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Customer quality management

Customer quality management involves all the processes undertaken by contact centers to ensure customer satisfaction. It involves training and refocusing agents to perform efficiently, and also entails enhancing agents skills needed to deliver world class customer experience.‍
Glossary >M - R

What is customer quality management?

Customer quality management involves all the processes undertaken by contact centers to ensure customer satisfaction. 

It involves training and refocusing agents to perform efficiently, and also entails enhancing agents skills needed to deliver world class customer experience.

According to a recent study, 47% of customers say they will stop buying from a company if met with a subpar customer experience and 76% will take the business elsewhere. As options galore, loyalty is diminishing and switching brands is becoming ridiculously convenient.

The foremost priority of contact center agents is to deliver high quality CX to customers. But as the trend of ‘quiet abandonment’ takes over, relying solely on customer feedback may not give you the best actionable insights. Instead, adopting a robust, automated and intelligent Quality Management (QM) procedure with a dedicated QM team is a more proactive and accurate approach.

What is Quality Management?

QM is the act of overseeing end-to-end activities and tasks that are pre-requisite to maintaining a desired level of excellence. It is an umbrella term for all individual processes that consist of continuous evaluations and improvement cycles. These include determining quality policy, framing a quality management plan, taking measures for quality control and finally, undertaking actions for efficiency improvement.

Maintaining the highest levels of quality standards requires a comprehensive approach from all quarters. The buzz phrase used across contact centers today is— Total Quality Management (TQM)— an approach that levels quality standards for all stakeholders.

What is Total Quality Management and what does it mean for your contact center?

Total quality management is a business philosophy adopted from the early 1980s automobile sector. Today, it is equally relevant to contact centers striving to deliver high CX. Here’s how contact centers incorporate TQM in their workflows.

Identify factors

TQM starts with identifying all the factors shaping CX by addressing the pain points. These include your CRM, workforce management solution, rising dead air, or high rates of supervisor escalation. It’s only from these identifiable areas of improvement can the TQM strategy and interventions be built.

Intervene and measure the changes

Are the new process interventions making any difference? Can improvements be measured and quantified? A good quality monitoring solution is data-driven and ensures accurately measurable results.

Persistence pays

TQM demands converging commitment from all stakeholders. It may appear slightly challenging to build momentum but TQM is an ongoing exercise, rife with trial and error, that pays off in the long term. 

What is a Quality Management System?

The big challenge in QM is analysing 100% of the interactions. Most contact centers monitor only about 2% of the interactions on average while a huge chunk of data is neglected.

This leads to skewed data on which the QM strategy is built— clearly not a great testimony if you’re employing a scientific QM effort!

Advanced QM using Quality Management Software is the answer to this problem.

It is an automated solution holistic approach to QM, which ensures close monitoring of all interactions and improved KPI’s like AHT, FCR, and CSAT. It automates all quality processes in a single application regardless of the data source, channel (phone, email, chat etc.), or recording platform. It automatically captures, sorts, and scores 100% of the interactions, leaving no room for chance.

What is QM automation?

QM automation is all about replacing manual processes of call center QA, designing the coaching programs, and sentiment analysis with a brilliant new technology: Contact Center AI.

Contact Center AI enables you to:

  • Carry out automated AI-driven agent evaluations of all customer interactions, scoring them without subjective bias or errors.
  • Avoid settling for a one-size-fits-all coaching program as Contact Center AI enabling  a tailor-made design and agent-oriented coaching workflows. 
  • Do an automatic sentiment analysis of all calls with transcription accuracy above 82%.

What is the Purpose of Quality Management?

There is a strong correlation between quality of customer interactions and contact center’s overall growth. Positive interactions are at the root of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, eventually driving higher revenues. An automated QM regime ensures:

  1. Understanding agent interaction – Automated QM gives you the opportunity to scan every interaction and zero-in on the problem areas.
  2. Improved customer service – Due to consistent feedback, agents are able to engage customers in positive interactions, which leads to enhanced CX.
  3. Customer retention – Positive interactions and better customer experience translate into loyalty and customer retention, ensuring steady revenue.
  4. Improve employee experience – Removing subjectivity and uncertainty of manual QM, automated QM enhances agent experience, which reflects in their customer interaction.
  5. Identifying opportunities for agent training – You can easily discern the weak links of an agent through automated QM and design coaching programs that suit their needs.
  6. Identifying key agent characteristics –Hiring decisions can be better informed by QM based on indicators of past success.

Signs of a Good and Poor QM Workflow?

QM workflows emanate from the genetics of your work culture. Here are some pointers that help evaluate your QM workflows.

  • Is customer service-driven culture at the heart of your business? Dedication to customer success, easy and cost-free on-boarding, agent satisfaction, zero hidden costs, and complete transparency demonstrate your commitment to a customer-centric culture and high likelihood of great QM workflows.
  • Do you offer fast time-to-value? In today’s intense competitive economic environment, time and efficiency are the greatest assets. Thus, rolling out QM solutions within the shortest possible time frame is a must. Clear timelines and accountability, technical support throughout the roll-out, and training for fast implementation are indicators of a fast time-to-value workflow.
  • Is your QM platform easy to navigate? For seamless adoption of the new QM platform, every level of your contact team must be able to log-in and view it. Simple UI and cross-functional insights indicate an ease of navigation of the QM platform.
  • Is your data accurate? Data quality management and accuracy lie at the heart of your QM effort. Transcription accuracy has to be above 80% and anything below that is not good enough. Transcription self-learning and tuning, AI-driven redaction, and an in-house machine learning team demonstrate a strong commitment to accuracy.

At the Cusp of Transformation

Contact center QM is an elaborate and continuous exercise to improve your service quality, agent performance, and customer interactions. Conventionally, it is marred by the lack of accuracy, miniscule, and random selection of interactions and subjectivity in scoring. But, powered with Contact Center AI, QM is eager  for a more accurate, comprehensive, and standardized practice transformation. This liberates critical human resources in the QM team to focus on tasks that matter the most for agent improvement, greater CX, and higher revenues.