Call Center Quality Assurance

Quality assurance (QA) is a mission-critical business function that identifies contact center and enterprise trends, and provides insights into how well each agent is performing. For the past 30 years QA has been performed in contact centers around the world in basically the same way. Managers search through volumes of recordings to find the 10% to 20% of calls that require attention, either because they are really bad or really good. If a call is bad, the QA specialist or supervisor must...

Join The Virtual Contact Center Conference - Best Practices in Quality Assurance and Speech Analytics - June 12 -14.  Network wtih peers, attend live sessions, visit the 24 hour exhibit hall.

 Benchmark research carried out by Ventana Research shows that contact center executives and managers are under pressure to provide the best possible customer service while staying within tight operational budgets. At the same time centers are receiving ever more inbound calls and responding to other types of interactions such as email messages and chat sessions. To demonstrate success, managers must improve the key performance metrics on which they are assessed, especially customer satisfaction...

Calibrating contact center quality assurance (QA) performance is a key practice for ensuring agents are delivering on their organizations’ promises to provide excellent customer care and service.

Calibrating contact handling evaluations to an excellence standard prevents them from being politicized by evaluator preference or prejudice. Failure to calibrate the evaluation process can be detrimental to organizations’ strategic goals of attaining advantage and differentiation through customer care...

Analytics applications are deployed in a number of functions and departments within the enterprise, and for a number of requirements in service operations. It is as critical to sales optimization in the marketing department, for example, as it is to performance optimization in the contact center. As a result, analytics often performs in a cross-functional capacity, typically without the benefit of coordination among users.

In the contact center, “cross-functional” may be narrowly defined as...

The staff of CRMXchange was present at the IQPC Las Vegas Call Center Week. IQPC did a commendable job with the content and speakers in the event. The exhibit hours were long, running close to 11 hours on day one, but the vendors were pleased with the amount of interest that people showed in their products and services. 

We traveled the exhibit hall. Below are some vendor highlights.

Analytics

Contact Solutions – The Continuous Improvement Practice (CI) is based on a unique methodology and supported...

Your customers are coming to you via an variety of   channels.  As a result, every employee is now customer facing — either directly or indirectly — and distinctions between the front
office and back office are blurring.  With many more channels coming to the multi channel contact center, and a much more dispersed workforce, organizations today are forced to manage a dizzying array of customer service systems, customer touch points and customer-related tasks.

The question is, how do you make sure...

EarthLink, an Internet Service Provider, needed to manage quality and compliance across multiple contact centers around the world. It was essential to find ways to cut costs and consolidate customer service operations while still maintaining high quality standards. In addition to pinpointing service breakdowns and other sources of customer frustration, EarthLink required a solution to help them focus on a number of key areas where it saw opportunities for process improvement.

EarthLink selected...

Retaining and growing a base of satisfied customers is the name of the game. In today’s global internet-based marketplace, customers have very high expectations and can find their next vendor with just a few mouse clicks. The challenge for modern contact center managers and supervisors is in determining how to identify customer satisfaction deficiencies and provide agent targeted coaching to improve on those deficiencies.

There are a number of best practices that should be deployed to maximize...

Second in a two-part series

Yesterday we looked at the Payment Card Security Council and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard which were established to protect the credit card user. Today we look  specifically at the standard and the requirements it places on contact centers.

DMG Consulting LLC is a leading provider of market research and consulting services for contact centers. The 2009 – 2010 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report is the definitive guide to...

New standards and technologies such as SIP, virtualization, cloud services and more that many customer care professionals anticipate will enable them to operate their contact centers more efficiently and enhance the customer experience may not be living up to expectations.

There are many variables when integrating these new technologies that can affect how they work under different workloads.  Adding to the complexity is the emerging of a variety of customer contact points such as web...

Authored by Patrick Botz, Vice President of Solutions Marketing, VPI

Call center monitoring software is now a fundamental technology in virtually every competitive call center environment. As the economy begins to recover, 2010 is expected to be another tough year for enterprises, with contact center managers asked once again to reduce their operating expenses while improving the customer experience and satisfaction scores. They will be expected to achieve this goal with limited resources and...

According to DMG Consulting, after eight straight years of market growth, the first six months of 2009 saw a decrease in revenue for many segments of the WFO market, from call center monitoring software to call center quality assurance applications. While WFO performance was not stellar, it still outpaced the majority of other contact center and IT segments. Overall revenue for vendors fell by 1.6%, from $1,336.2 million in the first half of 2008 to $1,315.5 million in the first half of 2009....

According to DMG Consulting, after eight straight years of market growth, the first six months of 2009 saw a decrease in revenue for many segments of the WFO market, from call center monitoring to call center quality assurance applications. While WFO performance was not stellar, it still outpaced the majority of other contact center and IT segments. Overall revenue for vendors fell by 1.6%, from $1,336.2 million in the first half of 2008 to $1,315.5 million in the first half of 2009. DMG expects...