Quality analysis is an ongoing process in the call center to guarantee that agents are delivering superior customer service. Thus, monitoring is essential to keep your finger on the pulse of how your teams are interacting with the end customer. This allows for timely coaching and behavior modification as needed.
A quality monitoring system must operate under established policies and procedures to consistently deliver calibrated results. You may have an experienced quality analysis team with an expert leading them, but if you lack commitment to adhering to policies and procedures you are at risk in the effectiveness of the analysis this team delivers.
Here is a list of how you can maintain policies and procedures for effective quality analysis.
Step 1: Outline the Policies and Procedures
First you must create the policies and procedures that will govern the quality monitoring of the call center.
Policies are documentation of rules, principles, and guidelines that an organization establishes to reach a long-term goal, in this case, quality control. Procedures, on the other hand, are the specific methods that will convey the policies in the day-to-day running of the organization.
This process may take a while, but it is important to invest your resources in setting a good foundation. You can look at policies and procedures as your quality delivery strategy and tactics.
Areas which need to be addressed include:
- Productivity measurements
- Workflow
- Calibration expectations
- Reporting standards
- Escalation process
- Dispute process
- Audit the Analyst (ATA) process and communication
- Monthly scorecard requirements and review
- Company policies
- Career Development
Step 2: Document the Standards
You should have an outline of the policies and procedures governing your quality assessment process within the call center, but you need to take it a step further and document it. By publishing your policies and procedures, you make them available to all within the company. This will easily facilitate the review with new hires and allow for documentation for all team members’ adherence to standards.
Step 3: Train the quality analysts
Leaders are responsible for formulating policies and procedures. However, the people to implement them are the quality analysts. You need to do an intensive training for the QA’s to ensure they understand the policies and procedures and thus be in a position to deliver quality service.
Step 4: Coach the quality analysts
Employee coaching is paramount for continuous performance improvement. When managers coach the team members on a regular basis, they further develop their knowledge and skills.
Proper coaching supplements formal training and goes beyond on-the-job training. Matters relating to quality need reinforcement regularly so that the weaker QA’s can catch up and the strong performers can become better.
There is always room for improvement and as a manager and coach your role is to guide all members of your team to engage in continuous performance improvement.
Step 5: Monitor and review
Finally, monitor the implementation of the policies and procedures. Policies should be formally reviewed annually to ensure that efficiencies are captured and modifications are made. Adding analysts to the review team will give you a hands-on perspective as well as allow for more ownership from the QA team.
In conclusion, when you create policies and procedure, document them properly, train and coach your quality analysts on the best practices and then monitor and review the process, you will maintain the policies and procedure and carry out effective quality analysis.
You can have an in-house quality monitoring team that is dedicated to only quality measuring and analysis. However, it is advisable to incorporate a third party audit team to audit your internal QA team. The external team will give you additional data based on their analysis that will help you improve your quality standards and provide the operations teams with actionable data to help modify agent behavior.
