Good to Great: How QM Helps You on That Journey

Imagine the ideal person. Is this individual a can-do type who plans ahead, sets goals, is open to learning and adjusting, and never stops in his or her effort to improve? Or does this person simply go where life takes them, feel fine about the status quo, and avoid upsetting the apple cart?

I’m going to guess you chose the former. And if you did, you are correct.

Striving to improve by setting goals, making plans, learning, changing based on that new knowledge, and continually striving to get better and stronger is a great way to be. It’s good for individuals. And it’s good for organizations, including contact centers, too.

That’s what quality monitoring is all about.

QM starts with understanding what your brand is, and what things you need to focus on to build and reinforce that brand.

Are you “freaky fast,” as sub sandwich shop Jimmy John’s describes itself again and again? If so, you probably want to focus on metrics related to quick handling.

Is your brand associated with luxury? If so, you should probably focus less on expediting customer interactions and more on delivering the kind of white-glove service your clients have grown accustomed to expect.

After you’ve decided on your brand values and what contact center key performance metrics match to that, you want to build a performance scorecard and start measuring key performance indicators. There are scorecard creation tools that help with that. And once created, scorecards will help you track and score interactions on a variety of communications channels.

In building your scorecard, be clear about what defines a quality interaction and how it’s measured. Also, use scorecards to show as well as tell users what’s important and what constitutes a particular score. You can do that by offering examples of interactions that are considered great, good, average, or poor.

And don’t just monitor agents’ interactions with customers. Also consider the post-transaction work agents do. And look at post-call survey data to see how customers feel following their interaction with your agents.

Of course, all this work won’t add up to much if you don’t put what you learned to good use. So set of processes to regularly review such information and use that scheduled time to figure out how you can fine-tune and change your processes, call scripts, promotions, and training to do even better in the future.

Edited by Maurice Nagle