15 tips to improve quality monitoring

Looking to improve your quality monitoring as well as other forms of interactions, like email, web chat and social media?

Our panel of experts share their top tips.

1.  Don’t confuse compliance with quality

Ensure every element of the scoring card is aimed at improving customer satisfaction. Don’t measure compliance within quality.
The future is having a score from customers rather than traditional monitoring.   Sheeraz Singh

2. Coffee morning reviews

Here is an idea which has been used in my centre.   We have a programme which we call a ‘coffee morning review’.

It’s a weekly programme, attended by an operation manager, a quality assurance officer, a team leader, a supervisor and five agents.

We do ‘hearing tapping’/ listening to a recording (any subject; information, inquiry, or complaint).

Then we discuss the agent’s recording based on the procedure. It works almost 100% of the time.

An agent who was invited to the programme wouldn’t be invited again the next week because he/she has been progressing well in giving great service (quality and service attitude).

3. Focus on the good and the bad calls

Intentionally, we choose ten recordings; 5 are good, the rest are ‘non-conforming’ conversations. The 10 recordings are taken from the five agents’/ participants’ conversations.

In order to make sure that the programme is not like a ‘judgement session’, we build a fresh and fun environment as well – like telling some jokes and sharing some prank calls from customers.   Feri Susanto

4. Monitor across multiple channels

If you want to improve your quality monitoring you need to take a more holistic approach. Rather than looking at the quality of telephone calls, email, live chat sessions, etc. in isolation, you need to listen to them in the round to really hear the true ‘voice of the customer’. Today, a customer interaction will typically traverse two or more communication channels before it is completed, so if you want to understand the quality of the customer entire experience you need monitor them in this way.

5.  Augment quality monitoring with automated surveys

In addition, using automated surveys at the point of the customer experience is a great way to improve multi-channel quality monitoring, by courting, capturing, interpreting and acting upon feedback in real time. The impact of such an approach has been proven to increase satisfaction scores by an average of 27%. This level of customer engagement moves the concept of post-call IVR to the next generation, by inviting customers to provide comment (whether structured or unstructured) regarding their service experience, via their preferred channel.

Craig Pumfrey is the Director of Marketing & Communications at NICE Systems EMEA (www.nice.com)

6. Involve agents in the auditing process

Let agents listen to their own calls and other calls too.  Help them create their own judgement.  Teaching them to fish is better than fishing and giving them on a platter. Coaching feedback also works wonders.  Dr. Nahela Bernal

7. Be objective

First, objectivity! An objective set of quality standards that can be applied to all call types; one that is both flexible to customer needs but also objective so assessor bias doesn’t affect the outcome. Many organisations have standards but don’t know how to create flexible, objective ones! (It’s almost a contradiction in terms, unless you know how.)

Everyone involved in the production of quality has to understand intimately (through training) how to apply the objective standards. An overview isn’t good enough.

8.  Ensure that coaching is the outcome of assessing

Ensure that coaching is the actualised outcome of assessing. Too many organisations put so much effort into assessing (e.g. building an unwieldy structure) they take away the time to coach. Without coaching, assessment is a waste of time and the system serves to disengage people. Glenn Bracey

9. Abandon the 1-2% random selection process

With traditional quality monitoring,  time is wasted listening to calls which are ultimately average, making decisions on statistically insignificant data.

The real value comes from the really good and really bad customer calls, allowing us to get to the root cause of good and bad customer service, the real purpose of quality monitoring. Technology has caught up and now we can analyse 100% of all calls using speech analytics, identifying good and bad calls, which does 3 things:

1. Removes the statistical bias of very small sample sets
2. Allows you to focus your quality teams on the value-add calls not the average ones
3. Targets your coaching and training on the agents who need most support and will drive the biggest change

David Evans is a Consultant – Workforce Optimisation at Business Systems (www.businesssystemsuk.co.uk)

10. Use quality monitoring in other departments

Quality monitoring statistics can be used for many other purposes and by many departments.

• The Training Department can use quality reports to determine the success of induction training and review ongoing training development needs
• Human Resources can review quality reports of new agents to determine the success of their recruitment process, ensure they are employing the right people for job and evaluating an agent’s suitability once the probation period comes to an end
• Marketing and Sales can utilise customer feedback providing valuable customer opinions and thoughts.

Brent Bischoff is a Solutions Consultant at Business Systems (www.businesssystemsuk.co.uk)

11. Cross-site calibration

Having cross-site calibration of calls is one of the most effective ways to monitor call quality. This type of interaction increases the engagement of your sites and also lets you understand people’s views and understandings of what good sounds like (and bad for that matter).

It is also a great way of agreeing consistency to ensure that everyone is one the same page! Kevin Dornan

12. Automate your QA systems

The days of collating quality data by hand are far from over. Infinity estimates that around two-thirds of contact centres prepare agent scorecards on spreadsheets – while a significant percentage still use paper-based systems. These can be wasteful practices not only in terms of time but also cost.

By switching from a paper to an automated Quality Assurance system, one of our clients cut the time taken to score a call from an average of 36 minutes to just 18 minutes.

Bernie Kane is a Director at Infinity CCS (www.infinityccs.com)

13. Improve calibrations

Get advisors, team managers and operations managers to take part in calibrations to hear the good, bad and ugly. Sometimes we can become detached from the calls and the customers. Nicola Hamilton

14. Consider on-call monitoring

I would suggest that the two key attributes of any call/contact centre agent is a) knowing what to say and, even more importantly, b) knowing how to say it in order to instantaneously win the confidence and respect of the person calling or being called.

Monitoring every agent all of the time, on a one-to-one basis, by a real person, is simply out of the question. But technology now exists that can effectively do this, in an extremely cost-effective way.

The adoption of live, on-the-call, monitoring via specific phrase recognition and stress analysis – advising agents, during the actual call that they are speaking too loudly or too softly, too fast or too slow, to stop interrupting the caller, or reminding them to let the customer speak and, most importantly, detecting when either the customer/caller or the agent is becoming stressed, are all key attributes in achieving these two key deliverables.

Graham Chick is Chief Executive of GemaTech UK Ltd (www.gematech.com)

15. Ensure the system is fair

It’s not just the tools and methodology you use which are important; is the scoring system you use fair? Does it give the agent a chance to achieve a reasonable score? Is the call selection process impartial?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, chances are you’ll be targeting the same agents again and again. And what actually is the purpose of your monitoring? Before starting, ensure you’re clear what you want to get out of the process and that you are not just monitoring for the sake of it.

Cleo Thomas is Training & Quality Manager at mplcontact (www.mplcontact.co.uk)

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