Do you want to deliver better customer experiences in your contact centers? Duh, of course you do. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would say otherwise. To deliver better customer experiences, contact center quality must transform at a more dramatic rate. Too many practices are built on the exact same premise as they were back in the 1980?s. I have compiled five articles from this year that can help you start to move forward on your contact center quality excellence journey. Remember, your quality program can either enable or disable your ability to improve the customer experience.
The truth is, the customer experience is a large impact on the value of your contact center. And the quality items you measure, manage and report metrics on greatly influence the result. Having a problem with empathy? Quality Assurance is driving that. Have a problem with FCR? Yep, QA. Have a problem with agent morale? Hey, it’s QA. We all know that “what gets measured, gets managed.” Well, there is a downside to that as well. “You get, what you get.”
Contact centers must undergo a dramatic change in priorities, processes, and metrics in their QA programs to correct the continual down-slide of the customer experience. We have to realize that our greatest opportunity to impact this down-slide is with the transformation of contact center quality assurance practices. To create a more positive impact on the customer experience in contact centers, this is the best place to start.
We at Customer Relationship Metrics recently shared our model of the impact quality assurance (iQA) framework in order to provide the industry with a tool that will encourage and support the QA transformation process. The model provides an understanding of how to close the gap between what customers perceive is quality and what your company views as quality. You’ll learn to define and better understand the difference between the company’s evaluation of service, referred to as internal quality monitoring (iQM), and the customers’ evaluation of service, referred to as external quality monitoring (eQM). The metrics in this model are more balanced to reflect their ownership to the agent, the company, and to iQM and eQM. A key factor is the linkage to desired business objectives. The final element, and arguably the most important of all, is emotional intelligence (EI) which is rooted in the science of engagement and influence. Emotional Intelligence covers elements of influencing the customer experience and influencing employee engagement and behavior change.
I created a list of five of the best articles to go deeper into the impact and details of the transformation of contact center quality assurance programs.
CX (Customer Experience) Bang with Quality Transformation
Contact center quality transformation is about turning your contact center and business into a more customer-centric organization. Sounds simple, right? It’s not, but the change is worth it. When others have developed advanced customer insight generation from their quality program, they very quickly experience the value that is added from unlocking the true potential of the contact center. Read on to see how Dr. Jodie responds to reader question about quality transformation…
Avoid the Hazards within the Quality Process
As I said, going through the quality transformation is not easy. The traditional way of doing quality is not easy either. You can say it even more difficult when you consider the low customer and employee experience levels created by the old way of doing quality. There is one highly visible hazard with voice of the customer and customer feedback problems that has existed for a long-time now. Well, it’s visible to me. The question is, are you aware of the difference between VoC, feedback and External Quality Monitoring (eQM)? This article reveals a critical component that may have been invisible to you…
Don’t waste time on Voice of the Customer Programs
This reply from Dr. Jodie to a reader builds upon the article before (above) to make a bold statement about voice of the customer programs. Hey, the evidence is in: the customer experience delivered by contact centers must change. That certainly requires a bold statement. One area in quality that deserves bold statements is traditional Voice of the Customer programs. VoC and customer feedback programs are most often low-value business activities that do little to encourage change. Read on to get more on why Voice of the Customer programs fail…
Is your contact center survey primarily used for agent performance measurement?
This is such a big mistake that is made way too often. Stop and think for a moment about calling into a contact center. Don’t think about calling your own because your judgement it too biased. Think about calling some other contact center. Things don’t go very well, in fact, it was bad. You realize that the agent did their best but were constrained from resolving your problem due to something that was totally out of their control. You feel you have been treated very poorly by the company and want to tell them so. After the interaction you get the opportunity to evaluate the experience where you expect the chance to tell them how you feel cheated and not valued. You accept the offer to complete the survey and all of the questions are about the agent’s performance. WTF? Why is that a failure? That is what we cover in this article, read on…
Case Study: Internal Quality Monitoring (iQM) is unable to answer the quality question
Case studies! We all love them. At least I do. Over the past twenty years I have reviewed numerous case studies about contact center quality programs. Many of them are studying the impact of technology on quality assurance. While that position may be useful to some looking to purchase software, it does little to show the best way to use the technology. We all know that technology can easily accelerate your movement in the wrong direction. This case study gets to the relationship building aspects of the interaction between customers and agents. When you review this, you may come to the same conclusion when I reviewed it: traditional quality monitoring methods has been enabling a very bad practice for many years. I made these mistakes myself when I was managing in a contact center and you might be too. Continue on to learn why iQM fails to answer the quality question…
