If you listen closely, customers will let you know where the gaps are in their user experience with your service or product. These valuable customer insights are often captured in different ways — surveys, focus groups, in-person, calls, chat, email and from social media. The traditional means for capturing customer feedback all have merit. However, there is often an untapped source for gathering incredible business insights and that source lies within your organization’s Quality Monitoring programs.
Leverage Quality Contact Monitoring for True Business Insights
Quality Monitoring (QM) is an important component of a QA program. Quality monitoring is primarily designed to evaluate agent performance, can also be structured to provide a wealth of business insights and customer feedback. QM programs involve trained assessors reviewing customer interactions (e.g., calls, chat, email, social media) in order to improve customer service. Traditionally, quality monitoring involves scoring calls and fixing execution inefficiencies for:
- Agent performance (e.g., speaking clearly, being polite)
- Up-selling of products or services
- Compliance (e.g., client authentication)
The agents are scored and given feedback for improvements while managers are given helpful coaching guidelines targeted to improve key behaviors. This function is a standard operating procedure for nearly all customer service and inside sales environments.
Quality Monitoring and Analytics
However, if you combine the traditional QM function with a deeper set of analytics and expanded program guidelines, an organization will be able to gather meaningful insights far greater than individual agent performance. By coaching assessors to capture some additional information from each monitored interaction and integrating the QM data with other key data points from multiple areas of the organization, you can identify both critical business process improvements as well as meaningful actions that will drive an enhanced customer experience for your clients.
By monitoring through a broader lens than just agent performance, businesses can gain insights in such areas as:
- Upstream process issues driving contact volumes
- Demand for new product
- Gaps in your customer service strategy
- Issues impacting customers ability to self-serve
- And much more
Case Study: Airline Industry
For example, say you’re an airline that provides an app, allowing customers to purchase flights more easily. However, you seem to be getting an influx of calls from frustrated customers saying that the app isn’t sending the confirmation email as it should after purchase. Quality Monitoring can identify the issue and push it upstream to IT to fix the error. Or, say you’re a utility company and you’re hearing a lot of people saying they wished they had a better sense of when their technician would arrive for repairs. You can implement a series of strategic changes to allow for shorter and more accurate estimated arrival times.
In short, it’s about improving both the current state of customer experience and operational performance by leveraging the rich data buried in your QM program.
