How Does Your Contact Centre Quality Programme Compare to the Competition?
Lauren Maschio, Product Marketing Portfolio Manager, Enterprise WFO
When 15-year-old Cori “Coco” in the 2019 Wimbledon, she didn’t just become the youngest player to win in 28 years. She also beat a tennis star she had idolised her whole life.
“I never thought this would happen,” she said in an interview with USA Today following her win. “I’m literally living my dream right now.”
For Gauff and many other athletes trying to compete at the highest level, an understanding of how they compare to the most advanced players in the sport gives them a new level to reach for and insight into how they need to improve.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for [Williams],” she added.
Just as Gauff improved her tennis skills by grading her performance against Williams, quality managers who benchmark their programmes against industry competitors will be better able to:
– Identify best practices used by companies in the same industry
– Determine how they can improve
– See industry-wide trends that might otherwise go missed
– Provide greater value in the contact centre
Benchmarking drives conversations around critical quality management activities like business impact and procedures and empowers informed discussions about quality management strategy. It provides a baseline for an organisation’s maturity, insight into the challenges it will need to navigate to achieve its goals and helps identify the best practices that other organizations use to reach similar outcomes.
To get started benchmarking your quality management program, you’ll need to source data on how other quality programs currently operate, then evaluate how your organisation is performing relative to other companies and identify where you want to go.
The Impact of Quality Management in the Contact Centre
Across the board, leaders view quality processes as disconnected. Many contact centres use different tools or evaluation procedures for different channels. They often lack a formal coaching program or secure agent feedback through random selection only. Likewise, coaching, agent feedback, results sharing and other activities aren’t connected in a meaningful way. Contact centre leaders’ perception of the power of quality management has suffered as a result. According to ICMI:
– Just 10% of contact centre leaders said that business processes have been changed, altered or discontinued based on quality results.
– Only 9% of contact centre leaders said agents feel like the quality program can help them be successful.
– Just 7% of contact centre leaders said quality results are used when considering business changes.
Organisations that take a holistic, connected approach find high levels of success by linking quality processes together, applying them broadly across all channels and tying them to executive goals. The ICMI report found that the most successful contact centres among them share common characteristics:
– They evaluate channels at a higher rate.
– They invest in speech and text analytics and plan to invest in predictive analytics.
– Their coaching programs provide both positive reinforcement and improvement opportunities.
– They include agents in the quality process and focus reviews on successful behaviours.
By investing in these areas, quality managers create a cohesive program that puts information in the hands of leaders and agents alike. This changes leadership’s perception of quality’s value and opens up new avenues for quality management to play a more strategic role in the organisation.
Manual Processes Continue to Pose a Challenge
While quality programs face a number of challenges, the most prevalent will likely come as no surprise to quality managers: 42% of contact centre leaders say highly manual processes plague their organisations. These are activities that are “more expensive, less efficient, more error-prone and less effective,” according to the report. They include:
– Distributing interactions for evaluation
– Manually evaluating calls
– Scheduling and delivering coaching
– Scoring
– Calibrating
– Reporting
These activities are considered manual tasks because they consume large amounts of employees’ time and are typically repetitive. Most contact centres have started using analytics to eliminate the time and human error associated with them. According to ICMI:
– Only 29% of contact centres were using desktop analytics in 2017. In 2019, 61% are using, updating or replacing, or adding desktop analytics.
– In 2017, just 23% were using speech analytics. In 2019, 61% are using, updating or replacing or adding speech analytics.
– Few organisations were investing in text analytics in 2017. Today, 51% are currently using, updating or replacing or adding text analytics.
Quality is evolving, both in how it’s executed and in how it empowers contact centres to achieve their goals. It has created an opportunity for quality managers to cultivate high-impact programs through investments in analytics and a shift to a holistic approach.
Additional Information
Lauren Maschio is Product Marketing Portfolio Manager, Enterprise WFO at NICE
To learn more about the state of quality management in today’s contact centres and modern solutions to the challenges quality managers face, download the ICMI report, “The Impact and Influence of Analytics and Quality Management on Contact Centre Performance,” by Clicking Here
NICE is a leading global enterprise software provider that enables organsations to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance and fight financial crime.
Our mission is to help our customers build and strengthen their reputation by uncovering customer insight, predicting human intent and taking the right action to improve their business.
We do this by capturing large amounts of structured and unstructured data (customer interactions, and transactions) from multiple sources. We then apply best-in-class analytics to this data to provide real-time insight and uncover intent.
Our solutions allow organisations to operationalise this insight and embed it within their daily business processes, empowering them to provide better service, motivate and engage employees and identify potential risk to the enterprise.
