Quality assurance underlies all sections of your best practice. It is the responsibility of every campaign owner and contact centre to consider and deliver quality to their customers.
Without quality assurance, it is likely that the outbound telemarketing and teleservice industry will fall into disrepute – making it no longer effective as a business practice and possibly attracting direct government regulation.
This section highlights quality assurance best practice that you should implement. There are also other suggestions that will enhance quality and will become practical in the future.
Quality assurance tools
There are a number of technological tools that provide an aid to quality assurance.
Some of these, such as call recording, are fundamental to quality assurance. Others, like speech analytics, are ones you should understand for the future.
Call recording and quality monitoring
- Record calls
Call recording is a requirement of a number of regulatory bodies and is legally allowed provided the requirements of The Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) Interception of Communications
Regulations 2000 are met.
- Keep recordings
Recordings can be accessed and examined in any customer disputes.
- Use quality monitoring
Use quality monitoring, with supervisors proactively assessing a sample of calls against your criteria.
- Use screen capture
Use screen capture to complement call recording. Replay both at the same time to gain a full view of your agent’s process and check that data capture is consistently high.
- Define specific training for each agent
Use the findings to target specific training for each of your agents. Ensure that you quickly spot and address any quality issues.
- Notify agents about any monitoring
Make all reasonable efforts to inform your agents that calls are being monitored or recorded.
Reporting and business intelligence
Technology can provide reporting on a wide range of measures. Some of these are fundamental to verification by regulatory authorities. For example, under Ofcom regulations the operations of any predictive dialler must be captured and stored.
- Monitor against campaign measures
Assess calls against your campaign measures, such as conversion rate or customer satisfaction indexes, as part of a balanced scorecard to improve quality.
- Monitor for potential problems
A number of quality monitoring solutions can spot other potential problems in calls, including:
- Long silences in calls
- Where the agent and consumer talk over each other
- High levels of stress in a voice
Speech analytics
Speech analytics is a very new technology but it will become commonplace in the future and will profoundly affect the way contact centres assess performance. It allows the identification of key words, phrases and stress patterns.
Speech analytics automatically maps call information into language patterns that are based on dozens of indicators such as customer satisfaction, agent politeness, acoustic stress, and call tempo.
- Identify call issues
Use speech analytics to uncover patterns that are quite unexpected, alerting you to issues that you would not be able to discover otherwise.
- Combine with call data
Combine speech patterns with call data to reveal in-depth information and allow you to make further analysis.
“Pull” calls individually and and inspected them for quality.
- Monitor for swear-words
Monitor for inappropriate language, including swear-words or other offensive terms.
- Investigate benefits and issues
Investigate and assess all factors around how your specific organisation can benefit from speech analytics, including:
- Management of the technology
- Use of alerts and trends
- Feeding back results
- Using results to improve quality
- Legality and regularity compliance