in your contact centre

Four ideas to improve quality management in your contact center According to Bain & Co, a customer is 4x more likely to buy from a competitor if a problem is service-related, versus price or product-related. It is important for call centres to understand this because they are in the front line of service delivery. So, each time your agents interact with your customers, they have a choice regarding the outcome they deliver. They can either create a great customer experience that inspires loyalty, or deliver an experience that drives customers into the hands of the competition. It is therefore crucial that every time a customer contacts your contact centre, he or she has a great experience. You may think that s easier said than done, but there are ways to ensure that all your customer interactions are managed effectively and focus on delivering positive customer outcomes. To increase your certainty of success, you will need the right quality management process in place. And therein lies your challenge. How do you make sure EVERY interaction achieves the right outcome? How can you be sure that the right words are used and are delivered with the right tone? Listening to 1-2% of agents monthly calls simply will not give you the answer. We ve put together a list of four powerful ideas from Duncan White of management consultancy horizon2 Limited, backed by technology tips from Frank Sherlock of CallMiner, on improving quality management in your contact centre. These will help to ensure your customers are getting a great customer experience every time they interact with your agents. Idea 1aluating more calls Really understand the voice of the customer and agent by evaluating more calls There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all. Peter Drucker Austrian born US management guru, writer and seminal business thinker. Drucker s quote above highlights why treating your call quality monitoring as a simple tick box exercise is a big mistake. No matter how well you do it, if you are assessing the quality of your agent performance based on a small number of calls per month, you are creating an assessment with a huge margin of error. This won t give you the insight you need to identify how customers are really being treated. It also won t give an accurate assessment of agent performance. Not only will you be wasting your time, but you will also run the risk of losing customers. This risk can be increased if your agents feel unfairly treated by your random assessment, which, in turn, may have a further negative effect on the service your customers receive. Our Tip: Take the guesswork and margin of error out of the equation by measuring every interaction

Best-in-class interaction analytics platforms can automatically measure and score 100% of interactions, regardless of channel. This will provide you with a full picture of the quality of your agent interactions. Monitoring can not only help boost the customer experience by spotting issues early, but also gives you and your agents the confidence that their performance is being evaluated fairly. It can also prove if the right quality standards and compliance are maintained. By leaving the analysis to the technology, your supervisors will have more time to improve the customer experience by delivering targeted coaching to the agents that need it the most. Manual QA - Contact Insight Process TIME, EFFORT and RATE OF INTELLIGENCE RETURN Automated Interaction Analytics TIME, EFFORT and SPEED TO INTELLIGENCE Idea 2aluating more calls Link your agent evaluation to drivers of positive customer outcomes not just compliance Your agents and customer representatives are your front line and their actions can immediately impact any business objective or metric associated with customer interactions. Effective agent performance management is paramount not only to running a great contact centre, but also to growing your business. It is then important to ensure that your agents are delivering the right outcomes. To do that, you need to link your quality evaluation process to drivers of positive outcomes in these three steps: 1. 2. 3. Identify positive outcomes and analyse their drivers Build these drivers into your evaluation process Test the approach and improve where necessary This means expanding your quality evaluation beyond simply compliance. Ask yourself a question: What specific agent behaviour, or the way the process is managed, helps deliver better customer outcomes for my business? Is it showing empathy, politeness, or making sure that the customer issue is resolved during the very first interaction with an agent? It could be all three. And it could be complying with legislation. This will mean analysing interactions across a range of categories to ensure you focus on all the right outcomes. Our Tip: Automate your quality monitoring of all your agents interactions

This will enable you to identify quickly, and with more certainty, which agent behaviours or processes are driving better customer outcomes. You can then build-in specific categories to agents daily, personalised scorecards and identify their performance against these categories. This will make it easier for agents to focus on specific areas that need improvement or ask for coaching assistance. It will also help you keep the right balance between different outcomes that are important to your contact centre, and bring the value to the entire business. Service Sales Financial Services Frictionless Experience Confidence in Process Fair Treatment Customer Expectation Efficiency One Call Politeness Confidence in Results Informed Secure Efficiency Pleasant Experience Politeness Clear Communication Compliant Behaviour Dignity Key Metrics to Measure PERCENT SILENCE 32% CALL DURATION 3m 14s DISCLOSURE 32% POLITENESS 84 CONSENT 91% EMPATHY 86 CALL EFFICIENCY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AGENT QUALITY CLOSE RATE FCA VIOLATION PAYMENT OPTIONS Efficient 74% 17 11% 71 87% Improving, +3 Improving, +3 Weakening, -9 Weakening, -1 Weakening, -9 Weakening, -1 Idea 3aluating more calls Recognise that there are different elements that create a good interaction and they all need to be taken into account Just as there are different components of a good song the pianist, the tune and the piano - there are many components that compose a good customer interaction. Therefore, it is vital to recognise that it is not just what your agents are saying that impacts the customer experience but also the tone in which the words are delivered, how the conversation is structured, how long your customers stay on hold, etc. This is important because you can t rely on your customers to behave rationally. Many decisions that people think are unbiased and rational are in fact based on automatic and sometimes unconscious reactions driven by the situation (the conversation) and the context. For example, changing the structure of your conversations as well as the tone and the way you present or summarise choices, can have a big effect on your customer experience. But if you only manually listen to a random selection of calls, how can you tell with certainty, which way is best? Our Tip: Capture the entire context and components of a discussion for quality scoring

With this level of granularity, you will need the right quality management metrics and tools in place to ensure all agents comply. By analysing and scoring every interaction with its components, it s possible to quickly identify exactly which calls achieved a good customer outcome and why. This could include analysing and scoring words and phrases that show empathy, good listening skills, or identifying the percentage of silence on the call. You can also use sentiment analysis to objectively identify specific factors, such as: the amount of stress or frustration in a customer s or agent s voice (measures micro-tremors); how fast the individual is speaking (rate of speech); and changes in the level of stress indicated by the person s speech (such as in response to a solution provided by a customer support representative). This kind of technology will capture the entire context of a discussion for quality scoring, including the way in which an agent has dealt with the situation. By isolating the words, phrases or tone of voice, it is possible to coach agents to either use or avoid them to achieve better outcomes. You can then share this secret recipe with other agents and provide coaching to raise the game of the whole team. Idea 4aluating more calls Measure the quality along the entire customer journey - regardless of the channels used Whether your call centre s primary function is customer service, technical support, sales, or collections or whether your customer interactions are across multiple communication channels - you should always measure quality along the entire customer journey. After all, a conversation is still a conversation, whatever the channel. And, as a single issue may be communicated over more than one channel (Twitter, email, call or chat), it s vital to be able to see and understand the whole customer journey. So, by building your QM around journey analytics as opposed to just contact analytics, you can ensure the quality is measured from the outside in, and that it is consistent across all channels. Our Tip: Analyse all interactions across multiple channels in one system that provides a single point of access to data Because the best multichannel customer experiences are those that provide a seamless transition between channels, it s vital to capture and analyse customer conversations across channels to create a complete picture of the customer journey. To do this you need to analyse all interactions across multiple channels in one system that provides a single point of access to data. Many call centres have different analysis systems for different channels and this creates a fragmented view of the customer. CallMiner s Interaction Analytics technology works by converting calls into transcripts and ingesting the transcript into a database. This enables detailed analysis across any text based channel - whether it s a call transcript, web chat, SMS, email, forum, blog or survey. If your analytics software doesn t cover all the methods a customer chooses to communicate with you, vital pieces of information will not be available when an agent needs them. You also risk creating a fragmented picture of the customer journey that may leave the organisation at a serious competitive disadvantage.

In summary, stop guessing and start acting on everything your customer shares with you The quality of insight on agent performance and the timing of its availability are the two most important issues affecting your manual quality monitoring today. Being able to automatically score 100% of interactions, as well as monitor calls in real-time, helps eliminate these issues by providing necessary insights to manage any quality assurance processes more efficiently. By using this insight to combine the human and technology elements of your quality monitoring, you can transform your performance by improving your processes, eliminating inefficiencies and reducing non-compliance risk. Most importantly you will enhance the experience and outcomes delivered to your customers. About CallMiner CallMiner believes that resolution is the fundamental driver of positive customer experiences. When contact centre agents and others responsible for customer engagement are empowered by insight and feedback in near real-time, they can dramatically improve the rate of positive outcomes. With the tagline Listen to Your Customers, Improve Your Business, our goal is to help companies automate the overwhelming process of extracting insight from phone calls, chats, emails and social media to dramatically improve customer service and sales, reduce the cost of service delivery, mitigate risk, and identify areas for process and product improvement. Highlighted by multiple customer achievement awards, including seven Speech Technology implementation awards in the past five years, CallMiner customers have been recognized for unparalleled success in leveraging Eureka interaction analytics to attain their business goals and objectives. www.callminer.com. View a demo or take a test drive Calculate your potential ROI CallMiner, Eureka, Eureka!, MyEureka, EurekaLive, the CallMiner Eureka logo, the CallMiner MyEureka logo, the CallMiner EurekaLive logo, Listen to your customers. Improve your business., Feedback Is A Gift, Listen, Engagement Optimization, the Engagement Optimization logo, and EO are trademarks or registered trademarks of CallMiner, Inc. in the United States and foreign jurisdictions. Other product names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.