Refresh Your Quality Monitoring Program with these 15 Best Practices

In your contact center, is quality "job one," or ho-hum? How employees view quality has a lot to do with how quality monitoring is structured and performed. If the process is punitive, agents will resent the concept of quality; a stale process will earn an indifferent eye roll; but a fresh, fair and inclusive quality monitoring process will inspire agents to embrace quality and do their part to help the organization meet its quality goals.

In today's experience economy, quality is more important than ever. Consumers are much less tolerant of low quality customer service experiences. On the flip side, they'll reward exceptional customer experiences (CX) with more purchases and referrals. Under these circumstances, contact centers can't afford to have agents who are indifferent about or resentful of quality improvement efforts.

This post will present best practices designed to refresh your quality monitoring program and motivate agents to hop on the quality train. Additionally, we'll discuss some warning signs that your quality efforts are misaligned and connect you with some additional resources that will help you keep quality monitoring on track.

What is quality monitoring?

Quality monitoring is an important sub-task within the broader quality management process. Quality monitoring is the act of reviewing and evaluating customer interactions to assess whether they're meeting the organization's quality standards. The output of quality monitoring, usually a score and some commentary, is used for coaching and training, which are additional components of quality management. These sub-tasks should all work together in a coordinated, continuous improvement effort.

Why is quality monitoring important?

This may seem like a question even Captain Obvious could get right, but the answer is actually multifaceted. Quality monitoring serves many purposes, including:

• Ensuring organizational standards are being met. Organizations often establish standards regarding topics like branding, sales processes, and CX. For example, they may want agents to personalize interactions as part of an overall CX strategy. Quality monitoring can help determine whether or not these standards are being followed.
• Ensuring compliance. Quality monitoring can also identify possible compliance issues. For example, some finance industry transactions require agents to read disclosure statements to customers. By listening to call recordings, quality evaluators can assess if this is happening.
• Identifying and troubleshooting problems. Astute evaluators can identify trends in the calls they listen to, including emerging issues. The information they capture can help businesses squelch problems before they have a widespread impact on CX.
• Maintaining oversight of remote agents. The importance of quality monitoring has been elevated due to the pandemic-related increase in at-home agents. A top complaint of managers with remote staff is the inability to monitor their work. Quality monitoring partially solves this problem by keeping tabs on remote agent quality.

What is a typical quality monitoring process? 

A typical quality monitoring process looks something like this:

• Step 1: The contact center designates someone to review and evaluate contacts - smaller operations may assign this to a supervisor as an additional duty, while large contact centers might have a team of analysts dedicated to quality monitoring.
• Step 2: The quality evaluators develop evaluation scorecards - these may be manual or automated forms and are hopefully concise and based on business goals and CX standards. Scorecards contain a series of questions that walk evaluators through the assessment. Contact centers frequently have different scorecards for different interaction types. For example, sales calls will have quality standards unique from service calls, and chat interactions will be evaluated differently than phone calls. Separate scorecards accommodate the unique characteristics of each type of contact.

• Step 3: The scoring method is designed - for example, each question might have the same point value or more important questions might be assigned a higher weight. Additionally, if some questions receive a score of zero, the entire interaction could receive a failing score.
• Step 4: Evaluators pull a random sample of call recordings - this step is particularly tricky and error prone. Evaluators need to review every agent's work and they usually only have the capacity to review a 1-2% sample. Is that really representative? The answer is NO, and we’ll talk about that more later.
• Step 5: Evaluators listen to and score the calls - they complete a scorecard for each call, which ultimately rolls up to agent, team, and contact center quality scores.
• Repeat steps 4 and 5 over and over and periodically review scorecards and scoring criteria.

This typical quality monitoring process is very straightforward, but it can become stale over time and lose its effectiveness. Additionally, as with most processes, it can always be improved to make it more relevant and engaging. Applying some best practices to your quality monitoring may give it the boost it needs to take quality from ho-hum to ta da!

15 best practices that can refresh your quality monitoring 

As best practice #13 implies, contact centers should strive for simplicity in their quality monitoring. This not only applies to the number of different scorecards they have, but also the contents of these scorecards. It's tempting to include a line item about every little step the organization wants their agents to follow, but overengineering scorecards can render them useless. Keep scorecard questions to a handful of the most important drivers of quality.

4 signs your quality monitoring program is misaligned

Even if you follow all or most of the above best practices, you may still find something is a little off. Quality monitoring efforts need to be considered in the context of other available information to ensure the scorecards are measuring the right things and that the quality scores truly reflect the customer experience. Here are some signs your quality scores might not be telling an accurate story.

• Quality scores are high but customer satisfaction scores are low. This is a scenario that can drive a contact center manager crazy. When the two scores contradict each other, it's often because the scorecards are focused on the wrong thing. For example, the scorecards may be evaluating whether agents are adhering to internal policies and procedures, while customers on the receiving end of those policies and procedures find they create an awkward experience. The lesson is that quality monitoring scorecards need to heavily lean towards what customers, not the business, think is important.
• Each agent's quality scores vary widely depending on the evaluator. Once agents are familiar with contact center processes and expectations, their scores should be fairly consistent month to month. There shouldn't be wide swings based on who did the evaluations that month. If there are, there's a calibration issue. Evaluators should have regular calibration sessions to ensure they are in sync with their scoring. This will ensure quality scores are consistent, trustworthy, and fair.
• High number of agent disputes. There will likely be some disputes with how interactions are scored, but if the amount is high, that's a red flag that there's a disconnect somewhere. Agents need to be trained about the quality monitoring process so they have a baseline understanding. Additionally, best practice #9 will help agents and evaluators get on the same page and reduce disputes.
• Evaluators struggle to meet volume targets. Quality monitoring programs typically have monthly targets regarding the number or percent of interactions to be evaluated each month. The manual nature of some organizations' processes, which require evaluators to search for appropriate contacts and then perform a detailed review of each one, can make it difficult for quality staff to meet their volume targets. If not enough interactions are evaluated, this can make quality scores invalid. Quality management software and quality analytics can eliminate this issue through automation.

Keeping your quality monitoring program on track

To maintain the effectiveness of your quality monitoring program, treat it like a living organism that needs regular care and feeding. Quality is too important to neglect. If you experience any of the symptoms of misalignment, if business priorities or customer expectations change, or if every day in your quality team feels like Groundhog Day, it's time to refresh your quality monitoring program. Start by applying some of the best practices in this article. And remember to regularly review scorecards for relevancy and hold calibration sessions to ensure evaluators and evaluation forms remain in sync with what's important to customers and the business.

Learn more

Our resource center and blog are packed with helpful insights and tips about contact center quality management. For example: