How Sweet is Your Contact Center Quality Program?

Much like baking, call center quality management is both an art and a science. Mixing together the ingredients for a sweet baked treat and compiling the components needed to advance a call center quality program require not only precision but that you also plan, monitor and refine the process.

A successful baking project results in a delicious dessert; successful quality management drives business objectives and improves agent performance. By thinking like a baker, and you can build a "sweet" quality management program that boosts ROI.

The Recipe for Success

Pick the right tools

Unless you have a set of bowls, a mixer and measuring tools, baking a cake will be a difficult endeavor. Quality managers also need proper tools to automate key aspects of their program so they don't spend hours in the "kitchen". Leading quality management solutions deliver immediate savings by replacing existing solutions or manual quality tools with robust and flexible automation features. Quality teams gain organizational efficiencies through automation of evaluation assignment, appeals, calibration, reporting and more. Quality management automation can be a catalyst to drive change across your entire contact center's operations.

Mix and Measure

With a careful eye, bakers precisely measure and mix ingredients together with a tool befitting the texture and type of baked treat – an electric stand mixer or blender, for example. These tools make bakers more efficient so they can spend more time making other tasty desserts.

Tools also help them measure more accurately and mix ingredients consistently.

Quality managers can also benefit from tools that help them to automate many processes that were once manual, such as sampling of interactions for evaluation, filling out forms, calibrating or compiling reports. By adding more automation to improve efficiency, managers can spend more time on higher-level tasks, such as analysis or coaching. Quality programs can be further automated with speech and text analytics. By monitoring 100% of interactions, you can accurately and consistently identify the highest-valued interaction for evaluation and coaching.

Remember Equal Parts Sugar

Without sugar, most baked goods lack the sweetness we look for in an indulgence. When that happens, they are likely to be unpopular and may even go stale before they are eaten. Quality programs that only focus on what agents are doing wrong will be viewed as punitive, and agents won't be receptive to feedback or coaching. By incorporating "equal parts sugar" and recognizing good behaviors, the whole program will be more effective. Good interactions can be used to model best practices and create training material to motivate employees, improving business objectives and quality of life at work for agents at the same time.

Random Sampling Can Lead to an Inedible Result

Ingredients in baked goods can't be chosen at random, and measurements must be precise. The wrong combination could lead to a flat cake, a burnt cookie or a tasteless pie. Random sampling can produce similar results in a quality program. The quality program will most likely miss uncovering, meaningful insights and can result in missed opportunities to improve.

Taste-test and Improve

No one becomes an expert star baker overnight – there are inevitably adjustments, trials and tastings before the perfect cake comes out of the oven. Quality programs should evolve and change along with the goals and objectives of the contact center. It is important to incorporate a feedback loop into the process, documenting and measuring the results along the way as changes are made.

Consult an Expert

Sometimes it is better to consult an experienced baker before trying a new recipe for the first time.. Similarly, seeking out an expert in quality management helps contact centers maximize their investment. NICE has partnered with leading contact centers to help them to create a quality program that meets their objectives, such as improving customer experience, optimizing productivity and enhancing agent engagement. Quality Central, a next-generation quality management solution, provides the automation that contact centers need, and the NICE team of experts helps organizations realize their goals.

​How sweet is your quality program? Find out how sweet – or mature – your quality program is and discover the next steps in your recipe for success.

Download a complimentary copy of the Quality Management Investment Analysis ebook. It covers how to calculate the ROI in quality automation tools and best practices for advancing your quality program to the next level.