In the world of contact centers or call centers, quality management (QA) refers to the continuous process of monitoring and evaluating customer interactions, providing the best-in-class customer experience.
For customer-focused businesses, quality management is an indispensable part of contact centers or call centers. It ensures the predefined quality standards in customer experience are always being met.
Here, this blog post from Solvea dives into contact center quality management from its definition, benefits, importance, principles, and best practices of quality assurance.
What Is Contact Center Quality Management
Contact center quality management (QM) offers businesses an effective method to monitor, evaluate, and improve customer interactions. It helps them meet the predefined quality standards and provides the best possible customer experience.
The process of QM involves assessing agent performance (like average handle time), analyzing customer data for trends, reviewing interactions across various channels, and implementing various strategies to maintain a positive customer experience.
What Is Call Center Quality Assurance
Call center quality assurance (QA) refers to the act of ensuring your customer service is meeting or exceeding the standards of quality you have set out beforehand. This process usually involves monitoring and evaluating customer service calls, chats, and other interactions between the agents and customers.
Why Quality Management Is So Important in Contact Centers
Quality management of your call center is key to getting a prevalent brand perception in the market. It helps a business improve customer satisfaction and maintain loyalty by ensuring consistent and high standards of service quality.
The QM process ensures all customer interactions of call centers adhere to certain quality standards, and these standards must be met by every agent. Thus, all agent performance will be monitored and further trained for better service.
How Quality Management Benefits a Contact Center
A well-designed quality management system can help businesses achieve significant improvements in contact center performance. For both customers and agents, here’s how QM benefits your contact center:
- Improve customer loyalty: By monitoring agent performance, customers can benefit from timely resolution and empathetic service, which enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reduce agent attrition: For new contact centers, agent training is a repetitive and time-consuming process. When agent training becomes part of the QM system, it motivates agents to work more effectively and reduces the likelihood of attrition.
- Enhance agents’ key performance indicators: Many key performance indicators are significantly improved in the contact center, such as first contact resolution, average handle time (AHT), higher customer satisfaction scores, etc.
- Automate contact center workflows: Call center quality monitoring systems can help agents streamline workflow. Besides, extensive integrations with the system also automate tedious and repetitive tasks.
Principles of Contact Center Quality Management System
Adhering to the fundamental principles of a Quality Management System (QMS) framework is critical to the success of your contact center. What are they? The following breaks down each principle and how it positively impacts your customer service.
1.Customer-centric
Customer focus is the basic principle of QMS. It enables businesses to meet customer requirements and exceed their expectations. As a result, businesses notice increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. This also results in repeat customers and creates the opportunity to improve revenue and market share.
2.Full engagement
It’s important to create conditions where all employees are engaged in meeting the business objectives. To achieve that, all agents should be aligned on mission, vision, and processes, and receive consistent communication from management.
3.Leadership commitment
In terms of leadership, a clear vision and dedication should be established to drive the implementation of quality initiatives. Additionally, your leadership should foster a customer-focused and quality-focused culture across the entire organization.
4.Efficient process approach
Designing an efficient and aligned process approach can help you optimize the team’s output. Besides, it creates clear paths to maximize resource usage and meet desired outcomes.
5.Ongoing improvement
If you want to maintain customer loyalty in a competitive market environment, you must keep ongoing improvement in customer experience and agent performance. For that, it’s necessary to optimize the workflow of your team and enhance the execution of agents regularly.
6.Making a decision based on evidence
Evidence-based decisions can reduce and even avoid errors due to information asymmetry and rapid market changes. Utilizing real-time data and information helps you make smart decisions that enhance customer experience.
How to Build Quality Management Framework in Call Center
This part guides you through detailed information to build a quality management framework in a call center or contact center.
Step 1. Define Quality Criteria Aligned with Your Goals
The first step is to determine what “quality criteria” are best for your contact center. These criteria should align with your customer expectations and strategic objectives. To ensure they are practical and reflect real-world scenarios, the process should engage both agents and supervisors in setting these standards.
An effective way is to design scorecards to break quality into observable and objective categories. For example:
- Active listening
- Professional greetings and clear introductions
- Fast and effective issue-resolution skills
- Accurate information delivery
- Empathetic reply
Step 2. Choose the Right Call Center Quality Monitoring Solution
Another important step is to choose a call center quality monitoring software that matches your call volume, complexity, and analytics needs. Focusing on features is not enough, and ensuring seamless integration with your workflows is equally important.
There are various call center quality assurance software programs, ranging from basic call recording to advanced AI-driven features. The top-rated ones include NiCE CXone, Talkdesk, CallMiner, Observe AI, Convin, LevelAI, and more. Just choose one from them and start monitoring the quality of your call center performance.
Step 3. Standardize Quality Evaluation and Calibration
Quality assessments deliver value only when it is fair and consistent. To ensure every score reflects shared standards, not personal views, it’s crucial to offer comprehensive training for evaluators. Schedule regular calibration meetings, especially at an early stage, to align expectations, discuss score standards, and address scoring gaps.
In addition, the quality evaluation should be up to date and offer instant reference materials. This makes evaluators resolve questions quickly and optimize standards for future improvements.
Step 4. Turn Insights into an Actionable Guide
Next, make sure your team collects fast, focused, and constructive feedback from customers. Once valuable information is found, share it with agents promptly using real interaction examples and turn it into actionable guidance. Here are some tips that make these guides achieve positive changes.
- Concretize agents' behaviors: For instance, let’s have a short pause after each customer statement to show we’re actively listening.”
- Balance praise with growth opportunities: Highlight strengths first and then take actions to address areas for improvement.
- Set measurable goals: For example, strive to increase the first call resolution rate up to 80% this quarter.
Best Practices of Contact Center Quality Assurance
In a contact center, Quality Assurance (QA) offers the chance to motivate agents, monitor customer service performance, and support their development. Here, we summarize the 7 best practices of contact center quality assurance.
1.Build a Connected Learning Strategy
Creating a connected learning strategy enables contact centers to treat QA as a team effort. It makes QA analysts, coaches, and supervisors work cooperatively to set shared performance standards, identify gaps, and execute post-training reinforcement, maximizing the value of their investment in QA solutions.
2.Balance Quality Scores with Customer Satisfaction
Look for any connections between quality scores and customer satisfaction. If they align, it means the contact center is measuring what matters most to customers. If not, it may need to revisit the quality scorecard.
However, not every scenario fits this. For example, some contacts, like loan denial interaction in banking, can result in low customer satisfaction scores. In this case, balancing QA insights and customer satisfaction is equally important.
3.Use Multiple Methods to Assure Quality
Lots of contact centers default to scorecards for quality assurance. It’s also vital to include other methods, such as customer surveys, appropriate metrics, and secret shopper programs, which can reflect customer interaction quality thoroughly. What’s more, contact centers can analyze the pre- and post-interaction experience to isolate CX issues outside the agent’s control.
4.Enrich Your Quality Assurance Program
A scorecard is just a tool of a quality assurance program, but not a strategy. An effective QA program should encompass connected learning strategies, shared standards, coaching, and roles and responsibilities. So, it’s crucial to enrich or adjust the contents of the QA program regularly.
5.Include Unquantifiable Standards within Scorecard
For agent performance, some standards, like empathy and politeness, might be vague. It’s necessary to build a library of excellent customer interaction cases to bring these standards to life, clarify performance expectations, and strengthen agent confidence. Besides, developing a standard repository that clarifies each criterion in plain language provides valuable resources for everyone in the contact center.
How to Improve Call Center Quality Assurance
To improve quality assurance in a call center, you can try the following methods.
Method 1. Have a Clear Quality Assurance Plan
A clear call center QA strategy means that you need to know what goals you want to achieve and how you’re going to get there. It will be difficult to make progress without a clear plan. Once you confirm goals, you need to take measures to hit them. Answering these questions can help you build a clear QA plan:
- What KPIs should be set to hit the QA scores?
- Which tools will help you make improvements faster?
- Who needs to be involved in your team?
- How to keep your team on track using a monitoring process?
Method 2. Monitor All Customer Support Channels
Monitoring all customer support channels can improve quality scores thoroughly because most customers expect omnichannel support. In addition to phone calls, these channels include emails, live chat, and social media. By monitoring all channels, your contact center can identify problems and correct them quickly.
Method 3. Assign QA Responsibilities to Each Team Member
Crucially, assign clear quality assurance ownership to each team member. This ensures the entire QA process is followed by the team. By offering the opportunity to each member, it motivates growth and ownership across your team.
Method 4. Share Real-time Analytics with Your Team
It’s an effective way to share real-time analytics with your team to keep each member on track. By doing so, your team can find problems early and solve them quickly. What’s more, more eyes on the same data can reduce the chances that an issue goes unsolved.
Method 5. Invest in the Right Call Center Quality Assurance Software
An appropriate call center quality assurance software can help you automate the QA process and free up your team from repetitive tasks. When choosing the software, you should look for a tool that includes features such as call recording, call monitoring, analytics, and performance reporting.
Contact Center Quality Management FAQ
1.How to pass QA in a call center?
You can pass QA in a call center when meeting specific performance standards and consistently delivering positive customer experiences. This usually includes adhering to compliance guidelines, following call scripts, and resolving issues effectively.
2.What is the QA score in a call center?
In a call center, the QA score refers to a metric that reflects an agent’s performance based on quality standards. It can be evaluated from various aspects, such as response accuracy, empathy, problem resolution, and script adherence.
3.What are the 4 pillars of quality management?
The 4 pillars of quality management usually refer to Quality Planning, Quality Control, Quality Assurance, and Quality Improvement.
4.What’s the difference between quality management and quality assurance?
In the world of call centers, quality management means maintaining the entire quality control in a certain range, while quality assurance focuses on how your agents achieve the standards of customer experience.
