The current state of QA for most contact centres
When it comes to quality assurance practices, the average business contact centre monitors between as little as 1-2% of their overall volume of calls.
Per agent, that’s only between three and four calls per month.
On top of that, most of the interactions monitored are calls that differ widely in type, meaning that the limited results don’t serve to give a team a true, consistent reflection of a particular agent’s overall performance.
Low monitoring volumes in contact centres also mean that issues identified on calls cannot be effectively quantified, and therefore operations can not be appropriately scaled in response to them.
Overall, this means that management are unable to develop a detailed picture of the efficacy of their internal operations – what any key issues might be, or where there are structural failings within processes.
It means that contact centre teams don’t have the evidence they need to demonstrate their compliance to regulators.
Download the e-book to read later (fill in the form below)
Defining the ‘future state’ of telephony
The future state of communications is approaching. And faster than you may think.
Teams need to be able to demonstrate Compliance against all their calls, regardless of call type or process.
But how?
Contact centres need to be aspirational, and strive towards the ideal 'future state' of internal processes.
Enter Speech Analytics
Speech Analytics technologies can significantly streamline the processes of monitoring calls and scoring agent performance, making Quality Assurance easier overall.
Speech Analytics can therefore enable teams to carry out far more call monitoring, with no extra effort of resource required.
The end result of this is that contact centre teams who can cleverly leverage Speech Analytics tools in the right way can gain a far more detailed and accurate picture of their internal processes and performance levels.
This is the first step to contact centres collectively raising their standards of training and process improvement.
So just how is it that we need to leverage Speech Analytics to turn the future state of communications into a reality?
The way we see it, there are a number of key objectives you need to fulfil if you want 'future state' processes to be within your reach. They are as follows...
Create a suite of data insights
Use the capabilities of Speech Analytics to build a highly detailed snapshot of how your agents are performing. The way to achieve this is to segment your data based on a number of factors such as different departments, agents, and types of call, and then measuring them against the same key metrics.
Implement more risk-based monitoring
Use different dispositions and categories to identify specific ‘risk calls’. Ie calls that could pose a threat to your brand integrity. These can be calls where current process expectations haven’t been met, which include negative customer sentiment or a group of calls containing aggravated ‘churn’ language.
Automate part of the Quality team's processes
The goal here is to create filters and categories that capture elements of your call monitoring form. This way you can ‘reverse engineer’ your search processes to identify practices that may be being overlooked and need to be reiterated, and other training needs. These may be elements relating to DPA, compliance statements, or forgetting to collect certain information. These can be built into a scorecard that automatically scores against these elements, reducing the need for manual QA.
Adopting a ‘do more with less’ policy
By implementing the above, you will reduce the amount of time required to locate calls, score calls and report on calls.
The ‘future state’ ideal we are discussing here is one where the overall contact centre workload can be managed more efficiently, allowing for other tasks to be undertaken that could not be done previously.
When looking to adopt a new technology platform or mode of working, most business decision makers get preoccupied with the notion of ROI. Will it save us money? Is it cost effective?
While these are of course valid questions to be asking, it shouldn’t be treated as a be all and end all to determine whether something is beneficial.
Speech Analytics provides return in the form of value (which arguably creates cost savings later down the road if we’re splitting hairs, but that’s not our point).
And that value comes in the form of new ability and opportunity to put your resources to better use. To make what you’ve got go further. Again, to enable new tasks to be taken on which couldn’t be taken on previously. With no increase in effort or resource needed.
Quality and compliance can be made easier if you can manoeuvre your Speech Analytics capabilities correctly and do more with less.
Step-by-step: a quick summary of how to get there
It's all well and good outlining the objectives, but what practical steps can we take? How can we make those objectives a reality with Speech Analytics?
These are our suggestions.
- Use Speech Analytics to monitor and score ALL calls
- Create data categories for fundamental compliance areas
- Build dashboards that automatically score and update results using an easy to interpret Red-Amber-Green rating system
- Set up behavioural categories to immediately identify dissatisfaction and complaints
- Use metadata filters, so you can monitor and analyse calls by brand, product, disposition or other areas relevant to your business
- Make regular use of manual search features to identify key words and phrases for ad hoc analysis
- Use ‘skip to word’ tools to navigate your call transcripts; this will help you identify specific issues you might be looking for verbatim and also support the enhancement of targeted coaching.
Conclusions
All of the above will enable your quality team, your team managers and your analysts to operate more effectively and efficiently when it comes to call monitoring and remaining compliant.
Using Speech Analytics not only gives you a full suite of data insights that can improve the transparency of your operations, but it also allows your business to have a more clear and concise view of all call activity.
This can help you to adopt a more dynamic and proactive approach to compliance, CX, customer service and reportable incidents.
If you want to learn more about Speech Analytics tools, or how you can strategically mobilise them to improve your processes and better your business, be sure to contact us.
Book a Complimentary Test Drive Call
