What Are The Essential Principles Of Quality Management In A Call Center

Measuring quality is critical to the success of a call center. As more businesses offer digital services, many users interact only with agents, thus prioritizing a seamless digital experience. Therefore, guaranteeing good quality management in contact centers is now more important than ever to retain satisfied customers.

That’s why call center leaders need to consider the essential principles of quality management (QM) to ensure their contact center can continually meet customer expectations, deliver consistent and predictable results, support and train agents and instill improvement initiatives that benefit the entire team. For this reason, it’s worth taking a deeper look at how these basic QM principles are used in the call center and why they’re crucial to sustained success.

Quality Management In The Contact Center

It should be noted that each industry or business sector has different requirements for tracking and maintaining quality control. These protocols ensure that your products and services meet acceptable standards and customer expectations. Quality management in the call center uses specific software that allows companies to track, analyze and improve the performance of agents and customer integrations with various effective metrics.

What Are The Key Principles Of Quality Management (QM) In Call Centers?

1) Establish A Clear Vision

Lack of vision within call centers can cause problems on a large scale. In cloud-based contact centers, agent focus is critical and aligning quality programs with company vision and goals is key to achieving quality management success.

Quality is not a static process in modern call centers. It must always evolve, built around collaboration. Leadership needs to set clear strategic goals so that managers can build and coordinate the process as well as the audits. So the frontline team can apply these strategies, conduct assessments, increase training, and use modules to build collaboration.

2) Build A Transparent Program

Building transparency in a call center can empower agents by making them feel involved in impactful day-to-day processes. A great way to do this is through performance training. These one-on-one sessions allow them to strengthen their skills, achieve career goals, and get real-time guidance. Involving everyone in the decision-making process can also help build trust throughout the contact center while aligning staff on critical goals.

3) Impact With Analysis

High-quality call center programs identify specific areas for improvement for each agent. That’s why it’s vital to create a performance-training plan that uses advanced analytics to provide clear examples of how to reduce areas with low metrics. If a business isn’t investing in call center technology that captures key metrics of customer interactions, how will it know which direction to take?

Omnichannel agent interactions present unique challenges, as voice is still captured and tracked more than email, text, and chat. Adding advanced machine learning (ML) data analytics to your software can help identify issues, build predictive models, and correctly score all customer interactions. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources can also offer a clear understanding of what is happening inside the call center so that companies can adapt and meet the growing expectations of customers.

These actions create a strong customer-centric plan that aligns with the organization’s quality management (QM) principles. By using data analytics, contact centers can dramatically increase the number of integrations tested (>90%). This quality management system lets analysts know which contacts should be prioritized so leadership can spend more time on what matters: training and education.

4) Participate In The First Line Of Customer Service (Frontline)

Part of keeping this frontline engaged involves rallying actors around the process. Contact center agents who can see a future and career growth to higher levels are more motivated and engaged than those who can’t.

Leaders need to examine how they are measuring the effectiveness of their training within call centers. Are you correlating KPIs with the number of training sessions held? A great way to reflect on this is to engage people in focus groups. Frontline staff can only improve if they know which areas need continuous improvement. By offering KPIs and customer data, you can show them how the metrics correlate.

What Are The Quality Management Principles In Practice?

Implementing a quality management system approach can help identify problems before they become widespread. Since there are 8,760 hours in a year, the average customer will spend 6 to 23 minutes interacting with an organization’s call center, so there is little time to create a positive and lasting impression.

With 91% of users saying they would stop working with a company after a bad experience, according to Gartner, it’s more important than ever to apply quality protocols to help exceed customer expectations. Therefore, the use of essential quality management principles can help exceed consumer expectations.

In conclusion, focusing on the implementation of the essential principles of quality management will help companies obtain better NPS (Net Promoter Score) / CSAT (satisfaction surveys) scores, since customers who resolve your problem quickly and have a great CX are crucial to generate more business without incurring additional marketing costs. Therefore, each interaction must be treated with great care.