Quality Management or QM can be perceived as meaning something different depending on the business. But in reality, the sole purpose of quality management is to measure success. Regardless of how you define success, the central questions will be “Was I successful?” and “Is that success repeatable?” Quality management processes help answer those questions for businesses in any industry.
Customer experience is becoming the most important contact center objective, and quality management will continue to be the means for any business to understand impact to experience. To make matters even more challenging, the traditional voice channel is now joined by email, chat/IM, social and SMS as popular channels for customer service, with most Millennials preferring the non-voice channels. This series will examine the fundamentals of quality management and what processes you need to successfully kick start quality for your organization.
So what is quality management? You can break it down to the following five major functions:
Capture the interaction between the agent and customer, whether voice or text, by recording those interactions in an easily indexed and retrievable form. Interactions are reviewed by trained quality experts who evaluate the quality of interactions based on objective scoring process. Since people are required for scoring there is inherently human subjectivity in the results. Calibration will help to normalize each evaluator’s scores, driving consistency throughout the organization for scoring and coaching. Analytics tools will help quickly identify successful behavior, poor performers, best practices, trends, and key customer experience details. Incorporating the voice of the customer through customer surveys and analytics will arm businesses with valuable information about performance, which will initiate coaching of agents to improve success, and then return to recording new interactions to ensure that the quality has in fact improved.
With a good quality management process in place you should be able to reduce callbacks, identify process improvement opportunities, facilitate actionable employee development, focus employee training efforts, and improve the overall performance of your contact center. No wonder most contact centers consider quality management to be the most fundamental and important of all workforce optimization components.
With our next iteration in this series, we will discuss best practices for sampling, which is a critical first step.
The post QM Kick Start: What is Quality Management? appeared first on Aspect Blogs.