Contact centres are reaping the benefits of call quality monitoring. The $136m market is forecasted to grow by 6% over the next five years.* It’s no surprise, really. Quality Monitoring (or QM for short) is one of the core technologies behind improving contact centres’ agent performance.
But not all Quality Monitoring applications are born equal. Here’s a primer on some of the latest QM technologies. When the time comes it will help you find an application that fits your business, budget and objectives.
Targeted monitoring
Targeted monitoring makes it easier to locate specific calls from your database. Modern Quality Monitoring Systems index your calls using a wide range of parameters including time, date, call duration, number dialled, department and agent. That’s invaluable. Not just in terms of time-saving, but finding the calls worth evaluating too. No more needle-in-a-haystack when you need to find a key call. No more sifting through huge call logs and arbitrarily picking conversations to evaluate quality. Just set parameters to find the anomalous calls (abnormally short call duration, for example) that are more likely to give you insight into your agents’ behaviours.
Agent learning
Modern QM applications increasingly come with learning centres that agents can access online from their workstations. Contact centres live with the dichotomy of knowing that regular training is needed to improve agent performance, but that regular training for all staff is incredibly difficult to plan, schedule and implement. This kind of agent learning technology makes it far-less resource sapping to share training materials with agents who need it.
You can use the learning centre to host examples of best and worst practice, upload training materials (like documents, web links and videos) and add feedback to a specific agent’s latest call. It’s a highly effective way of incrementally improving agent performance based on their specific abilities. Ideal if your resources are stretched in terms of personnel and spare time.
Replay speed
Just like the name suggests, ‘replay speed’ functionality allows you to tweak the playback speed of your call recordings. You can play-through agent conversations up to 25% faster than real-time, enough to help you zip through recordings much more speedily without the risk of missing something important. You can skip through silence too. For contact centres with high volumes of calls to evaluate, replay speed functionality promises time-savings that are hard to pass-up.
Word search analytics
Word search analytics is now a realistic, effective add-on to some Quality Monitoring systems. Once implemented you can set it to automatically flag calls that mention certain words or phrases. It gives you a failsafe to make sure the calls that really matter are properly evaluated to promote the best practices and eradicate the worst. Again, if you process large call volumes – or if small gains in performance will produce big savings – you should consider speech or word search analytics.
Self-evaluation
This refers to applications that enable your agents to score their own call performance based on a list of questions set by you. Why would you let your agents evaluate their own calls? It gets staff more engaged in the evaluation process. It gives them clear targets for success and it helps to sift out the calls that need your attention. This technology can also be used by agents to nominate their most successful calls as part of a an internal rewards scheme – which is a neat way of making sure examples of best practice never slip through your evaluator’s net.
Calibration
This addresses fairness of process and answers the question: who’s evaluating the evaluators? Calibration tools generate reports to help you compare your supervisors’ evaluation behaviours. It gets quite in-depth. Deviation scoring monitors each evaluator’s behaviour to regulate consistency. Pre-determined thresholds flag any instances where an evaluator may have been over-zealous. It boosts the reliability of your performance data. And it shows staff that they are being evaluated fairly. Very useful if your contact centre has a number of evaluators and a high employee turnover.
Scheduling and enforcement
Having great evaluation technology is one thing. Setting aside time to evaluate is quite another. Quality monitoring applications now come with scheduling tools to help you hit target evaluation numbers. You can delegate key tasks for supervisors and other quality staff (with deadlines). And alerts can be set to remind supervisors of looming deadlines. It ensures your quality monitoring programme is kept right on track.
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* Workforce Optimisation Technologies forecast 2013-18, Ovum, June 2013
