The Relationship Between Quality Management, Speech Analytics and CX

David Samuel at Contexta360 explores how the relationship between quality management and speech analytics maximizes CX impact.

Quality management has evolved over time: from the days of telephone operators and supervisors walking the floor, to random recorded calls being sent to team leaders and supervisors, to something of a more intelligent and automated offering.

Today, the contact centre is regarded as the centre of excellence for most businesses. Quality management (QM) is viewed as the main way to understand how your business is performing, what improvements can be made and if you are remaining compliant with the mass of processes and legislation.

Contact centres must implement a constructive process and workflow that focuses primarily on knowledge gained from customers and conversations, not just from internal performance criteria and metrics.

The knowledge gained from customers must be the primary driver for your performance measurement, the employee development actions that take place, and to help you understand why your customers really contact you.

Traditional QM is based on manual evaluations. It relies on team leaders and supervisors listening to calls and scoring them according to fixed criteria. It provides accurate, consistent and measurable analysis of agent performance over time, and it can be used to direct coaching and training efforts.

Add speech analytics, which is rapidly becoming a mainstream technology, and you open up a host of opportunities for contact centres, with technologies that can process 100 per cent of calls while identifying other key metrics such as sentiment, empathy, and insights into why your customers are calling.

Speech analytics enables users to systematically collect data from a large sample of interactions, but data is nothing unless it can be turned into information. Combining speech analytics with QM can help to turn that data into actionable information.

Using the speech analytics tool to determine key issues that require a deeper understanding, and then combining that with targeted human listening to analyse the interactions for meaningful insights, root cause analysis and behavioural correlations, will create richer and more actionable outcomes.

Furthermore, the combined power of a speech analytics and a QM tool can identify calls that contain specific words or phrases, or even highlight areas of interest that you hadn’t considered. This is paramount when trying to pinpoint conversations that require escalation or immediate attention.

The business can then leverage the outputs to focus on agent coaching opportunities – evaluating them for specific agent behavioural trends, identifying agent behaviours that need improvement, and providing actionable feedback to the supervisors for coaching and training purposes.

Add this value to other stakeholders, and suddenly you can link your conversational data right across your business.

This includes correlating data right through to customer experience measures such as customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Scores and customer effort, as well as sales and operational KPIs, CRM data, complaint data and agent HR data.

By integrating QM results with other key data points, business leaders can identify and address the true root causes of issues such as dissatisfaction, customer attrition and many other problems that can affect the health of the business.

By combining the power of QM and speech analytics as an integrated solution, you can fulfil the whole of your organisation’s needs in a compelling way.

Speech analytics can collect data on both the conversational and transactional part of a customer interaction, and it can be used easily and effectively for compliance and automation to increase efficiency.

However, without the integration of QM, the next-level insights that truly affect the whole customer experience are not identified or resolved.

Author: Guest Author