A traditional contact center quality program typically includes a team of experts evaluating frontline associates and business performance through varying customer contact channels such as calls, email, chat, and social media. These services provide the contact center management with specific, targeted, and practical insights to drive improvements in associate performance and business processes. Quality teams are commonly structured in a shared services function that serves as the right hand to contact center leaders providing valuable insights to drive improved results. A quality monitoring team allows an organization to receive objective feedback and dedicated resources to consistently evaluate a statistically valid sample of interactions and continuously identify new call center monitoring standards, share best practices, evaluate trends, and prioritize action plans.
Leading companies often leverage the expertise of 3rd party call center quality assurance monitoring services to ensure assessments and insights are gathered through the eyes and ears of their customers and are true reflections of their desired customer experience. This ensures the improvement recommendations and action plans are aligned and prioritized to what matters most to their customers. Another advantage of leveraging 3rd party call center quality assurance monitoring service organizations is they base their assessments and recommendations on best practices from a wide range of companies and across business verticals. Having a broad range ensures clients receive innovative, relevant, and practical insights and action plans that have been proven to drive the targeted business outcomes. While well-intentioned, internal quality teams tend to be desensitized to broken processes and/or rationalize performance based on what they know about the company, they are also mostly focused on agent performance and not the entire picture, which includes business process, product, and policy issues that lead to a higher effort interaction or poor service experience. This is why most internal customer service quality assurance assessments are not correlated with customer satisfaction or loyalty scores, such as NPS.
Speech and text analytics solutions have dramatically transformed quality management programs and are critical tools for evolving call center monitoring standards to the next level. They are growing in popularity due to their great potential to quickly and seamlessly identify major pain points, drivers of effort, challenges faced when contacting customer service, and other customer experience issues that need to be resolved. Recent technical advances have significantly enhanced the quality, accuracy, and value of the data-driven insights that speech and text analytics tools provide. However, to fully leverage the value-added by speech analytics tools, companies must use them in tandem with human-assisted quality monitoring programs. Using both analytics technology and human-assisted quality is the best way to maximize detailed insights to be gained and identify the root causes and design solutions that will accurately and fully address the issues.
There is a misconception by some that speech and text analytics solutions negate the need for human-assisted monitoring. This could not be further from the truth because, as great as these solutions are, they only tell you what the specific problem is that needs to be addressed and not how to solve it. Developing and implementing specific action plans is where companies realize the full benefit of and return on their investments.
Better Together – Speech/Text Analytics & Human-Assisted Monitoring
The power of speech and text analytics solutions allows us to analyze large volumes of data within and across channels to identify, quantify, and prioritize the macro-level issues impacting the customer experience and operational efficiency. Transcribing all calls and integrating that data with chat, email, and internal information about customers and products unleashes an incredibly valuable set of data that can be mined in so many ways. You can identify customer pain points, drivers of repeat calls and opportunities to resolve issues in each customer’s channel of choice, which all drive improved customer experience and a dramatic reduction in operational costs. You can also conduct statistical analyses on outliers in agent, product, and process performance, which allow business leaders to target their improvement efforts in the areas that have the highest impact.
Once the problem areas have been identified, the human-assisted monitoring of a statistically valid sampling of calls allows organizations to gather more information regarding specific drivers of the issues, root causes, and interdependencies. With this deep understanding of the problem, impact, and root causes, the quality team is well-positioned to share potential solutions and recommendations with the contact center and business leadership teams. With a closed-loop communication process, the quality team can also go back to listen to a sampling of those targeted call types or processes after the improvements have been made to confirm that the targeted improvements and benefits were realized.
The Northridge Group is a leading provider of Quality Solutions and Customer Analytics Services that enable our clients to transform their Customer Experience and reduce operational costs. Contact us to learn more.
