What is contact center quality assurance?

Let’s begin with a definition. When we talk about contact center quality assurance, we’re referring to a quality management process consisting of a very specific set of measures to improve and maintain high levels of contact center performance.

Generally speaking, this is to satisfy two areas: delivering good customer service and aligning operations with business goals. By introducing and sticking to the measures we cover below, you can ensure that your operation is optimized.

Contact center quality assurance process

If the purpose of quality assurance is to deliver great performance and results, the quality assurance process is one of consistent and thorough performance reviews. Key areas here comprise the communications between your contact center and your customers, regardless of format. So, a broad range of communications is included in the process, from voice call recordings to emails to social media interactions.

This is because it’s only with the use of as broad a body of data as possible that you can be sure of capturing your operation’s performance across the customer relations spectrum. This will then allow for performance improvement across the board.

Contact center quality assurance responsibilities

There are two parts to the question of QA responsibilities. 

First, those conducting quality assurance are responsible for establishing an accurate picture of conditions as they are, thereby setting the right conditions for performance improvements.

Second, QA practitioners are responsible for adhering to the privacy legislation in effect in that geographical area and observing whatever compliance requirements apply, both statutory and within business.

What are the benefits of contact center quality assurance?

Contact center quality assurance can deliver a wide range of benefits. Here are the main ones.

1. Provides customer experience improvements

This is, in many respects, the big one. If your business depends on customers — and the chances are very high indeed that it does — then you need to keep those customers coming back to you. The way to do this is to make every experience they have with your business an absolute delight, or as close to one as possible to deliver.

To take a not-so-fun example, not every complaint will be joyous for the customer to dish out or the agent to listen to. But you can ensure that the environment in which a complaint must be made is conducive to rapid, clear, and efficient communication and resolution. Contact center quality assurance can help this to happen.

2. Gives business goals a chance to flourish

If you have a set of business goals, and you certainly should, you must ensure that all operation elements align with their achievement.

These goals might be ongoing and long-term, such as reaching a particular demographic and giving them what they need. Or they might be more transitory, such as a push on a product being introduced, perhaps with a particular offer.

In both cases, you need a clear notion of what’s being communicated to your customers so you can be sure that everybody’s reading from the same page. This is what QA can deliver.

3. Spots training needs

Even the best agent can use some help from time to time. There can be specific reasons for a dip in performance. Perhaps they’re going through a bad patch, personally. Or perhaps they’re struggling to understand the great things about a particular product. Or they could be slightly jaded and have resorted to dialing it in somewhat.

QA allows the contact center to identify where this might happen and schedule workforce levels to suit demand. You can then apply whatever support your staff member needs to get them shining once more.

Poor performance from one staff member can bring the whole team down, so by giving the struggler some assistance, you not only restore their abilities and job satisfaction but also give everybody a boost.

4. Buffs up the business

In addition to spotting individual problems, call center quality assurance can highlight where structural imperfections might be to blame for poor performance. No organization is perfect, but you can do your best to improve matters as much as possible by allowing QA to show up where snags need addressing.

If, for example, one element of your operation is overwhelmed by incoming calls and could do with more resource deployment, QA can show this. Used in conjunction with workforce management software, you can be sure that the right staffing level is deployed.

One of the great things about this is that overall performance will rise, and total cost will tend to come down. That’s because nothing pumps up the expense like friction. You cut the associated outlay by reducing friction and promoting smooth, hitch-free processes.

Key metrics for contact center quality management

There are key metrics that are commonly used wherever customers form part of the deal, as well as key metrics that are more specific to contact center usage. Let’s look at a selection drawn from both groups. 

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score

CSAT is all about the customer's account of the process, focusing on the degree to which it satisfies their particular need. It’s usually measured on a simple scale, from 1 to 10, with 1 being unsatisfied and 10 being very satisfied indeed; thanks.

CSAT is useful because it cuts to the chase: you’re trying to produce satisfied customers who are pleased enough with their interaction with your contact center to encourage them to indulge in some repeat business further down the track. CSAT tells you how you’re doing with this endeavor.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is a similar metric in that it measures a customer’s opinion of the business with which they’ve just interacted. Still, it’s specifically intended to discover how likely that customer is to promote the business to others.

Again, a score is given, usually from one to ten, with one to six classing the customer as a detractor, seven and eight being a neutral stance, and nine or ten determining a positive and promoter attitude. 

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Again, it is broadly similar to CSAT, but the crucial difference is that it looks at how difficult the process of interacting with your business is.

This is useful because satisfaction is a big deal, but you don’t necessarily want it to take the customer hours of sweat and upset to get there. There must be an element of ease in the interaction, or there’s something wrong somewhere.

4. Average Handle Time (AHT)

This is another good measure that looks at the ease side of things. The time taken to achieve satisfaction is important to ease and convenience. A consistently high AHT tells you that interactions are too long.

This could be due to difficulties with a particular product or a lack of expertise among your staff. In most cases, additional training should help matters. 

5. First Call Resolution (FCR)

If you’re trying to reduce the time taken to achieve customer satisfaction, then it follows that you don’t want to see a succession of calls being necessitated before the matter is put to rest.

The holy grail is to achieve culmination in a customer journey of no more than one call, so FCR is a good indicator of how often you score this ultimate goal. 

6. Agent compliance metrics

This concerns the measures you can use to rate your agents' performance relative to the priorities you have set out. This can include their use of language and tone, as well as how empathetic they appear.

It can also include very specific matters, such as their use of particular prescribed phrasing and expressions (in other words, script compliance).  Using the right software, you should be able to use automated call center analytics to keep on top of all this.

Contact center quality assurance best practices

Now we move on to how you can ensure that you don’t just deploy contact center quality assurance — you also get the best out of it. Some recommended techniques are worth taking on board, so let’s run through them. 

1. Define clear quality standards

Here’s a great place to start. Part of running a business is having a concept of how you want it to be presented to customers. Here, you can be different from your competitors by giving customers exactly what they want, plus a little more. Of course, different contact centers will have different contact center use cases. So, giving your business the individual thought it deserves is important. 

Doing this depends on your frontline staff knowing exactly how you want them to interact. Consequently, you must establish objective and unambiguous quality standards you expect every staff/customer interaction to meet. Any quality assurance program needs to have these standards fed into it to deliver to your needs. 

Once you’ve established your quality standards, you can look at quality assurance contact center software, such as Vonage, to see how it will help you achieve them.  

2. Set up call recording

It’s a bit of an old-school technique, but call recording is an absolute must. Without it, you’re operating very much in the dark, as is your agent, who doesn’t get the benefit of advice on their performance after the call. With call recording, you can identify elements of outstanding customer service work and those areas that might benefit from a little attention — perhaps some mentoring or training.

Vonage software combines call recording with AI insights into speech tone and conversational tenor. This gives you an extremely useful set of contact center tools to ensure quality improvement.

3. Implement regular call monitoring 

One thing’s for sure: There’s little point in dipping into an agent’s performance just once. Each time you sample their work, you get a snapshot of their performance level at that time. All kinds of factors in operation could influence the employee’s output, for good or bad. 

You should be monitoring regularly to get a better and more accurate picture of an agent’s proficiency. Vonage contact center quality assurance software allows you to do this. Then, have feedback sessions so the employee can benefit from your thoughts on the interactions you witness.

4. Appoint a quality assurance manager

Contact center quality assurance is a demanding and time-consuming role. The chances are, it’s not the kind of thing somebody can do in hurried bursts, sandwiched between other duties. For this reason, it’s an extremely good idea to put a dedicated quality assurance manager in place.

By giving them the time and resources to do the job properly, they can institute robust procedures and do all the analysis necessary for good QA insights to be enjoyed. In turn, you’ll be able to reap many more benefits than would otherwise be the case.

5. Automate workflows with AI 

We live in a golden age for improving workflows. This is partly due to business structure specialists advising on how best to shape dynamic processes in corporate bodies. Perhaps even more significant is the advent of reliable and distinctly usable AI assists across a huge range of business workflows.

Those monitoring sessions we mentioned can all be conducted with AI, using Vonage contact center quality assurance software. Indeed, you can have a 100% call monitoring solution, all driven by AI. This automated workflow saves you a heap of time-consuming work and immediately gives you the kind of analysis you need. 

6. Ensure ongoing coaching and development 

The road to employee excellence is the one marked by continuous improvement. The business that decides that its staff is great enough and needs no further support is the business that will flounder and fail. You have to build into your processes an open-ended commitment to staff improvement.

So frequent coaching and development sessions tailored to that staff member (using the insights you’ve gained from call monitoring) are needed here. Using Vonage contact center quality assurance software, supervisors can give agents all the coaching support they need by allowing jump-ons to give three-way calls, including the customer, or whisper coaching if that’s more appropriate. 

On top of this, there should be a culture of openness so that any staff member's concerns about their performance or knowledge level can be raised without fear of judgment or recrimination.

7. Create post-call surveys 

Customer feedback is utterly vital. It can tell you the bits of information that all that monitoring perhaps missed. That’s because the position of a customer and that of the business are, at times, fundamentally different, and what can seem a little trivial to a business can be a huge deal-breaker to a customer. So you need to hear from them. This is where CSAT, NPS, and CES are invaluable.

But how to deploy? You can invite customers to agree to take part in a post-call survey by having an automated message delivered by your interactive voice response system. Or you can send out an automated follow-up email.

Whatever route you want, Vonage contact center quality assurance software will give you tools to get the data you want and ensure that you frequently get the results from your surveys so you can use the insights promptly.

8. Continue to review and improve your quality assurance program 

Continuous improvement is not just for your staff. Far from it. The whole business needs to be on the road to ever-better performance, or it will end up being left behind by its competitors.

When other businesses are giving better and better service all the time, and where customer demands are growing every day, you have to meet and preferably surpass expectations, or you will underperform and struggle to compete.

The road to business success is lined with the husks of outfits that spent too little time thinking about how to implement better quality assurance. And don’t forget that a key ingredient in reviewing and improving is involvement — communicate the necessity of better results through better quality assurance to all your staff and work with them to achieve it. Together, you’ll get there.

Choosing the best contact center quality assurance software 

When selecting the best contact center quality assurance software for your business, you need to be sure that the package you end up with has all the features to satisfy your requirements. After all, you don’t want to have to reinvest a short time down the line. You need a solid, long-term solution.

Here’s the skinny. You need robust KPI metrics housed in the CRM for convenience and accessibility. Call recording has to be included, and coaching has to be facilitated by a flexible offering that allows supervisors to access calls in real-time and even jump in when appropriate.

You need a solution that will offer all the speech analytics necessary for pinpointing the nature of each interaction. Finally, you need a post-call survey provision to encapsulate the caller experience reliably and quickly.

Not all contact center software will offer all this at a great quality level. That’s why Vonage contact center quality assurance software is a breath of fresh air. It delivers the features you need in a future-proof package, utilizing AI to the fullest. Not just this, but crucially, it’s fun for your agents to use.

Nobody wants to slog their way to improvements. Vonage shows how you can be fantastic easily. Contact them today.