The Disruption of Quality Management
There is a tremendous opportunity to improve how quality is managed in most contact centers. It is ripe for disruption.
As I was putting together my thoughts on this blog I went to Investopedia to look up their definition of Quality Management. They state that quality management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks needed to maintain a desired level of excellence. This includes creating and implementing quality planning and assurance, as well as quality control and quality improvement. What really struck me about that definition was the mention of a “desired level of excellence.”
What was traditionally called quality monitoring has been around in contact centers for decades, and I’m not sure many customers associate customer service with “excellence.” While call recording and associated technologies have improved significantly, the fundamental practices of what we now call quality management have not changed in most contact centers.
Generally, they have not evolved to meet the demands of modern customer engagement, and most importantly, do not take advantage of the newer capabilities and practices that are beginning to be adopted by leading-edge organizations. We all know there is a growing need to be customer centric, to leverage both direct and indirect customer feedback that occurs in the contact center on a daily basis.
If you consider the fact that there is a goldmine of indirect customer feedback embedded within the millions of calls that come into a contact center, what is the opportunity cost that is being overlooked? Many current practices are based on older approaches, metrics and lack the view of new market realities in customer engagement.
Take for example the use of speech analytics to evaluate indirect customer feedback. Speech Analytics can provide sophisticated conversational analytics to automatically identify, group and organize the words and phrases spoken during calls into themes, helping to reveal rising trends and areas of opportunity or concern. The technology helps do the hard work.
Contact centers don’t even need to tell these analytical powerhouses what to look for, because the more advanced solutions can identify themes automatically, continually refine them, and add new themes over time. It’s just one of the many practical and powerful ways that Quality Management can help contact centers stay on top of customer perceptions and deliver the desired “level of excellence.”
If you are interested in learning more about our thoughts on the challenges of Quality Management, and—more importantly—the ways to address them, click here.
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