Contact Centre quality management is crucial for maximising contact centre agents’ performance, and even more so now many are working remotely. In this article we take a look at six ways to improve your contact centre quality management and why this is so important.
Happy Agents equal Happy Customers
Investing time in your agents is one of the best ways to drive up the employee experience and in turn deliver a great customer experience too. Investing in your agents is crucial to this, and using the right Workforce Management technology should be a given, so that call centre managers can motivate and support their agents to do a good job and feel part of the team.
Contact centre managers are now having to juggle even more balls than ever due to remote working and higher than normal call volumes. As a result quality management suffers and gets moved down the to do list. When quality management starts to get pushed down the priority list, the knock on is that it can start to effect agents’ motivation and performance. But, this doesn’t need to be the case. As many contact centres are now in the process of adapting and finding ways to make remote working a more permanent solution, with this in mind, now is an ideal time to ensure you have a well-oiled quality management process in place.
1. Re-balance the load where necessary
Countless unforeseen events in any given week can cause managers to be pulled in too many different directions resulting in a pause on quality management. Having the right analytics tools in place to be able to forecast fluctuations such as seasonal peaks and flows can help, but also consider introducing performance-based models. For example, can top-performing agents who need less support actually step in and help to support lower performers.
2. Invest in the power of speech analytics
Adding speech analytics technology greatly reduces the timely task of manually looking for the right customer interactions to review or use for training. Speech Analytics provides intelligent insights into the customer sentiment and can provide very precise analysis of words, phrases, categories and themes in conversations, happening daily in the contact centre. These interactions are also more likely to contain important coaching opportunities for your agents.
3. Use live monitoring and screen recording
Back in the office, a significant portion of quality management time involved managers sitting alongside agents to observe and support them in live interactions with customers. This can still be achieved remotely by using live monitoring and screen recording. Supervisors can observe how agents navigate their available tools and multiple monitors during phone and digital customer interactions and offer more insightful coaching.
4. Give quality feedback
Of course it isn’t as easy to give live feedback and coaching when you aren’t physically with your agents. Providing feedback after the event and then asking the agent to try and recall the call and remember what happened can be tricky. This is where a quality management platform that has the ability to highlight specific moments in calls and tag agents so they can listen to the interaction themselves alongside the supervisor comments can provide a much more effective way to deliver feedback.
5. Collaborate face to face to keep agents motivated
A temptation when agents are remote is to forsake the typical one-on-one conversations and interactions in favour of sending an email. While this may work for some, it’s not a great long term strategy. Good collaboration tools should be a lifeline for any contact centre who wants to look after employee wellbeing. Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams can help increase staff performance and morale especially when working in different physical locations.
6. Free up time running reports
Now is an ideal time to get your quality management reporting in order. Having the right analytics tools in place that reduce time spent creating reports can significantly help to free up time that can then be used to train, develop and mentor agents when they really need it. Also consider the types of reports you are running, for example, look at reports of how agents are trending on the behaviours expected of them. This is a reflection both on their ability to improve and the quality of the coaching and training they receive.
