Quality management has always been essential to maintaining service quality in contact centers, ensuring that every interaction meets your standards (and your customers’ expectations) and that your agents are performing at their best.
But with the rapid growth of communication channels going way beyond phone calls and a massive increase in overall interaction volumes, managing quality has become more challenging than ever.
To keep up with this demand and continue delivering exceptional service, it's time to consider automating your quality management process. Thankfully, the rise in demand coincides with a massive shift in contact center tech, specifically the emergence of automated quality management solutions.
But do we need artificial intelligence, automation, and all these fancy other tools to keep up with the modern demands of a contact center? Let’s dive in and see what’s really going on.
While almost everyone is familiar with the conventional way of handling quality management, that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect system—especially as technology has advanced.
Several challenges come with it that impact the efficiency, accuracy, and the overall performance of your call center. And understanding the why behind these issues can help show you why change might be necessary for your call center operations.
Traditional call center quality assurance takes a long time. It means multiple hours of evaluators listening to call recordings, reviewing transcripts, taking notes, compiling data, and building scorecards. The average time spent on a single evaluation can be upwards of 20 minutes!
This manual process eats up a lot of time and labor hours that could be better used elsewhere. Imagine being able to redirect those resources to things that directly impact your business—targeted coaching, QA data analysis, strategic initiatives, and more.
Right next to the massive amount of time it takes to do an evaluation, it’s just as detrimental when you realize how much information you’re actually missing.
Most call centers can only capture and analyze about 2 to 3% of their interactions, leaving a huge amount of data behind. How are you supposed to get a real understanding of performance, customer experience, operations, and key metrics with such a small dataset?
Important issues and trends might slip through the cracks, meaning that valuable opportunities for improvement can go unnoticed. Without the right insights, it’s difficult to make informed decisions that drive real change and even harder to track the changes you’re making in the first place.
Humans are inherently subjective—whether it’s intentional or not. Different team members can interpret the same call differently, leading to inconsistent results or, worse, turning agents against the whole QA process.
This subjectivity creates bias, making it difficult to maintain a standard level of quality across all interactions when you rely on different evaluators and teams spread across your entire organization. Consistency is crucial for any quality management system to be effective.
As your call center grows, traditional quality management methods simply can’t keep up with the demand. Customer expectations are higher now than ever, and keeping up with multiple channels to track and evaluate is nearly impossible.
“87% of support teams have seen an increase in customers expectations over the last year” (Intercom)
Manually reviewing calls and evaluating performance can become overwhelming as interactions increase.
Without automated quality management, your only solutions are hiring more evaluators (which can feed into other challenges and get prohibitively expensive) or cutting corners in your QA process (which will be a massive detriment to your customer experience).
Human error is unavoidable in any manual process. With such a low sample size from manual efforts, it can easily lead to blind spots in your QA—and even the smallest mistakes can have serious consequences. 68% of data breaches involve a human element, showing how dangerous one slip-up can be.
Relying solely on manual processes makes it impossible to have a safety net and comfortably keep compliance issues to a minimum. As you scale up and interaction volumes start to climb, the chances that your call center fails to meet regulatory standards increase.
Automated quality management takes advantage of modern technology to efficiently monitor, evaluate, and improve interactions within a call center. Unlike traditional methods that heavily rely on manual reviews, automated quality management uses AI and machine learning to analyze every call, chat, email, and other communication channel in real-time.
By automating the quality assurance process, you can achieve total coverage across all customer interactions (even 100% QA auto scoring), ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks. This means you’re not just saving time but also delivering consistent, transparent evaluations. And what do you get from it?
Automated quality management uses cutting-edge technologies to transform how call centers operate and manage the customer experience. The two key aspects that drive this change are natural language processing and machine learning.
NLP is the tech that allows computers to understand and analyze the language used in customer interactions. It breaks down conversations to detect tone, sentiment, and key phrases, helping you assess the quality of communication.
This call center technology can identify customer sentiment and tone, as well as conversation topics, and support compliance monitoring. It allows you to quickly identify customer concerns, measure agent performance, and make sure that your team is adhering to regulatory requirements.
On the other hand, machine learning is all about pattern recognition and predictive analytics. ML algorithms learn from the massive amount of data your call center creates, meaning it can improve over time. This allows the system to evaluate past interactions and predict future trends and areas needing improvement.
For example, ML can learn to identify what types of calls typically lead to positive outcomes, helping you refine training programs and optimize call scripts. It can also help predict churn risks, identify opportunities for agents to upsell during interactions, and even personalize interactions, helping you create a new AI-powered call center.
Implementing an automated quality management system in your contact center can significantly improve your operations and customer experience. Don’t believe us? Here are seven reasons why it’s a smart move:
It’s right there in the name—automated quality management streamlines your QA process by automatically evaluating every customer interaction regardless of the channel, saving your company time and money.
This eliminates the need for manual reviews, freeing up valuable time for your team to focus on more strategic, rewarding work that can make a difference. Plus, it helps ensure that your QA is more consistent and effective.
Automated quality management ensures that every interaction is evaluated fairly and accurately. Unlike human reviewers—which may have unconscious biases or inconsistencies, as we mentioned earlier—AI systems give you objective feedback based on your predefined criteria.
And every interaction means every interaction, as these auto QA tools can easily scale to 100% coverage, for a more reliable, comprehensive quality management function. Your agents benefit, too, as they get more accurate feedback from more thorough assessments.
As your calls are analyzed in real-time, automated quality management systems can give agents immediate insights and corrective suggestions during interactions. This way, they can adjust their approach on the spot, avoiding escalations and negative customer experiences. This instant feedback loop accelerates improvement and enables higher service standards.
By identifying specific areas where each of your agents can improve, automated quality management tools let you overhaul your agent coaching and training programs by tailoring them to the specific needs of individuals.
It can spot where they may be struggling or have gaps in their knowledge and help you create training sessions that cater to what they need the most, which leads to your agent being more engaged and equipped to perform better.
Automated quality management software can quickly analyze trends in customer interactions, helping your teams identify and address common pain points and difficult moments in the customer journey.
By understanding the issues your customers are experiencing throughout their journey, you can take proactive steps to improve service and impact customer satisfaction before it causes churn or a lost sales opportunity.
The math is pretty simple. Better QA = improved agent performance + service quality = happier customers.
With increased efficiency and accuracy, and more personalized training, automated quality management helps reduce operational costs while improving the quality of your service.
And with better service comes happier customers, which leads to more word-of-mouth referrals, increased sales, and stronger brand loyalty.
The ability to cover 100% of your contact center interactions makes it significantly easier to flag compliance risks. Automated quality management systems continuously monitor interactions for compliance and help create and maintain an audit trail to prove it. They flag potential risks and discrepancies, ensuring that immediate action is taken before anything escalates.
This automates the entire QA process by scoring 100% of your interactions based on predefined criteria, and it does it in a fraction of the time that human agents could. Instead of covering 2 to 3% of your interactions, you can score all of them without adding to your QA team.
These features allow you to transcribe voice conversations into text, which can then be analyzed as part of your QA program. Speech analytics help you capture key insights from every call, like frequent issues or customer requests, and then use that information to improve your overall service.
By identifying whether conversations are positive, neutral, or negative, you can gauge customer satisfaction and take action to address issues before they escalate, boosting the overall customer experience. This information can also be used to spot workflow issues that might impact customers so you can improve internal processes.
Identifying keywords and topics lets you spot trends within your interactions, giving you deeper context into why customers are calling. It can also be used to get a closer look at script adherence and make sure your agents are following guidelines and standards, all without needing to manually review each call.
Powerful analytics and reporting tools give you the data you need to make informed, data-driven decisions. Automated quality management tools give you detailed insights into agent performance, customer behavior, and the overall operations of your contact center, helping you track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Integration with your existing tools and infrastructure ensures a seamless workflow. Picking a system that easily connects with customer relationship management (CRM), workforce management (WFM), and other essential tools allows you to streamline operations and get a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and experience.
Before automating, look closely at what your call center is struggling with (or what you want to improve). Identify areas where your existing quality management processes fall short and define your goals with automation. Whether it’s improving accuracy, reducing manual workloads, or getting 100% coverage, specific goals are always more effective than a blanket approach.
Once you’ve figured out what you need, it’s time to choose a solution that helps you achieve them. Look for vendors that offer features relevant to your objectives, whether that’s auto scoring, sentiment analysis, reporting, or otherwise. And don’t forget to do your research—make sure they’re reputable and credible and that their software actually does what they claim.
Seamless integration with your existing tools is critical for a smooth transition. Make sure that your chosen automated quality management system can work alongside your CRM, WFM, and other essential tools. This is a great opportunity to start small with pilot programs, too, so you can safely test and scale up without disrupting workflows.
Change isn’t always easy, and introducing new technology like this can be a significant change for your team. Offer training sessions and workshops to educate and train your agents and stakeholders to understand and embrace these new tools, and work with your organization to understand how they work and fit into your operation.
Like we said, change isn’t easy. It’s likely you’ll receive some pushback, so it’s best to be prepared. Identify potential challenges with your vendor ahead of time and find ways to tackle them proactively. Common issues like data migration, integration issues, or internal resistance to change can all impede progress, but they don’t need to stop you in your tracks.
As you implement new technology, it’s absolutely vital to ensure that your data security and privacy measures are robust and thorough. The system you choose should comply with industry regulations and offer features like encryption, access controls, and audit trails to ensure the safety and protection of your data.
Manual quality management processes are no longer the only option when it comes to evaluating your contact center’s performance.
With the power of today’s tech (and the astronomical coverage increase!), moving to automated quality management is a no-brainer. It offers increased efficiency, complete coverage of all your interactions, huge cost savings, and a better ROI than manual QA could ever hope to achieve.
With Scorebuddy’s GenAI Auto Scoring tool, you can build an automated quality management system and scale to 100% interaction scoring:
Reach out to try a free demo of Scorebuddy today and see for yourself.
