Quality Management
Quality is a benchmark for all call centres - which impacts your brand, your success at acquiring new customers and your ability to retain your existing ones. So how do you measure quality and make sure that everything you do internally re-inforces that external Customer Service perception?
Through our experience of working with a range of clients in both public and private sectors, RXP believe that there are 3 components that you need to address:
1. External surveys
You can take regular 'soundchecks' on what your customers think of your service by undertaking customer surveys. You can either undertake these yourselves, in the form of mystery shopping or get an external agency to sample a range of customers who have used your services. Mystery shopping is about "what does it feel like to use your call centre", and RXP have information that can help you to do this activity quickly and easily for yourself.
2. Quality assessments
Once you know the factors that impact what external customers think of your Customer Service, it is important to put in place internal processes that mirror those criteria. Remember that the team leader has a role to mentor, coach and develop each of your Agents. They can achieve this through a structured method of call and email assessments.These assess the different elements of the core contact handling process - the welcome; the listening skills; the analysis and response plus the after call fulfilment and use of internal IT systems.
This is where technology has a role to play - particularly for call assessments. A voice recording system allows the Team Leader to select a sample of Agent calls for assessment. You can then use a scorecard to consistently rate the quality of each call aganist set criteria. Once you have these processes in place your Team Leaders can then focus on delivering effective Agent coaching to drive up the performance of each of their team members. This in turn leads to an outcome of higher external Customer Satisfaction 'scores'.
3. Continuous improvement
One of the benefits of running a Contact Centre is that your Agents are the "ears and the voice" of your organisation. By the contact centre analysing complaints and feedback from customers you can assess improvements on downstream activities i.e. the services your organisation undertakes. Regular reviews between the Contact Centre with your internal stakeholders can be used to develop an action plan for process improvements - which can result in a continuous cycle of organisational learning and quality enhancements.
