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Contact Center Quality Assurance is Essential in All Channels

5/23/2018
By Donna Fluss

There’s a great TV commercial about what happens when consumers insure only 3 quarters of a car. The punch line is that when the car needs to be replaced, the consumer only gets ¾ of a car, which is not useful or practical. (While some people may enjoy driving a vehicle with 3 tires, most of us find 4 tires work best.)

The same concept applies to quality assurance in a contact center. It doesn’t make sense to perform quality assurance (QA) only on calls when the contact center supports emails, chat, SMS and social media, as well. QA serves many purposes and has many benefits for an enterprise, but one of its most important contributions is to serve as an insurance policy to minimize the impact of agent and company mistakes on its customers. However, if a company only does QA on 1 or 2 of the channels it supports, it won’t have visibility into the performance of its agents which is essential in an era when consumers are very quick to publicize anything that a company does wrong.

There are two primary reasons that companies give for not performing QA on their digital channels; the first is that they do not have the bandwidth or staff to expand their existing QA resources, who are already stretched to the limit and do not have time to complete the required number of evaluations for phone calls, let alone other media. (This is a resource and cost issue.) The second reason is that they don’t know how to do QA on digital channels.

A great way to address both of these issues is to transition to analytics-enabled QA (AQA). This is where a company uses their speech and text analytics solutions to review anywhere from 10% to 100% of their interactions from all channels, and a QA specialist gets involved only when an issue requires a human touch. Using AQA is a game-changer for companies, as it gives them visibility into a much larger percentage of their inquiries, and is a much better “insurance policy” than traditional QA, where companies typically monitor only 2 – 10 calls, or 1% – 3% of calls per month.

The world has changed, and supporting digital channels is imperative. QA is a mission-critical activity for all channels, to monitor staff performance and to provide much-needed risk management.