The way every organisation, its employees and customers, operate and behave is unique. When it comes to contact centre quality management, there really is no “one size fits all” approach and it’s best to steer away from cookie-cutter solutions.
Always start by looking at your customers and their needs, agent performance, and the long- and short-term goals of the business. In this article we listed ten essential tips that you can use to make the quality management process as easy as possible.
1. Success Begins with a Goal Alignment
Before you can create a successful contact centre quality management program, you need to define what “success” looks like for your organisation. That means understanding the goals of the contact centre and the goals of the larger business, and how they align.
That way you can not only achieve those goals, but do so in a way that garners support from all key stakeholders as well.
2. An Investment in Technology is an Investment in Your Business
Contact centre quality management will be exponentially easier when you empower your employees with the right tools. Remember, not all contact centre technology is created equally which is why you must be selective. Don’t just invest in a quality management technology for the sake of it – instead, write down a list of must-have features to avoid paying for functionality you don’t need. Similarly, take into consideration long-term goals to make sure there’s room for growth.
3. The Art of the Multichannel Approach
Remember that creating a high-quality customer experience doesn’t begin and end with customers who call in via traditional phone. When designing your quality management approach, show the same level of care and attention-to-detail to emails, social media, SMS and text messages to take a true multichannel approach to what you’re doing.
4. Evaluate Everything
As you work to execute your contact centre quality management strategy, understand that adjustments will need to be made to fix issues as they develop and to capitalise on opportunities for improvement. This means creating clear and effective scoring and evaluation criteria so that as you monitor things like agent performance on an ongoing basis, you have consistent insight to work from.
5. Automate, Automate, Automate
Organisational leaders will need concise, accurate, and actionable information to work from when making decisions about the direction of your call centre. They also need it as quickly as possible, which is where automation comes handy. By automating quality management reporting, you can get insight into the hands of the people who need it faster than ever – while you save time from manually gathering that same information.
6. Break down Those Silos
Contact centre quality management insights don’t benefit the larger business if it is trapped in a series of disconnected systems. Replace legacy systems to break down data silos to allow information and insight to freely flow from one department within an organisation to the next. For example, marketing teams can hugely benefit from the valuable customer insights contact centre agents have, but if there is no way to share data, it cannot be distributed cross-departments.
7. Ongoing Evaluation is Key
On a monthly basis, you should review the data from your quality management tool and evaluate the performance of your call centre to see what is working and, more importantly, what isn’t. Before making drastic changes, ensure that the sample size is large enough to get a clear understanding of where you stand and how far you have left to go.
8. The Power of Ongoing Training and Education
At a bare minimum, you should always provide both initial and ongoing training to all agents to make continuous improvement a top priority for everyone at your contact centre. Likewise, create a library for customer interaction best practices that agents can refer to if necessary.
9. Recognise Good Work Whenever Possible
Every day, agents in your call centre will be doing excellent work. Don’t be a Negative Nelly that only focuses on fixing things from bad to good, instead make a constant effort to recognise everyone’s efforts whenever you can. Positive feedback is important, and praising victories is equally so.
10. Never Lose Sight of the Customers
Finally, always make sure that all decisions are focused on those that matter most: your customers. Everything you do needs to be in service of meeting their needs and exceeding their expectations. A decision that doesn’t meet that criterion is one that isn’t worth making.
Interested in applying quality management best practices within your organisation but don’t have the right technology or tools? Talk to our contact centre and CX experts today to start your journey.
