Quality Monitoring
Call recording and quality monitoring solutions are now mature with widespread deployment of call recording both within and outside the call centre environment plus an increasing uptake in quality monitoring for performance coaching. However there remain significant opportunities to take this even further and evolve into what vendors now call workforce optimisation.
This concept has caused industry wide consolidation with the major vendors providing a portfolio of component solutions with various degrees of integration across their solution sets. The exceptions at this point are data mining and business intelligence vendors who typically sell at enterprise level and as yet have not linked with call centre vendors for the complete performance optimisation vision. Meanwhile business analysts and technical planners have plenty of options with which to build their migration strategies.
Development Path
Level one competency is normally built around workforce management (WFM) for forecasting and scheduling together with quality monitoring (QM) and coaching. The scope of reporting at this level enables managers to quiz call statistics and agent performance from ACD data, monitor quality scores and concentrate on forecasting accuracy and schedule adherence.
Moving closer to the performance optimisation vision next entails the integration of WFM and QM with analytics and scorecards. Scorecards provide a fuller view of what is going and allows customised views based on role and rolled up summaries for distribution to public wallboards.
Analytics provide insight beyond simple reporting of the facts and is therefore the start towards a business intelligence approach.
Internally focussed quality monitoring can also be augmented with external customer feedback either indexed as issues for corrective action or coded as satisfaction ratings both of which provide greater insight into coaching needs.
Once being monitored and coached is an established culture for the agent community, e-learning is another component of the performance optimisation vision. This allows certain types of focussed learning to be undertaken without the need for live intervention.
Tight integration between quality reviews and the library of e-learning modules is vital to make this resource useful for both coaches and agents. So too is integration with the scheduling system which can then organise learning sessions to take place during periods of low customer activity.
Evolutionary Pacing
The major risk in workforce optimisation implementations is doing too much, too fast and not using the technology to full value to ensure a return on the investment. This means taking time in planning and implementation to minimise risk.
It is therefore sensible to phase in the components slowly and methodically with educational input for the management team to absorb the operational implications. This allows them to budget for adequate resources, ensure buy in, and consider how to extract measurable value at each stage as the capability of the overall solution expands.
See alternative business needs description
Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Quality Monitoring.