Customers look for quality
In the early days of contact centres they were mostly viewed as a necessary evil. The challenge was to provide customer service at the lowest possible cost. Companies aggressively pursued cost reduction.
With the singular focus on minimising service cost, many companies failed to realise that customer service was becoming a major differentiator and began experiencing increasing customer churn along with the loss of long-term revenue potential.
Today, the focus is much more firmly on quality. Not only have customer expectations of service quality increased, but customers have shown an increasing willingness to switch brands. Customers look for quality, and if they don’t find it, they don’t hesitate to take their business to competitors that offer equivalent products and a desired level of customer service.
Getting the quality equation right is not simply a matter of training. Obviously, where theory is taught in call centre training courses, the theory has to be translated into practice, for tangible results to be achieved. Sometimes, agents and supervisors have difficulty in adapting and applying the skills developed on training courses into practical everyday situations.
It is important to take a practical approach to developing communication and sales skills - an approach that is designed to produce tangible results and a measurable return on investment.
Call centres that have a sharp focus on quality assurance, need to implement an intelligent approach to training, but they also need to understand how call monitoring can best work for them.
The process of monitoring calls in itself, is not enough to produce happier customers. The feedback from monitoring needs to happen in a timely manner and be perceived by the agent receiving the feedback as relevant, unbiased, practical and objective.
Most call centres today record conversations conducted by their Customer Service Representatives and their clients to ensure that company policy is adhered to, and that proper service is provided to clients.
In the interest of quality, thousands of calls are recorded daily, but only a fraction of these calls are reviewed by the call centre managers, thereby overlooking many calls that might contain important data, or more important, unsatisfied customers.
Managers simply do not have sufficient time to review all calls, so they end up taking "educated guesses" as to which call should be listened to. However, there is now technology in use in some call centres that provides a better way to handle this situation.
With something called, emotional profiling of conversations, the technology analyses the "atmosphere" of each and every call in a fully automated process and provides training managers or supervisors with a quality assurance priority system. With the appropriate technology in place, there is no need for managers to listen to all calls. They mine down only to the "interesting" ones.
The technology uses a conversation logging system, designed to keep track and record only problematic calls, thereby saving time and storage space.
Apart from call monitoring, agent evaluation, is critically important. For a call centre that is truly dedicated to quality, agent evaluation must include:
- Flexibility in generating evaluation forms and changing them over time
- Customised scoring forms
- Intuitive graphical scoring techniques
- The ability to reconstruct the total customer experience
- Real-time evaluation
- Tools to measure the effectiveness sales and service
Where managers are serious about quality assurance, quality permeates the organisation and guides them in setting all call centre goals. Evaluation forms are developed with clients to ensure that they are rating their agents on all pertinent criteria during customer contact.
Excellence in quality today includes the ability to:
- Monitor and save any selection of calls,
- Review both the voice and data of each call,
- Set business rules for call recording,
- Build customised quality assurance forms within the system and evaluate calls online while monitoring is in progress,
- Graph and report data to identify trends or opportunities for improvement.
