In the first of a series of features looking at
different types of technology, Robert Wint investigates the key components of
quality monitoring, how the technology works, and what it can deliver.

What you should look for when purchasing quality monitoring

• Automatic delivery of calls - leaves supervisors free to focus on improving agent
  performance

• Contact management -
  makes it much easier to access recorded
  interactions that have been tagged and stored

• Contact
  recording - lets organisations capture, manage and learn
  from voice, web, chat and e-mail interactions

• Data
  recording - captures agent desktop activities to illustrate
  exactly which applications agents are using during an interaction

• Performance
  evaluation - customised forms, reports and graphs that
  facilitate the scoring of an agent’s performance

• KPI
  scorecards - role-appropriate scorecards that display actual
  predefined employee performance metrics

• Actionable
  learning - monitors quality monitoring scores and delivers targeted
  training to agents with specific skills requirements

• Speech
  analytics - analyses customer interactions and identifies
  each call that meets specific business criteria

• Comprehensive
  reporting - delivers intelligence to help contact centre
  supervisors and their managers make better informed decisions

(related (keywords: technology, headset, it, computer)

What does quality monitoring technology actually do?

Quality monitoring is the process
of listening to and observing a contact centre agent’s phone calls and other
interactions, and then scoring those conversations against an agreed definition
of what constitutes a great customer interaction.

Quality monitoring tools exist to
increase the efficiency of these evaluation processes, reducing the amount of
administrative effort involved in recording useful agent conversations, storing
the recordings and scoring them for quality. The software helps to formalise
and add substance to the definition of quality transactions, and also improve
the workflow of key performance indicator (KPI) scorecards.

As quality monitoring develops so
new capabilities such as monitoring the voice of the customer through feedback
techniques, tracking workflow and root-cause analysis, and speech analytics are
starting to deliver even greater capabilities.

How does quality monitoring technology work?

Traditional quality monitoring
involves reviewing just a random sample of calls, assessing them for general
quality standards, and then generating monthly reports based on average quality
scores. Most companies only manage to evaluate less than one per cent of their
calls this way.

However, some quality monitoring
solutions can now combine call recording functionality with performance
management, speech analytics and actionable learning capabilities. A single
user interface allows supervisors to manage all aspects of quality monitoring,
from the selection of recordings through call scoring, tracking and analysis
against KPIs, and the automatic assigning and delivery of e-learning to agent
desktops to address skills gaps.

Instead of simply scoring a small
sample of selected evaluated calls, the more advanced QM implementations are
now automatically prioritising calls based on key measures such as first contact
resolution, successful or failed up-sell attempts, repeat or unresolved calls,
even calls with poor or high customer satisfaction, so that limited QM resources
can be focused on those areas where they are most needed.

In addition, contact centre
management can drive best practice by turning the most successful customer
interaction recordings in to e-learning content for other agents.

What kind of results can quality monitoring technology deliver?

Quality monitoring works best when
it achieves a tangible link between quality measures and business results. This
means measuring those aspects of an agent’s behaviour that are likely to have the
most positive outcomes, such as customers spending more (and more often), using
the optimum channels for your business, becoming more loyal and recommending
your products and services.

So before even getting to the
technology, contact centres need to get some buy-in as to which outcomes will
make the most difference for their business. They then need to build the
evaluation forms that will let them score agent performance in ways that
actually matter.

The results can be impressive.
I’ve found that effective quality monitoring programmes invariably result in
sales conversion rates going up by at least 5% although there have been
customers who have succeeded in doubling this performance.

The process of managing agents and
using quality monitoring to feedback performance improvement can also have an
impact on first time call resolution. Done right, it’s possible to see improvements
of up to 10%, along with overall agent productivity improvements of up to 15%.

Contact centres that implement a
technology-driven quality recording approach also usually see 50% improvement
in team leader efficiency. Simply through not having to manually pick calls
from tapes or spend time on side-by-side listening, team leaders free up a huge
amount of time that they can spend on proper coaching, which in turn helps
drive other improvements in the calls taken or made.

With potential results like this,
it’s easy to see why organisations quickly gain a return on their investment in
quality monitoring technology.

What other sorts of benefits can you expect with quality monitoring?

Quality monitoring is all about
process improvement, and in addition to the initial gains organisations achieve
through deployment, there’s an ongoing opportunity to secure continual incremental
improvements. It’s essential for organisations to stick with their quality
monitoring programmes, as once you’ve successfully baselined activities the
gains keep on coming.

As call quality scores rise, you will invariably see a
commensurate improvement in key business measures, from sales conversion rates
through to improved customer retention. In turn, agents seem to benefit from
working in a more efficiently managed environment, resulting in reduced
attrition and falls in sickness and unscheduled absence.

Quality monitoring can also yield
important insights in to activities that take place outside of the contact
centre. Speech analytics techniques can be used to support sales by uncovering
data relating to current campaigns or by identifying customer churn triggers,
while the early capture of escalated calls to supervisors can alert the
business to possible customer service issues.

Another key opportunity comes
through the use of quality monitoring to highlight just why calls are coming in
to the contact centre. If, for example a large number of calls relate to
accounts issues, then effective root cause analysis can spot a repeat pattern
and alert contact centre management who can then escalate the issue to the billing
department.

It’s
clear that quality monitoring, and its implementation within a wider workforce
optimisation infrastructure, has the potential to be the most powerful tool
that a contact centre can ever buy.

Robert Wint is EMEA marketing
director at Verint Systems

Tel: +44 1932 839 500

Website: www.verint.com