Some contact centres still in the ‘Quality Monitoring’ dark ages

The latest ‘Workforce Optimisation Technologies forecast’ released by Ovum estimates the spend on contact centre quality monitoring (QM) technology to be $141 million across Europe in 2014 with slow but steady growth predicted over the next five years. This is somewhat surprising for a technology in the mature stage of the adoption lifecycle and which has been readily available since the mid 1990’s.

A recent guide to contact centre quality monitoring launched by call recording specialists Business Systems (UK) Ltd indicates that a number of contact centres still engage in live side-by-side monitoring of agents or use Excel spread sheets to manually log evaluation results after listening to call recordings. These contact centres have typically not invested in any formal quality monitoring technology and rely on time consuming, labour intensive processes to review contact centre call quality.
The guide goes on to pre-empt some of the concerns contact centres may have when it comes to implementing a QM system by highlighting some common pitfalls which can be avoided if an organisation knows what features to look for in some of the latest systems available.
Historically, contact centres have been reluctant to invest due to concerns around making sure enough calls can be evaluated to be representative, targeting the ‘right type of calls’ for evaluation and making sure that insights gained are actually being used to effectively coach and improve agent performance.

Brent Bischoff, Quality Consultant at Business Systems comments “to develop a high performing contact centre workforce, it is imperative to have some kind of quality programme in place to review progress, refine practices and coach staff on an on-going basis. Quality monitoring technology has evolved in recent years with inclusion of features like agent learning centres for agents to review and self-learn. This coupled with basic audio analytics which can be integrated with QM packages to facilitate more targeted call monitoring and evaluation, will help drive some of this predicted growth in quality monitoring, whilst addressing concerns over evaluating enough of the right type of calls.”

With contact centre quality monitoring technology costs decreasing with the availability of hosted options and more feature rich functionality being developed to help better target calls for evaluation, it is easy to identify what may drive some of this expected growth. Those contact centres currently functioning without a quality monitoring system due to; lack of resource, budget or a belief that the technology will be under-utilised, should take the opportunity to re-assess whether their needs can now be met following some of the latest technology developments.

If you found this blog post interesting, you might also find useful our recent report on The State of Quality Monitoring in the UK – 2016.