Stop Expanding Your Call Center. Do This Instead.

3 ways to improve customer experience

As a customer service professional, probably it’s no surprise to you that the quality of the service you provide to your customers is a pivotal element of your brand and business.

But meeting, let alone exceeding, customer expectations is not a walk in the park. Multiple factors, such as prevalent employee attrition combined with hiring constraints, flat budgets and the expansion of digital interactions are contributing to the Engagement Capacity Gap™, the chasm between what organizations know they need to do to meet rising customer expectations and the resources they have to do it.

Yet, expanding your call center is not necessarily the best strategy to improve customer experience. It suggests that you’ll continue to receive yet more incoming customer requests, while we all know that the best customer service call is no call at all. By improving your service quality, you can reduce the number of customer inquiries, complaints and follow-up calls.

So, instead of focusing on growing your contact center’s capacity, why not transform your approach to service quality?

What is call center quality assurance?

Call center quality assurance is the continuous process of measuring, maintaining, and enhancing the excellence of the customer service your call center provides. It is measured against a set of criteria, usually called quality scores, to evaluate the effectiveness of your processes and assess the performance of your agents.

However, if we listen to analysts, it might be necessary to finetune our vocabulary and start talking about contact center quality instead of call center quality, and interaction quality scores instead of call center quality scores.

Why? Well, although voice is still the most common channel for service, Ventana Research believes that by 2024 a large majority of customer interactions will take place using digital channels instead of traditional voice calls.¹

In this new climate, you are going to have to modernize your contact center quality programs. As Ventana analyst Keith Dawson points out,

“The tried-and-true quality assurance processes that many contact center practitioners relied on for years are probably well out of date. It is time to reevaluate how quality is tracked and measured, and to implement some sensible new practices that take into consideration the ways in which operations have evolved.”²

3 ways to improve contact center quality in the digital age

If you’re reevaluating your contact center quality and looking for new ways to reach important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), consider adopting a Total Quality approach by taking the following three steps.

1. Capture, monitor and evaluate ALL channels.

Many organizations capture and evaluate less than 3% of their agent interactions due to extensive time and resource requirements for manual call evaluations. Low call evaluation rates are not only statistically invalid, but they also leave a huge blind spot in your quality program that can jeopardize your overall business.

Moreover, because these recordings and assessments usually focus on voice calls only, the rapidly increasing number of digital interactions is not included.

A recent study shows that two-thirds of customers will leave a brand if they have a negative experience on digital channels.³

In addition, monitoring only a fraction of your interactions can conceal compliance issues, which can eventually lead to penalties, hefty fines, and a negative perception of your brand.

Automated quality management technologies can help you automatically monitor, evaluate, and score up to 100% of your interactions – human or bot – across all channels – voice and digital.

Learn more about automated quality management

2. Integrate customer feedback into your quality program

The customer’s view of service quality is another factor often missing from current quality programs.

So, instead of focusing solely on an internal view of what makes a quality interaction, consider integrating your clients’ feedback on every touchpoint of their customer journey.

This may sound like a trivial piece of advice, but you’d be surprised how many organizations don’t grab this low hanging fruit. Although most businesses capture customer feedback in some format, they generally do it separately from their quality programs.

Automatically add customer experience (CX) scores to your quality management scorecards to gain more comprehensive interaction insights, including the impact of agent and bot behavior on the customer’s experience.

Learn more about interaction quality

3. Drive positive outcomes for complex customer calls

Managing customer complaints, inquiries and issues can be a daunting task, and even the best agent can require help sometimes. In hybrid and WFH (work-from-home) working models, call center supervisors often struggle to listen-in to customer calls as they happen to identify opportunities to guide agents and interactions toward better outcomes.

Don’t wait until the next call to improve your customer service and reduce the need for service recovery. By leveraging AI-driven technologies, you can proactively assist your agents in the moment, helping them resolve challenging calls as they happen.

This automatic, real-time guidance can be provided even if they work remotely and can help spot negative sentiment, provide behavioral advice, contextual knowledge, and suggest the next best action. This can help to reduce handle times, decrease employee stress, and improve customer satisfaction.

Learn more about real-time agent assist.

Congratulations, you’re now taking a Total Quality approach!

By following the steps above, you can introduce Total Quality into your contact center and can:

• Enhance customer experience and engagement across all channels
• Boost employee engagement, and improve agent training and first-call resolution
• Elevate quality across your organization and improve regulatory compliance for GDPR, PCI-DSS, FDCPA, HIPAA, and more

Learn more about Verint Total Quality.

1 The Future Contact Center is Here Now, Ventana, 2022

2 Contact Center Quality Processes Must Modernize for the Digital Era, Ventana, 2022

3 2022 State of the Digital Customer Experience Overview, Verint, 2021