Quality & Performance Management
Datapoint provides a wide range of quality monitoring and performance management solutions. Some are pre integrated modules within an interaction hub solution while others are part of a wider portfolio of optimisation solutions that include complimentary functionality such as e-learning and analytics to leverage the efficiency and overall effectiveness of a quality and performance solution.
All the solutions provide the basic building blocks in terms of quality assessment of customer interactions and an evaluation methodology to score and therefore track progress. They also meet the emerging need of next generation call centres in that they undertake these monitoring and improvements functions for voice, email and web chat traffic equally well.
Changes In Monitoring Techniques
However what is changing is the way in which these services are being organised and presented to users. This can be seen as an antidote to what is generally agreed to be the inherent inefficiency of the monitoring, evaluation and coaching processes and the relative ineffectiveness of curing the really important performance issues in call centres. These extend way beyond improving agent quality compliance despite the fact they have been the traditional priorities for monitoring.
Key changes that are now engineered into the latest generation of solutions include a move away from small scale random sampling to focusing evaluation onto only those interactions that are seen as significance to the business objectives of the call centre.
Options For Speeding Up The Monitoring Process
Meanwhile the process of retrieving those calls and helping pinpoint where to start evaluating them in the interaction lifecycle has also undergone some degree of helpful automation. This has also been further boosted with innovations such as synchronised audio, screen and quality forms in a single window on the supervisor’s desktop.
The time consuming nature of face to face coaching has also being augmented with e-learning with conveniences such as embedded workflow for assigning training to agents from within the evaluation process. Auto calibration is available in some solutions to ensure supervisors evaluate key issues consistently.
The second issue of effectiveness has been addressed in term of additional analytics modules which can mine speech, text and screen records and post call surveys in order to reveal broken processes, the key topics from customers’ perspective and root cause analysis as to why an issue has happened.
This analytic component is sometimes being provided as part of a vendor’s performance optimisation portfolio. Otherwise third party solutions can be readily integrated, although being speech based these are unable to analyse web chat interactions.
The best choice of solution depends on your own situation based on a number of factors that Datapoint can assist you evaluate. These include existing investment in a vendor’s portfolio, improvement plans for current monitoring and performance management activities and readiness to extend improvement initiatives beyond the confines of the call centre.
Further detail of the choice in functionality is listed below.
Options In How Monitoring Is Undertaken
Monitoring applications enable supervisors to monitor voice, web chat and web collaboration interactions between agents and customers in real-time. This can be performed in a number of ways.
Silent monitoring which allows supervisors to accurately assess the quality of the agent/customer interaction since the agent is unaware that they are being monitored. These sessions can also be recorded for training and evaluation purposes.
Supervisors can coach agents through an interaction without the customer’s knowledge or can directly engage the customer and take over the interaction at any time while monitoring the agent. This can be used as either a tool to close a sale or provide expert assistance to the customer in the event that the agent is unable to properly handle the interaction.
Remote monitoring from off site which can be particularly useful for outsourcers who can offer clients the ability to monitor the effectiveness of the outsource partner in handling their customers.
With more general monitoring requirements to achieve quota levels, there are now a number of ways to approach this. The decision of which approach is best suited to your needs will be a key driver in your eventual choice of vendor.
If you are only interested in tracking voice interactions and the inefficiencies of random sampling are of no concern, then there is plenty of choice in what is now a commoditised module. The same applies for multi media tracking if undertaken in the same way.
However if there is a desire to increase the volume of interactions that can be tracked without increasing headcount proportionately, or just find more relevant interactions for evaluation and coaching, then a further set of choices need to be made.
Smarter Ways Of Selecting Customer Contacts For Evaluation
With some solutions it is now possible for automated receipt of pre qualified interactions into dedicated ‘inboxes’ on the supervisor’s desktop. As a phase one exercise this can be achieved by using existing customer data from the recorded call such as the phone number and matching this against criteria such as a customer value rating logged in a CRM system in order to identify and forward calls based on such criteria. In this way the most valuable or vulnerable customer segments can receive greater supervisory attention.
A more advanced version increases the choice of criteria exponentially by introducing analytics which can both discover and refine such criteria either through frequent or near real time tracking of interactions. These high relevance segments of total traffic can then be forwarded for attention, often with tags embedded in the audio stream highlighting the key issues, which again speeds up the evaluation and coaching processes.
Some speech analytic solutions can be used to automate the categorising of calls based on content analysis. If this technique is favoured then managers can dedicate supervisors to key call categories such as churn, failed 1st time resolution or escalation calls to build rapid subject matter expertise in order to increase overall call centre effectiveness.
Screen capture can also be analysed in some solutions and therefore can be mined for certain types of interaction. For instance, those in which an agent is entering a transaction that exceeds a certain threshold can be flagged and dispatched for live supervisory approval or post interaction quality control.
Designing Evaluation And Calibrations Processes
Agent evaluation is template based and forms can be rapidly designed and customised to reflect KPIs and business objectives. Evaluation templates can incorporate many types of questions, default answers, free-form comments, preset reason codes, and flexible scoring rules.
Time saving functionality includes:
- Presenting the right form based on the type of call
- Self-populating parts of the evaluation form
- Multi-language spell checkers
- Displaying or hiding new questions based on specific responses to other questions
- Automatically calculating scores based on answers and evaluation data
In some solutions, calibration of those delivering evaluations can be automated by identifying anyone whose scoring is out of synch with the average and these can be forwarded to management for more focussed discussion on particular evaluation criteria.
Options For Performance Management
Using customised dashboards based on user needs, supervisors and agents can view quality scores and listen to evaluated calls from their desktops. Each agent has an individual login that presents a dashboard of their metrics compared to that of the team, as well as access to their evaluated calls. This enables agents to track their progress, better understand their strengths and weaknesses, and monitor their performance
In solutions that provide e-learning modules, supervisors and other users can easily assign training courses to agents and track their progress. Recorded interactions that represent best practices can be identified and sent directly to agents as part of their ongoing training. Agents can use these clips to learn by example from more experienced peers. Additionally, users can create a library of best practice clips for use in future training.
Reporting in all solutions is rich and highly customisable based on pre configured templates. These can be generated straight from the user dashboard and widely shared via the browser interface.
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