Boost Agent Involvement in the Call Center Quality Management Process

Agent involvement in the call center quality management process can make a world of difference to a quality department's ability to achieve its business goals. By giving agents the right tools to understand their performance and empowering them to improve, you can drive personal accountability and make agents partners in quality management.

Increasing agent involvement is a goal for most call center quality management departments, but it can often be challenging to create and implement processes that enable performance improvements. Manual processes and the tools that support them complicate quality programs, and the sheer amount of time needed to drive agent involvement can make this goal seem out of reach.

Today, however, call center quality leaders are leveraging automation solutions to enable agent participation, and in doing so, these leaders are multiplying quality's impact on business goals. To help you learn from their experiences, we've launched our Quality Hot Topics educational video series. In this series, you'll learn proven best practices from quality leaders such as Morgan Stanley's call center quality assurance department manager and the solution deployment leader at WPS Health Insurance. Topics covered in the series include automating manual processes, the agent score dispute process, quality workflows and quality's impact on organizational goals (coming soon).

In the latest episode of Hot Topics, call center quality management leaders discuss how to involve agents in the quality management process. They address topics such as why and how they get agents involved in quality management, the ways they've broken down barriers to agent involvement and the role automation plays in a successful agent quality engagement program.  In this video, they offer the following best practices.

Use visual dashboards to make supervisors and agents more effective

Last year, Instagram hit a big milestone, growing to one billion monthly users. Instagram and YouTube, which now has more than two billion monthly users, are among the most popular apps for millennials and Gen Z. The key to their success lies in visual, engaging content.

You can leverage the power of visuals in your call center quality management program in much the same way as Instagram and YouTube do. About 65 percent of the population learns visually, which offers an opportunity to empower agents to take action with feedback that is presented in a visual format. This approach enables you to engage agents in a manner that's familiar to them, with dashboards that deliver performance insights that are automatically updated in near real-time.

Dashboards aid performance improvement by helping agents understand what they're doing well and where their opportunities for growth are. You can use dashboards to allow agents to listen to calls and read any feedback or evaluations. With powerful personalized visual dashboards and the ability to review calls, agents and supervisors alike can prepare for coaching sessions rapidly and save time by focusing on knowledge gaps or exemplary customer interactions.

Make quality management and performance improvement a two-way conversation

You might be surprised at what agents don't know about the quality process, as WPS Health Insurance was when they asked agents for feedback. To help agents better understand their areas of improvement, hold discussions focused on how they think they're performing and what would help them better recognize where they stand against contact center goals.  

Agents don't always have full insight into what's driving different performance metrics or what they need to do to improve. Providing a complete picture of the goal of the quality program and how individual agents contribute to this goal is often key to self-correction. Incorporating agent feedback into the quality program increases opportunities for personal accountability.

Teach agents how to use available dashboards

Rolling out agent dashboard won't guarantee that they use the information presented; you also need to show them how to interpret the data and leverage the information to improve performance. To build in agent accountability from the start, make this a part of your onboarding process. When armed with the relevant information on a dashboard and provided with training on how to use it, agents are more fully engaged in their success and the success of the contact center.

Automated technology gives your call center quality management program the power to accelerate the pace of agent performance improvements. Watch our video on agent involvement in the quality process or visit our quality management solution web page to learn more about these and other strategies to get agents more involved in the quality process.