Call centre technology is evolving rapidly. With each advancement, emerging strategies promise to push quality management to the next level—delivering new value to the call centre and across the entire enterprise.

Here are five trends that are changing the way QM is delivered—and revealing new ways organisations can capitalise to create better outcomes for their customers and for the business.

1. AUTOMATING QUALITY (AUTOMATION)

Automation makes the contact centre and quality program more efficient by using technology to collect, analyse and provide insight into customer interactions. It follows an “if this, then that” approach, using processes to help evaluators identify, focus and act on the interactions that matter most.

• For example, automation takes the guesswork out of call evaluation by evaluating 100% of interactions and flagging those that need further review.

2. MULTICHANNEL QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Customers want to communicate with brands in their preferred channels—and sometimes across multiple channels—over the course of one problem resolution. While calls remain the most common way that customers contact companies, more are turning to other channels for these interactions. This means that brands must be ready and available with a multichannel strategy.

• Multichannel Quality Management is the process of capturing and evaluating customer interactions regardless of channel—call, chat, email, social media, etc. This ensures complete visibility into the quality of a contact centre’s performance.
• A common practise is to have different evaluation forms for each channel, including the standards and requirements that are applicable for each specific channel.

3. ANALYTICS-FUELED QUALITY MANAGEMENT

There is simply too much valuable customer information to be captured, processed and turned into knowledge for any company to remain competitive without modern analytics tools. That’s why modern QM is moving away from manual, transactional QM to automated, predictive, analytics-fueled QM.

• Analytics-fueled QM allows contact centres to unlock the insights buried within the enormous amount of multichannel interaction data streaming in every day—spotting trends and directing quality efforts to the areas where will have the most impact.

4. OUTCOMES-BASED QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Outcomes-based quality management looks beyond measuring a single engagement and its efficiency and instead takes into account the long-term customer experience outcome. It looks beyond agent performance and behaviors and focuses more holistically on the outcomes or goals of the business.

• In outcomes-based quality management, emphasis is placed on the conversations that agents are having with customers to help move interactions toward improved customer satisfaction, problem resolution and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

5. ENTERPRISE QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Enterprise Quality Management (EQM) extends QM beyond the contact centre by connecting it to the goals of the business. For example, if providing excellent customer experience is a key goal or mission for your organisation, everyone involved from hiring, training, supporting, processing, and delivering must understand why it matters and embrace the opportunity.

• In this case, HR would need to understand and align around these criteria in order to hire the right agents. Similarly, training would need to know what systems, scripts and processes the agents will be using so they can properly train agents.

Enterprise Quality Management creates a comprehensive program that focuses on both performance management & process improvement. Learn more about how you can use EQM in your contact centre.