Since the pandemic, high-quality customer service has become more imperative than ever. Post-COVID, 59% of consumers consider customer experience the top priority when choosing whom to buy from. And 77% of customers say they’re more loyal to businesses that offer top-notch service.
The bottom line is that customer-centricity is critical to a company’s success. It is the crucial differentiator for consumers when deciding who gets their business. Customer experience is also the problem-solving foundation on which a company can either stand tall or crumble.
So, it’s no surprise that 63% of companies are prioritizing customer experiences more in 2021. The challenge: contact center leaders struggle to capture, share, and generate value from their data to make improvements to offer the highest quality customer experience.
The first step to providing the highest quality customer service is accurately evaluating the current customer experience across channels. You need a comprehensive snapshot of your processes, procedures, and services to develop a strategy for success. And for this, contact center leaders need an endless supply of accurate and helpful data.
Unfortunately, many contact center metrics are widely subjective and lack a clear path of action for improvement. On top of that, contact centers are often burdened by inconsistent reports and too many data points that tend to cannibalize the impact of any given metric or trend. This makes it challenging to get the proper insight needed to make better decisions.
This is not a matter of poor leadership. It is data analysis that permeates the contact center industry. Nearly 43% of today’s support teams don’t measure ROI, leading to wasted time and dollars unnecessarily spent.
So, what’s standing in the way of better contact center insight? Lagging technology and misinformed measurements. Currently, 46% of support leaders believe their technology stacks “actually hold them back from achieving their goals.” There’s a reason why nearly 55% of customer support leaders increase their spending on technology to scale their efforts.
To put it simply, many contact centers get so bogged down in the day-to-day details that they miss the big picture. And this gap in insight prevents contact centers from growing and improving customer satisfaction (CSAT). That’s where contact center quality assurance comes into play.
To improve contact centers in a directly actionable and meaningful way, fully functional QA framework guidelines must be employed. This framework must empower key decision-makers to execute proven best practices guaranteed to decrease customer churn and boost revenue. It is an essential responsibility that demands constant attention, frequent reviews, and ongoing improvements.
Understanding quality assurance through the lens of these evolutionary frameworks—operational, tactical, and strategic—allows call centre managers to identify goals and pinpoint key performance indicators (KPIs). More specifically, managers gain insight into the specific KPIs that deliver the most strategic to their contact center’s long-term value.
In short, these frameworks simplify contact center processes and data points by identifying the root causes of poor customer experience. They can help you think more strategically and objectively when examining your contact centre's inherent challenges and growth opportunities. They also provide a foundation for using innovative techniques like agent self-scoring, text analytics, and learning management.
For a better understanding of how your contact center can benefit from QA framework guidelines, here is a quick overview of the focus of each framework and how it works.
Working within a strategic framework is the end goal, but this may only be reached by first defining and discovering in which evolutionary stage your contact center currently resides. Processes can be put into place to support your call center as it continues to evolve.
It’s a journey from an operational framework to a tactical framework and a strategic QA framework. And a working framework is a great place to start. It gets the job done by providing your contact center with the data and insight you need. The key is to evolve to the next level continually.
So, what happens when you implement a quality assurance framework—operational, tactical, or strategic—in your contact center? What is the actual impact on your bottom line?
No matter the evolutionary phase your contact centre QA framework is currently working within, there is value in identifying your clear path toward successful growth. It is what supports high-profile companies. And it does this first by providing big data analytics to your contact center leaders, which results in:
A QA framework is also key to exceptional employee engagement. That’s because a framework involves your call center agents in the QA process from beginning to end. This is critical to company morale and to provide better customer service. Engaged employees can help your company become 21% more profitable, reduce absenteeism by 41%, and improve company culture—resulting in a 682% growth in revenue.
And that’s just the start of how a QA framework can benefit your contact center.
Companies are reliant on their contact centers to achieve success more than ever before. They are the friendly voice on the phone, the smile behind the keyboard, and the first person to connect with customers. But without insight into what works and what doesn’t, success is guesswork instead of strategy.
However, when you make a quality assurance framework the driving force behind your contact center, almost every KPI improves. A QA framework will help you acquire and implement the right technologies, adjust agent training, improve efficiency, and make better decisions every day. It’s not enough for your contact center to provide convenient and fast service, you have to connect with your customers in the way they want, and that’s what a framework is there to tell you.
Make sure your contact center moves from an always-the-same state to always-evolving scalability. It is that adjustment that will lead to the most significant improvements.
