Automated Quality Management—The Modern Solution for Compliance Issues

On May 20 I attended the “Verint Virtual Customer Engagement Conference 2020” from the comfort of my home office, thanks to the continuing shelter-in-place government edicts which are making the virtual world a reality.

While it was a great compilation of new and interesting happenings in the everchanging world of omnichannel customer engagement, I was most impressed by the recent advancements in quality management and compliance that were presented.

The educational session was entitled “Automated Quality – Building a Compliance Culture.” The session was presented by Siobhan Miller, VP of Portfolio Market Strategy at Verint and provided an overview of a Verint quality management offering—Automated Quality Management (AQM).

The primary reason I was interested and impressed is that over the past several years I have worked with many clients who were, and in many cases still are, struggling with quality management in their contact centres. It seems that compliance with industry and government regulations is always at the centre of their frustration. Quality management can and has been applied across many areas of customer care as a monitor of success or failure, ranging from employee evaluations to risk aversion and first contact resolution issues.

Compliance is the specific task that seems to garner the most interest because of its direct effect on customer satisfaction, and its relatively easy demonstration of cost savings in avoidable expenses and the related penalties that can result from noncompliance.

Enterprises have long attempted to employ quality management techniques manually by sampling customer agent interaction and trying to identify problems as quickly as they can while they move to solve the identified issues. But there is now at least one automated solution that meets standards aimed at simplifying the process, making it easily repeatable—while simultaneously handling the operational variability that can occur across different contact centres.

The primary added value of Verint’s AQM is that it is no longer dependent on the practice of sampling but can cover every single interaction that occurs in each contact centre.

This a great improvement over the previously used sampling techniques traditionally applied in manual QM programs. Manual QM systems were seldom able to observe more than five percent or so of customer/agent transactions. AQM can track all transactions, making it far more accurate than ad hoc manual systems.

An AQM system can also focus on a single given set of standards and can be easily repeatable in a consistent manner. This can lead to quick remediation of identified problems that may be driving noncompliance issues of an organization or an individual contact centre agent, often doing the equivalent of years of manual operations in just a few days.

Besides the comprehensive 100 percent sampling mentioned above, the other benefits derived from an AQM solution that make it far more effective and better at managing risk become obvious in a side-by side-comparison.

First, AQM adds a level of consistency and objectivity far above the normal variability and subjectivity so common in manual systems. Secondly, it tends to reduce the risk of missing any noncompliance issues while raising the chances of early problem detection due to its automated nature.

Finally, the AQM functionality can be implemented, on-premise or in the cloud, at the pace chosen by the user as an “out-of-the-box” application or customized with a focused intent—such as agent analysis. Custom views can also be created for specific managers within the organization.

I believe the AQM product is a major step forward in compliance that can be used on its own, or in conjunction with speech analytics or other contact centre management products to optimize your company’s compliance program.

The automation enables you to create a consistent compliance standard across voice and text channels in multiple languages. Its flexibility allows the implementation of a very focused process, or specific targets such as individual agent performance—or a broad overview of compliance issues, depending on company needs and requirements.

AQM is poised to be a very successful and fast growth product in vertical markets dependent upon strong compliance-oriented services such as finance, insurance, legal, and healthcare industries—among a growing number of others in the marketplace.