Everybody wants to provide quality customer interactions. Unless you’ve got really deep pockets and unlimited resources from which to draw, you won’t be able to achieve performance management nirvana in the blink of an eye. But if you have a road map and the patience and determination to follow it, you can steadily progress from that basic quality starting point along a continuum to insightful, balanced multimedia optimization.
Single View (Internal), Calls Only. The supporting technology has been around for a long time, and a decent system will offer flexible scorecards, calibration and trending at a reasonable price. VoIP offers additional options for capturing calls, and many vendors bundle QM with their other offerings. Beyond their value in assessments, call recordings can be used to support corporate liability and compliance initiatives, or play a role in employee training and coaching.
Expand Media. Text-based contacts – e.g., email, SMS/text, web chat – are obvious candidates for expansion in your program. These channels typically have the ability to capture and store interactions. Core QM tools can be used for review, scoring, calibrating, reporting, etc. and offer scorecard options by media.
Expand View (External). A rigorous internal view of performance is all well and good, but if customers don’t share your sensibilities, you won’t hit the mark. Short, post-interaction surveys using IVR, email, and web-based solutions can establish a direct connection between the customer feedback and the specific contact and agent. Core contact center technology vendors and performance suite vendors provide premise-based applications. Hosted solution providers offer a range of simple, inexpensive offerings.
Expand Insights. Once measurement systems are in place to address the different media and both internal and external perspectives, it’s worth taking a step back to consider what more these resources might convey when taken together or when explored and analyzed more deeply. Tool sets for expanded insights used to be associated with costly implementations and heavy demands for support resources. Slimmed-down versions have enabled more centers to avail themselves of these insights and effect meaningful change in their organizations – as long as they are willing to commit some trained staff to the task.
As you line up your quality assessment tools, make sure that the individual components integrate with one another, or look for a suite of tools or services. Ideally, you’ll want to consolidate data on all facets of quality into a single platform for analysis and reporting.
Read Today’s Tools Take QA to the Next Level for further insights.