Quality policy in contact centers seems to have stagnated a bit in recent years. Traditionally a labour-intensive process. With automated quality monitoring and real-time coaching, you get your employees up to speed faster and therefore productive. Customer service departments with a relatively high turnover can benefit from this. Impression of Verint's Total Quality Summit.

 

Anyone organizing an event in the ArenA cannot avoid doing something with the number 14 or with Cruijffian wisdom. The link between total football en totalqualitymanagement (TQM) in customer contact is of course not that difficult to explain. Quality is not an end in itself, but part of effectiveness and efficiency (errors and repeat traffic cost money). Or as Martin Melis, director of solutions consulting, argued: “every interaction with the customer must be good” and more and more companies are also dealing with regulation.

Verint has chosen to give more depth to the various Engage events, it announced Paul van de Waal, VP Sales Benelux at Verint during the Total Quality Summit. So instead of an annual broad event where all kinds of topics have to be discussed, the company opts for several specialized sessions per year around a theme. The last event in this form was about Total Quality Management in the Johan Cruijff ArenA, on June 6 Digital First Engagement Summit on the agenda (location Depot Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) with, among others, OHRA as a case.

A second life for Quality Monitoring

As far as Verint is concerned, it is no longer necessary to stick to traditional quality policies, where you only have a limited number of conversations per month listened to by coaches. This approach also has the disadvantage that compliance remains limited, that it is usually not combined with a customer assessment and that coaching takes place afterwards. In adult contact centers, all conversations are often recorded (so in addition to telephony, also chat, e-mail, social, messaging and chatbot) and when you apply AQM (automated quality monitoring) to this, you can assess every interaction on all kinds of factors and the put average scores and outliers in a dashboard. If you combine this with real-time agent assist, you can do coaching on the fly: 'show the customer the possibilities of self-service now'.

Fact-based analyses

The various speakers at this Total Quality Summit emphasized one-by-one that employees like it when they have insight into their own performance and know where and how they can (or should) make adjustments. The same is true in football: Frenkie de Jong likes to analyze his own performance on the basis of data. Players also use that data in negotiations with other clubs, according to Ajax. It would be nice if customer contact agents could do the same with their competency reports when they apply for a job at another customer service. Because the benefits of automated QM are mainly for the organization (and its customers): less training time, fewer errors, more first call resolution and for those who need it: 100% compliance.

Do not forget!

Seif Alhamrany, team manager advice at Florius, emphasized it once again: the youngest generation of employees has no problem with solutions such as Realtime Agent Assist and Automated Quality Management (AQM). On the contrary, he says: employees can solve more problems and complex issues independently – an advantage if you work from home where no senior is sitting next to you. You will be provided with correct information immediately. They can see their performance on their own smartphone whenever they want.

No success without support

The Verint software lists the transcript and assessment of each call side by side. Per employee it is visible on which points the performance increases or decreases.

Alhamrany emphasized: involve employees in the how and why of this kind of technology from the very beginning, because if they don't understand it, you don't have to start it. This aspect also emerged from other speakers: for a customer contact department that is already used to working in a structured way with QM, the step to AQM is less significant because it can show you even more potential for improvement, both for the employee and for the organization.

TQM: three insights

The Verint TQM Summit provided at least three insights.
First of all: Verint users all have their own journey. The various components of the Verint suite are usually introduced gradually over a period of several years and the use is gradually expanded. Introducing TQM is therefore not a 'big bang'. This has the advantage that employees who are already used to a structured use of quality monitoring experience the step to AQM as less significant. AQM usually starts with the most essential and crucial parts of the conversations. As more data becomes available and the organization is 'swung in', you can further refine the components on which you assess.

Secondly, the phased development of quality policy is also visible in the tooling itself. In addition to call recording, screen recording is also on the rise. This not only gives you insight into how applications are used, but the actions also show what has been done to help the customer and can therefore also be part of your customer contact registration in your CRM environment.

And finally the third insight: the advancing automation in QM. The more you automate, the more likely the human interaction between agent and coach or supervisor will come under pressure. After all, it is very easy to automatically link performance issues to e-learning modules.

How is the well-being of employees?

That advancing technology in people management is immediately a nice bridge to Dr Phoebe Asquith, put on stage by Verint partner Wise. Asquith, a psychologist with a PhD and a business consultant at Sabio, took a deep look at employee well-being within the contact center. If you don't pay enough attention to well-being, you will have to deal with absenteeism, turnover and sub-optimal performance: things that get in the way of your CX strategy. The pitfall of many organizations, says Asquith, is that they think they're there if they offer a bowl of fresh fruit and yoga. You guessed it: an integrated approach is needed if you want to go further than treating symptoms based on suspicions.

Combine well-being data

Sabio has developed a model in which a large number of factors provide insight into welfare issues – again per employee and in detail. Insight into these factors means that you can make targeted adjustments – for this it is necessary that managers understand how to make adjustments. And to what extent their behavior might lead to problems. Sabio's agent wellbeing solution also contains a kind of chatbot that questions employees in different ways a few times a week and provides feedback and tips based on results. Eventually you can get the information out the well-being tool combine with data from other systems, such as WFM and QM.

How many agents in your contact center have burnout symptoms?

Just like with AQM, you may wonder to what extent this puts even more pressure on the social aspect of working in customer contact – putting the cart before the horse. Fortunately, Asquith came up with practical insights that you can apply without relying too heavily on data and automation. For example, Microsoft investigated that 'back to back meetings' increase the chance of burnout complaints, simply because there is too little recovery time for agents.

The likelihood of these kinds of problems increases with emotional and complex conversations that lead to stress, Asquith said. Providing adequate recovery time comes at the cost of short-term productivity, but the long-term effects are predictable. Unfortunately, Asquith neglected to ask about absenteeism figures and the level of insight among contact center managers: how many agents in your contact center have symptoms that indicate imminent burnout?

Making a radical quality improvement

Roger Becker, lead operational analytics & insights, explained in the second half of the Total Quality Summit how VodafoneZiggo pulls out all the stops in terms of analytics to gain as much insight as possible into the company's 7 million customer interactions. Here too, it is clearly visible how the organization has progressed step by step with analytics. Not only on content – ​​what exactly is behind all the billing questions we get? But also to be able to determine priorities: what do you invest your QM time in?

For Beckers it is certain: anyone who wants to make radical quality improvements cannot only look at the conversations that employees have, but will also have to analyze the processes. In addition, integration of all quality data is necessary, so that you avoid pitfalls such as addressing a successful sales agent about an AHT that is too long.

Personal leadership: developing yourself

VodafoneZiggo also uses speech analytics from Verint to find out in detail what happens in conversations with customers. And VodafoneZiggo also states: "You want to enable the employee to coach himself - an employee is more engaged if he can find where he can improve." Personal leadership is expected from agents: this means, among other things, that advisors themselves look for opportunities to improve themselves based on data-based insights. AQM will be one of the resources that the advisor has at his disposal to gain insight into where there is room for improvement.

Tanja Hoymann, senior quality manager at Bridgestone Mobility Solutions, concluded the day with a series of practical tips for those who want to get started with quality. Quality is always about people, processes and performance. Quality KPIs only come alive if you share them with all stakeholders. She also raised the question of who is listening in on the chatbot – is it part of your TQM? And you may want to measure everything, but ultimately the behavior of employees determines your success. And not unimportant: also focus on the things that do go well and reward people for that. (Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

Event, Featured, Human Resources Wise, Verint