Workforce Management Featured Article
Automating Quality Monitoring Makes Contact Center Management Easier
There’s often a vast difference between how contact center managers would like to be able to manage their workforces, and how they are actually able to do so. Even the best laid plans for quality monitoring and schedules can get shunted to the side when the unexpected happens, such as high call volume spikes, meetings that run overtime, or sickness that results in agents calling out for the day.
Often, workforce management and quality monitoring rely on sources from different places, such as spreadsheets, call logs, customer surveys or software solutions that aren’t integrated so they can’t “talk” to one another. This means it’s up to managers to pull all this information together and put it into a form that makes sense. Given the average contact center manager’s schedule, this means that quality processes aren’t performed nearly as often as they should be.
In a recent blog post, Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo noted that automation in quality management and workforce management can help solve a lot of these issues.
“Workflow, visibility and best practices become much easier to manage,” he wrote. “In fact, there’s really no debate about the benefits these solutions provide. Any hesitation to adopt this technology and leverage its many advantages usually stems from cost concerns. For new companies or smaller call centers without a large IT budget, that used to be a legitimate reason for getting by with the old-fashioned methods. Used to be.”
What has changed in recent years, according to Ciarlo, is the availability of flexible, secure cloud-based quality management solutions that can be implemented with little to no upfront cost. These solutions are scalable and integrated, and contact centers can get up and running with automation that helps eliminate administrative time and allows for better (and more frequent) monitoring.
“With no servers, no network switches, no full-time IT staff and no other hardware to purchase, install and maintain, ROI is achieved a lot faster,” wrote Ciarlo. “Quality is important. With the right quality management solution, you’ll always know that customers are experiencing the best your business has to offer.”
Automated quality monitoring solutions are an easy way to improve agent effectiveness and optimize call center processes through a range of capabilities, such as call assessment and playback, call quality scorecards, quality monitoring, screen capturing, an evaluation questionnaire and detailed reporting. Companies can gain deeper insight into customer interactions to identify pitfalls and encourage processes that are working well. Contact centers are well positioned to automatically capture and securely store video and audio transactions to minimize risk and liability, ensure compliance, and control costs from sales, service, claims, collections and other business disputes. Automation means that the process is done regularly, done right and distributed to the people who most need to see data.
