The quality of your contact center is a direct reflection of your whole company. 90% of Americans use customer service as the deciding factor in whether or not they want to do business with your company. Recognizing this power is critical. There are many stakeholders inside and outside your organization concerned with quality assurance in the call center—more than you may think.
When it comes to building relationships with your customers and providing exceptional customer experiences, no department is better suited to the task than the contact center. It’s about understanding your customers’ needs, desires, and pain points better than anyone within your organization.
Even in the slightest way, everyone who interacts with your contact center has a stake in its success. By recognizing these stakeholders, why they care about call center quality assurance, and what information they need, you can create a QA program that meets company goals, addresses concerns, and drives constant improvement.
In this article, we’ll look at who these stakeholders are, why they matter, what their call center roles are, and what value they want from contact center QA.
Every agent has a naturally vested interest in the quality of your call center. They want to know that their work meets goals—within the call center and organization. After all, if agents can directly tie their performance to customer satisfaction and revenue generation, they know that their value will be rewarded.
The key for call center agents is to create a QA program that is reliable, transparent, and simple. Agents must trust the QA system if they are to respond to recommendations given and change their behavior for the better. There should be both positive and negative consequences for agents based on quality assurance results to be used for improving contact center performance.
The primary function of team leaders and supervisors is to oversee their team’s performance and improve it. And knowledge is power. A call center quality assurance program helps leaders monitor performance across channels and levels.
Quality assurance empowers supervisors to improve their team's performance by helping them get a grasp on what’s working for each agent and what isn’t. And with the appropriate tools in place, QA offers detailed insight through reports and dashboards without wading through unstructured data.
Quality analysts are the nerds of quality assurance. They are the heavy users of your call center QA program. They’ll use all the tools—quality scorecards, text analytics, the LMS, etc.—and spend their time deep-diving into reports and analyzing the results.
As such, quality analysts want a contact center QA program that is intuitive and flexible. They need data and powerful analytics that are easy to interpret and can be used to carry out root cause analysis. Please give them a QA program with as many different features, tools, and extras as possible, including the ability to customize everything.
Managers and upper management (CEO, COO, Director of Operations, Customer Service Manager, Contact Center Manager) are influential decision-makers. As such, they require access to relevant and reliable information—constantly. They need to be able to see a performance at a glance, but they also need to drill up or down as much as possible to get to the root of any issue.
A contact center quality assurance program ensures that management can get the insight they need by clicking a button. This data can then be used to adjust goals, make hiring decisions, develop new products/services, boost operational efficiency, change pricing, and even create new revenue streams.
Lastly, the human resource department uses quality assurance for feedback sessions and periodic performance reviews. QA provides HR with the insight required to map out relevant training and onboarding. It helps them focus their efforts on specific needs, including knowledge gaps, to provide specific—instead of generic—help for your contact center.
Not all quality assurance processes and procedures take place in-house. Occasionally, you’ll need to hire a quality assurance coach or consultant to offer an outside opinion. These coaches depend on insight from QA software to aid them in identifying performance issues, training gaps, and more. The more information they have, the better they can determine where assistance is needed.
Even for outsourced contact centers, quality assurance is imperative. It’s how you demonstrate to your clients that you are keeping your finger on the pulse. You can use QA insight to help your clients better understand what their customers want and continually improve service.
Giving clients access to your QA system is a great confidence booster and represents an honest and open relationship between partners. You can even ask your clients to participate in quality scoring calibration.
Having a solid position on the standard of quality you deliver and backing it up with a robust quality assurance program shows that you are serious about consistent high performance. This is an attractive trait to prospective clients, significantly if you can demonstrate that you are willing to stand by your commitment to quality 100%. You can easily win new business based on your dedication to quality and the transparency you provide through QA.
Finally, if a quality assurance program is in place and doing what it is supposed to—improving the quality of customer service—everyone wins. Your customers are always the real bosses of the contact center.
There are few tools more essential to your success than quality assurance in the contact center. And with contact center QA software alongside a QA program in place, you’ll have easy and quick access to valuable insight about your most critical business, customer, and process metrics. This will ultimately help you identify patterns and trends for improvement, generate more revenue and increase satisfaction.
And by sharing QA information with internal and external stakeholders—agents, managers, customers, and clients—everyone comes out on top. You’ll set yourself up for both short- and long-term success.
If you're thinking about new QA software, check out these 27 questions you should ask software providers.
