3 Best Practices to Eliminate Manual Quality Processes

Lauren Maschio of NICE shares her contact centre quality assurance (QA) guidelines to remove manual quality processes.

1. Identify the Most Manual Process in Your Quality Programme

Start automating the tasks that will give you the greatest return. Examine where you’re spending most of your time and make sure your quality management tool can support this type of automation.

For many companies, assigning calls for evaluation is the most time-intensive and tedious task – and it’s also prone to errors. Call centre quality management programmes often use Microsoft Excel or SharePoint for tracking interaction work assignments. These tools have some obvious challenges that are only compounded because they do not scale well as the number of interactions and evaluators in your quality programme increases.

Evaluation challenges reported by quality leaders in our Quality Hot Topics video series include:

• Spreadsheets crashing
• Version control challenges
• Documents that can only be edited by one person at a time
• Human error
• Technical challenges

Score disputing is another time-intensive manual task commonly reported by quality leaders. Every company has a different way of settling disagreements over an assigned evaluation score, but the dispute process often requires that the interaction be reviewed again by the evaluator or a third party. No matter the procedure, it’s often time consuming and handled verbally or via email in a manner that can’t be easily tracked or measured, leaving call centres without insight into any long-term plan to reduce the number of disputes made.

In the past, quality management automation solutions failed to support the score dispute process, but today’s modern solutions remove the ambiguity and man-hours involved. Streamline the entire process by identifying solutions with customisable quality workflows that enable you to automate your company’s unique score dispute process.

With the process automated, you can identify score dispute trends, such as the agents or supervisors involved in disputes, or review disputes tied to a single evaluator, enabling your quality team to uncover areas of opportunity more quickly.

Manual processes and the programmes needed to support them plague organisations that rely on them. By identifying the most manual activities, you can prioritise tasks for automation that will have the biggest effect on your business.

2. Configure Interactions to Be Evaluated Based on Business Objectives

Identify interactions for evaluation based on your business rules or the specific behaviours you want to monitor, instead of on manual random sampling that can miss key insights.

Quality solutions that use speech analytics or some type of metadata, such as if a transfer occurs, to help steer quality evaluators on where to focus their attention will have the greatest impact on the business.

When automating evaluations, take into account the evaluators themselves and make sure you assign the right number of calls. Factors to consider include:

• The number of interactions
• The channels best suited to each evaluator
• The frequency at which you’ll send evaluators interactions

Consider each of these aspects to ensure that evaluators can work effectively and maintain the tempo needed to meet quality goals.

By automating the evaluation process and providing the right interaction to the right evaluator at the right time, you’ll achieve a more effective, organisationally driven quality process that’s aligned with your business goals. You’ll also save time that evaluators would otherwise have spent on tasks such as opening files and searching for their next interaction to evaluate, which increases their productivity

3. Evaluate Workflow Capabilities That Improve Automation

Pre-configured quality workflows can give your quality team a jump-start on automating many manual tasks. These may cover many standard quality processes you already have in place such as calibration, self-evaluation or a dispute process.

Workflows can be customised to align with the processes your contact centre already has in place. Many quality solutions offer workflow customisation, but their development typically requires an extensive consulting engagement that can be expensive. A visual workflow builder is the fastest way to customise quality processes, and its efficiency and ease of use makes implementing automation simple and straightforward.

By adopting these best practices, your contact centre can better leverage its employees, gain a comprehensive view of the quality process and tie quality to business goals and processes.