What is Quality Management and Why is it Important for Call Centers? | Eleveo

What is quality management and why is it important?

At its best, a call center’s quality management efforts provide actionable insights into agent phone, email and chat interactions with customers to create a virtuous cycle of interaction, analysis and feedback. It improves CSAT and process efficiency and ensures compliance. 

The business value of quality management primarily manifests in 5 ways:

• improved compliance
• strengthened customer relationships
• increased customer satisfaction
• increased revenue
• reduced costs 

Without that automation, though, quality management is prohibitively labor-intensive. Contact center managers cannot manually collect and analyze a large enough sample of agent/customer interactions to institute an effective quality management program.

Quality management is mainly about exercising control over thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of inbound or outgoing interactions - calls, emails and chats.

The degree of control contact center managers have is a function of how many interactions they can review and analyze. It’s equal parts science and art, correlating metrics (like Average Handling Time or CSAT) to call outcomes, then analyzing those results for root causes. Only after that process is complete can an agent be trained to improve their performance.

Automation is key, but most contact centers are not fully exploiting automated quality management solutions and speech analytics capabilities.

Two approaches to quality management in call centers

Call centers generally take one of two approaches to quality management:

• The Policing Approach
• The Problem-Solving Approach

The Policing Approach: In this traditionally manual approach, the quality manager may listen to one call per agent per week to see how the agent handles the customer interaction and whether they’re in compliance. That agent may participate in one coaching session per month, where they are given feedback and appropriate training. The problem with this manual approach is that the call sample rate is inevitably minuscule, somewhere around 1 percent, given the time it takes to review each call.

The Problem-Solving Approach: This approach is much more prevalent as automated quality management gains popularity, mainly because automated speech analytics allows contact center managers to collect and analyze an ample sample of calls/interactions. This approach gives contact centers a data-driven, systematic way of addressing problems by analyzing root causes.

A typical scenario might be a case where Average Handling Time (AHT) is too long. The root cause could be that the agent lacks adequate product knowledge to solve the problem, and he/she spends too much time in the knowledge base. Or, perhaps, the agent doesn’t have proper control over the call/caller, and the conversation goes off on a tangent. Another reason might be that the customer doesn’t have all the necessary information at-hand (e.g., the version number or serial number of a piece of equipment) and has to find it.

Eleveo as a quality management software solution for contact center

Using Eleveo’s automated quality management solution with advanced speech analytics, contact center managers can review 100% of agent/customer interactions, search for keywords or phrases and perform emotion detection in their evaluation of agent performance.

For instance, managers can identify phrases that relate to the root cause of suboptimal performance. They can scan a sample of, say, 10,000 calls and correlate key phrases with calls lasting longer than their desired length-of-call. 

If the root cause is found to be an agent’s lack of product knowledge, that agent could be trained on how to find information on the knowledge base. Or agents could be drilled on answers to the top 10 most popular questions identified by the quality management solution.

Generating More Revenue with Eleveo Quality Management

You can use those same speech analytics capabilities to improve your outbound sales or collection calls’ success. Once you’ve identified the average length of a successful call, you can find unsuccessful calls that were longer or shorter and analyze them for frequently occurring phrases. You can use that information to train your agents, so they’ll be equipped to make more calls — and more effective calls — in the same amount of time, thus generating more sales and increasing collections.

Ensuring Compliance with Eleveo Quality Mangement

A growing body of regulations is being built around protecting ‘vulnerable customers’ — people to whom companies cannot sell to or make loans. Again, advanced speech analytics can help you identify keywords, phrases or behaviors as likely indicators of vulnerable customers. You can train your agents to recognize these keys and end the call, keeping you in compliance and decreasing the likelihood of selling or loaning to someone who cannot pay.

Quality management is an enormously important and emerging topic. We’ll be addressing different aspects of this subject in greater detail in future blogs. Still, for now, it’s important to recognize that quality management can have a far-reaching impact on your contact center’s efficiency, effectiveness and business value.