Viki Patten at EvaluAgent explores how the right QA software can transform contact centres by addressing key challenges such as insufficient interaction monitoring and the balance between automation and human oversight.
The contact centre has always been a challenging place to work – fortunately, technology can help alleviate a lot of the most common obstacles, blockers and issues.
In fact, Deloitte’s 2023 contact centre report shows that modernizing infrastructure and agent-enablement technologies feature as two of the top three investment priorities.
So what challenges can best-in-category QA software help you solve?
The Primary Contact Centre Challenges
Great call centre software should help you alleviate tangible issues within your contact centre. With over 25 years of contact centre expertise, we’ve found that most contact centres typically experience one or more of the following QA challenges:
Not Enough Interactions Monitored
It’s difficult to make meaningful impact when you’re only sampling 2-5% of interactions. You’ll rarely catch the extremes of the scale with this amount of coverage – both good and bad. It’s these must-monitor interactions that can have the biggest impact in improving customer service.
Upping this number by getting as close to 100% as possible is vital for getting a true picture of your customer experience.
Random Sampling of Interactions vs Over-Automation
It’s a catch-22. You randomly sample interactions in the hope of catching at least some of the extremes in customer interactions, which gives you unreliable and inconsistent data. Or, you can leverage automation to find them all – only to drown in data, making it ultimately useless.
The key here is to find software that helps you strike the balance between automation and the human touch.
Using Data Meaningfully to Drive Improvement
Senior staff are spending too long sitting behind a screen of data – be it in already existing software, or spreadsheets – instead of coaching and developing their team. They get bogged down in admin, manual workflows and slow reporting.
They could really use real-time, automated workflows that surface important insights quickly and easily. There are tons of different methods and features to not only keep on top of agent development, but make great strides with actionable insights across the contact centre.
Engaging Agents and Teams
With agent attrition rates at a historically high average of 38% and contact centre leaders sharing that recruiting and retaining talent is one of their biggest challenges, keeping agents engaged is a big thorn in the side of today’s contact centres.
COVID shook up the norm and changed expectations of working models everywhere, with SQM reporting that 81% of agents prefer to work from home.
Not all contact centres are able to offer such flexibility, and the ones that are lack the visibility to engage those who might be ‘quiet quitting’.
Add to that the inevitably high-pressure nature of the job, the lack of recognition and feeling unsupported, it’s no wonder agent attrition continues to climb.
Software can and should promote data transparency, feedback loops and specific agent engagement features like rewards and gamification features.
Action Point: What Do You Stand to Gain?
Identify which of these challenges your call centre is facing and start to frame your business case around that. This is not the time for anecdotes or assumptions, so go on a fact-finding mission to uncover the numbers on metrics like:
- Agent attrition rate
- Time spent on reporting
- Time spent coaching/in 1-2-1s
- Number of evaluations completed
- Percentage of interactions evaluated
- Compliance breaches/fails
- Customer satisfaction scores
Do this at a monthly and yearly timescale to start painting a picture of the obstacles you’re facing and, if available, benchmark your data against your industry.
This will be essential to making a strong case for software to transform your contact centre – as well as identifying which aspects the software should primarily focus on.
This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of EvaluAgent – View the Original Article
For more information about EvaluAgent - visit the EvaluAgent Website
About EvaluAgent
EvaluAgent provide software and services that help contact centres engage and motivate their staff to deliver great customer experiences. Find out more about EvaluAgent
Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.
Author: EvaluAgent
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 13th Sep 2024 - Last modified: 22nd Oct 2024
Read more about - Guest Blogs, EvaluAgent, Viki Patten
