How Can Call Centre Quality Management Predict Brand Success?

Dick Bourke discusses how quality management solutions can increase brand value, promote consistency and improve transparency. 

We can all agree that brand recognition and success are elusive and hard to achieve. But there are ways of increasing brand value that are so simple that after businesses find them, they wonder why they never put them in place before.

Having a better-quality assurance programme is something that lots of companies overlook – until they need a way to ramp up business and boost the company’s reputation. A new quality assurance programme can have a dramatic impact on a brand image and eventually help a firm to grow and outpace its competitors.

The real value of a quality assurance improvement programme is knowing exactly what agents are saying to customers – and what customers are experiencing as they interact with your customer service team.

This insight allows a business to meet its customers where they are, and anticipate their needs. And that in turn can lead to better operational models, a reputation for excellence, and increased revenue.

A recent article entitled ‘Do You Know the Best Way to Measure Call Center Quality’ outlines the metrics used to understand how well your agents are meeting the challenges of customer satisfaction in the call centre, ultimately leading to brand success.

Promoting Consistency

One way that more effective QA works is to create a consistent and universal process – and that can be a big deal for a business.

If you’ve ever heard a customer complaining about how they were treated or that the agent was unable to solve their problem, you know how frustrating that can seem. An overall departmental QA process helps to make sure that the firm’s representatives and agents are held to a universal standard.

Beyond that, the most modern and sophisticated QA programmes give businesses a whole lot of critical business intelligence to work from as they move forward.

Transparency Is Key

One guiding principle that is integral to the process of putting a more robust quality assurance programme in place is achieving transparency. You cannot see what your customers are experiencing until you ask them, or find some way to collect and aggregate the data that will tell you what customers encounter when they contact the business.

The best cutting-edge QA software solutions allow companies to customise their dashboards to see exactly what they need to see when contemplating customer interactions.

Some call centre quality management solutions can drive increased productivity and outstanding customer experience. These solutions may also provide the ability to create your own scorecards and access these very important indicators under one roof.

That’s part of how today’s businesses are improving their brands and expanding their markets – they’re using the power of raw data to accelerate operational processes that are already working well but that need to scale up to really help the business reach the next level.

Think of it this way – a company can have a great product or service, and an existing customer base, but unless they do a deep dive and dig into customer experience data, they can find themselves behind the eight-ball when it comes to competing in a fast-paced and often online market.

Many of the companies that are dominant in their markets are those that have invested in software that will provide the customer experience data and reporting that they need to make future decisions.

A customer insights-driven business, one where data and analytics are applied at every opportunity to differentiate its products and increase customer satisfaction will leap over the competition if these insights are actionable.

The Discount Airline Game

Take Ryanair, a company with a reputation for getting people where they need to go around Europe, cheaply and efficiently.

Yes, this company has had high growth numbers of passengers for quite a while, but positive brand reputation didn’t really come to the company until relatively recently as they transitioned from a pure low-cost strategy to combining low cost with enhanced customer service.

In a Marketing Week story in May of 2016, Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary talks about how the company finally plugged in more customer service programmes and saw business take off in a big way.

O’Leary said that prior to the past couple of years, Ryanair was a company that, in his own words, “hated customers”. However, O’Leary pointed to a strange kind of juxtaposition that was a clue for Ryanair as it paved the way for future growth:

“We have been the victims for about 25 years now of various consumer surveys saying we are the most hated company, airline, god-knows-what…” O’Leary said. “Yet, remarkably, if you look at the growth in customers, the public doesn’t seem to be able to get enough of what we do.”

Chief Marketing Executive Kenny Jacobs also told Marketing Week that the company aims for the brand appeal like well-established firms in other industries.

So, even though it seemed like Ryanair already had everything, leaders at the top were noticing that something was missing.

The ‘customer journey’ in the airline business is complex and involves many stages from enquiry, booking, travelling and post-flight. As one of a range of initiatives Ryanair looked closely at their customer service delivery through their three call centres.

When the company developed customer-friendly policies and invested in customer service tools, such as Scorebuddy’s call centre quality management solution, people like O’Leary saw big things happen, in terms of the improvement in company reputation leading to increased growth.

All of this underscores the need for real quality assurance processes underneath even the best customer service and support systems. Businesses need a way to craft and re-craft processes to suit their customers – and that’s where quality assurance and customer service software comes in.

Find out more by visiting scorebuddyqa.com