4 Questions to Ask About Your Contact Center QA Solution

Quality assurance is essential for running a thriving contact center, but not all quality assurance software is the same. Many contact center systems include a built-in QA solution, but how effective is software frequently sold as an add-on bundled with the contact center system? 

What is the minimum that you need from your QA Solution?

• It must be easy to use 

Introducing a QA platform to any contact center will impact the activities of the QA team and the agent body, and the management team. A system that is easy to use and deploy is critical to delivering an effective rollout and engagement across groups. It’s beneficial to have an intuitive interface and a comprehensive set of essential features of scorecards, calibration and reporting. 

• Flexibility is non-negotiable 

If you are moving from spreadsheets to a QA solution, the system typically starts by mimicking the spreadsheet design and format. You will find that your QA needs evolve very quickly as the expanded functionality of the solution becomes apparent. Business requirements change over time. As you gain insights into service quality and agent performance, the flexibility of the QA system and particularly the scorecards become paramount. If other departments are brought into scope for quality assurance, a completely different scorecard design will likely be needed to address the specific needs of support teams or sales teams.  

• Engagement and collaboration are important 

Critical to engagement with the QA solution is how it promotes collaboration within the evaluation and review processes. Visibility and transparency are crucial to agent engagement and building trust in your QA framework and processes. Dashboards and agent access are vital functions to look for. 

• Insights that tell a story 

A quality assurance solution’s primary goal is to deliver consistent and measurable customer service across the customer service teams. However, as part of the evaluation process, there is an opportunity to gather a rich data set. If you consider that information collected on compliance, soft skills, problem resolution, and process adherence is valuable, then the reports and analytics available in a solution to visualize the data and plot trends provide an opportunity to deliver real value to the management team.  

The limitations of built-in QA software 

Many built-in QA modules are restricted to telephony, call recording or CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) platforms. They may not support all your communications channels. They often have limited scorecard creation options and rudimentary answer choices, outcomes and feedback that could be confined to one to five or only three stars.  

Basic scorecards can only capture limited data, which restricts the system's reporting capability. If you only have primary data and feedback, you will have limited insights to make agent performance and engagement decisions.  

The level of detail you can capture and the ability to report on that detail is essential for helping agent engagement and retaining agents. Limited feedback makes it harder to provide the best direction and coach agents. Poorly coached agents can have a detrimental effect on Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) ratings, affecting the company’s bottom line. Agents can become disillusioned and leave. Losing staff is expensive, and they can be hard to replace. 

These limitations can be exacerbated as your company grows. Purpose-built QA systems developed by specialist companies such as Scorebuddy are less likely to be subject to a built-in system's same restrictions and limitations.  

They include more flexibility and innovation, can be upgraded and enhanced more often and offer more options than their built-in competitors. Contact centers can get more from purpose-built QA systems that can create more complex scorecards and provide much better feedback to agents. 

4 Questions to Ask About your Call Center QA Solution 

1. How do I know my agents are compliant? Call centers are under strict compliance obligations around data, transfer, usage and storage. Is the QA solution up to date and able to manage these obligations? As consumer and data protection regulation spreads, monitoring compliance and alerting breaches is increasingly demanded. Can the QA system automatically track compliance performance and highlight failures as they happen, alerting a line manager? Can it enable you to show auditors how you monitor and deal with compliance breaches and reduce your risk profile?
   
2. Can it provide effective text analytics? Text analysis is becoming a crucial QA component that helps provide better customer service by focusing on targeted conversations. With growing customer demand for text and chat-based interaction, it is essential that the QA system review every text-based channel – such as live chat, email, voice transcripts, and customer support tickets—to provide a holistic view of the customer experience.
   
   Text analytics enables you to spot trends, understand the percentage of users with a particular issue and improve products, services and customer support. You can use text analytics to assess the customer’s perception of interaction with the contact center and identify sentiment trends for each agent and as a whole. You can locate overarching areas for improvement, agents needing training, and agents that deserve rewards.
3. Can people use it? Software is the bedrock for adequate quality assurance, but it needs to work for everyone. The QA software needs to be user friendly. You need to be able to trial the software to see how easy or difficult it is for agents to use. Some training may be required, but it should not take too much time. Day-to-day users should be able to use the software and senior management and coaches.
   
   The software should allow contact center managers to edit forms quickly and easily. It should be easy to add and remove users because this is a common requirement for contact centers, and you need to be able to make these edits quickly and simply.  Finally, how long will it take the IT team to set it up? 
   
4. Does your QA system support remote working? Remote work became the new normal for many organizations during the pandemic and is likely to remain so for many of them into the future. With 62% of contact centers planning to implement cloud technology, your QA software will need to be up to the challenge presented by the shift in working patterns and required to provide the same flexibility and user experience as in pre-pandemic times. Purpose-built QA systems are, by definition, far more flexible than built-in systems and able to integrate with a much more comprehensive range of contact center solutions. 

Get The Best From Your Contact Center 

Your organization must make the best choice for the business when deciding which contact center QA software to implement. Built-in QA software might seem like a low-cost option, but it may be more of an afterthought than a dedicated product in many instances. Purpose-built QA software from companies like Scorebuddy is designed to help you turn QA into a strategic asset, improve your customer service delivery and get the best from your contact center today and into the future. 

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