A robust quality assurance (QA) program can reveal extraordinary benefits for any client-facing organisation, especially call or contact centres. The true impact of a QA process reaches far beyond the confines of the agents and floor manager, transcending boundaries to safeguard organisational success, and facilitate innovation through analysis of existing and historic interactions. “Every day’s a school day” as they say – why should customer interactions be any different?
Through the ongoing evaluation of agent performance and call quality, organisations secure their bottom line by identifying areas for enhancing the customer experience (CX). This, in turn, leads to heightened customer satisfaction and longer-term retention.
The realm of contact centres has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis in recent years, propelled by ground-breaking technological advancements. Once perceived as a functional necessity, call and contact centres have now emerged as the very cornerstone of CX. Notably, analytics technology has reshaped the landscape of contact centres, bestowing upon organisations that wholeheartedly embrace its potential a distinct competitive advantage. And we all love a competitive advantage don’t we! By leveraging analytics to enhance the quality of customer interactions, these adopter organisations soar above their rivals. After all, CX drives business growth directly. It’s an intangible feeling for the customer with very tangible results for the business.
We thought it important to explain some pivotal methodologies which contact and call centres can use to enhance their QA. Spoiler alert, it starts with analytics, and it’s powered by data!
Averages aren’t representative – focus on the anomalies
On average, humans have one brown eye and half a blue eye. Of course, that statistic is absolutely preposterous! Very few, if any, humans have one brown eye and half a blue eye. This represents an average of a dataset. If someone needs to know the eye colour of the human population, they should look at the modal values, not the average values.
The same is true for interaction data. To improve customer interactions, you should focus your QA efforts on the modal scenarios and anomalies. Usually, we have training for customers who are upset, customers who are in need of support, and customers who want to buy something/are being upsold to. We seldom have a training video for customers who are upset, in need of support, and are in the market for a new solution. The output of a contact centre addresses modal data findings, but the analysis of a contact centre focuses on across-the-board averages. This is a mindset shift that needs to occur.
Although random sampling and top-level aggregate data should be a part of all contact centres’ QA measures, it should only be used for top-level analysis. And top-level analysis is not what improves interaction quality. Evaluating your agents’ longest or shortest calls, for example, can be useful in identifying service outliers and opportunities to coach agents on more valuable outcomes in these situations. Additionally, looking at the modal length of calls at an agent level can help you determine if individuals are having trouble solving particular customer issues or stringing calls along for unnecessary reasons.
With speech, video and text analytics you can pinpoint the most relevant modal interactions and outliers in order to evaluate:
- Customer interactions that were centred around emotion, and how they were dealt with.
- Repeat customer interactions from the same individual, and why there are repeat problems.
- Customer interactions where agents were too fast to solve a problem and didn’t provide the required level of customer care.
Satisfaction is personal – analyse it on an individual basis
Furthering the idea of looking at the outlying interactions with repeat customers having the same problems or seeking the same support regularly, we can go one step further to solve the obstacle. We can look at the screen recording or video data together with the text and speech data, to see what exactly an agent was doing at the time of resolution, or what they were doing to disgruntle the customer, and so on so forth.
By conducting this satisfaction analysis on a case-by-case basis, we can see the true reasons why things are happening, and then take a step back to look at how we can improve quality at a higher level. Do agents need to be on a particular device when supporting a customer? Are better interactions had when the agent is standing up? Is a resolution achieved more efficiently when agents have the MS Teams call window open, showing the name of the customer, rather than another tab? These micro questions can help us solve on a macro level.
If you combine screen recordings with webcam and speech, overlaid with text transcription, you can accurately see when a point of interest occurred, and why it happened. Furthermore, you can see how it was dealt with. This agent data is just as important as customer data. Usually, the customer reaction is fuelled by the agent communication. If you can improve understanding agent-side as well as through your customer data, you can drive better results.
Increase FCR to improve CX
With most interactions now being omnichannel and self-service, First Contact Resolution (FCR) has become harder to measure. Repeat contacts negatively impact on customer satisfaction scores and disrupt centre operations while issues that should have already been resolved are revisited.
According to SQM Group, half of all inbound contact centre interactions are the result of a customer’s issue not being resolved the first time. Thus, frustration levels increase and CX is worse. Improving FCR by looking at individual datapoints in interaction analytics is vital.
As part of any QA program, floor managers and quality assessors should take steps to reduce repeat contacts, whether that’s by addressing a training issue for the wider team, supporting an individual agent, or making business/UX improvements to processes that clearly are driving negative inbound interactions.
And Liquid Voice can help with all of this! We provide Interaction Capture & Analytics as-a-Service which is where you can utilise our interaction capture and analytics solutions as a cloud application consumed under a Software-as-a-Service model. Perfect for the modern contact centre!
This allows you to quickly deploy all our applications without the need for capital investment. You simply select the application you require, and we provision these on our fully managed cloud as a predictable monthly service charge.
With this speedy deployment, you can have access to our powerful market-leading interaction analytics that enable you to inspect every conversation, event and transaction.
In essence, LV improves QA by helping you focus on FCR, which in turn improves CX, which is as easy as ABC, right!? Maybe that’s a little confusing. In short, we help you see the full picture, and hear it as well. Context is key!
Find out more about Liquid Voice’s Interaction Capture & Analytics as-a-Service!
