It’s unquestionable that contact center compliance teams are data driven. From measuring call volume to completion rates, it’s critical for organizations to collect compliance data in order to track performance and make ongoing improvements.
But far too often, compliance teams end up compiling and analyzing data that doesn’t ultimately lead to clear business decisions. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are some tips and ideas for rethinking quality assurance compliance to deliver meaningful results.
An ongoing insights challenge
For several years now, compliance specialists and industry experts have been aware that they have a problem. “Compliance functions are still spending a disproportionate amount of time collecting data, versus time spent adding strategic value to the business through analyzing and trending the data collected,” noted a 2015 Compliance Trends Survey from Compliance Week and Deloitte.
Part of the problem is that most contracts and processes are focused on the number of QA monitors and compliance-driven evaluation forms that agents complete. At the same time, clients are demanding insights into customer behavior and patterns as well as insights about broken processes or roadblocks to their business outcomes. They want helpful insights to improve CPI and associate performance, out-of-the-box ideas, and proactive leadership.
Rethinking quality assurance (QA) in the contact center
Transforming the insights that compliance teams deliver begins with people, processes, and technology. Let’s start with people: Compliance teams need higher-skilled data scientists and process improvement experts to collaborate with associates and go beyond evaluating interactions to proposing proactive solutions.
Imagine a team of associates analyzing the customer journey, probing customer pain points, and identifying improvements. They would be coached on new processes for proactively identifying and offering solutions for improving the service experience. They would also be equipped with technology such as predictive and speech analytics tools combined with AI to quickly surface the right patterns and insights.
Here’s an example of how this approach works: With one client, through our speech analytics and call data platforms, we were able to see that a large percentage of agents sent unjustified replacement devices to customers and created a lower NPS due to more support escalations to corporate.
To fix the problem, we recommended making changes to the knowledge base that agents used and we created an uptraining program to better merge the agents’ technical and soft skill knowledge. Implementing these recommendations increased cost savings through a 30 percent reduction in replacement devices being sent out, the client’s worldwide NPS increased 12 percent, and corporate escalations decreased 31 percent.
Set your QA team up for success
Companies can speed up the QA transformation process by working with a partner that has already built the foundation to enable those desired changes. Look for a partner that can reduce the costs of compliance through powerful automation and streamlined investigations (many current processes are manual or based on antiquated technology and provide no historical trend analysis.) Additionally, many clients assume more is better and create very expensive QA setups to support a lot of compliance-driven monitors. The truth is, it’s about quality over quantity.
Using technology and people to complete a high quantity of monitors won’t provide the types of quality insights that a small group of highly trained experts who are strategically monitoring transactions would produce. And finally, work with your contact center partner on agreed metrics that measure program effectiveness, providing impactful analysis to the business and appropriately influence outcomes.
Transforming contact center QA insights won’t happen immediately—old habits and processes tend to persist. But by adopting an innovative mindset, contact centers can begin putting the changes in place for associates to proactively identify the insights that forward-looking organizations need to make smarter decisions both today and in the future.
