Customer Quality Management

What is Customer Quality Management?

Customer quality management refers to all the processes undertaken by contact centers to meet customer expectations and ensure customer satisfaction. 

It involves training and refocusing agents to perform efficiently, and also entails enhancing agents’ skills to deliver world-class customer experience through continuous improvement.‍

According to a recent study, 47% of customers say they will stop buying from a company if they have a subpar customer experience, with 76% taking their business elsewhere. As options proliferate, loyalty is diminishing and switching brands is becoming ridiculously convenient.

In today's competitive business landscape, achieving high-quality customer service is critical for success. That’s why the foremost priority of contact center agents is to deliver a top-notch experience to customers. 

What is the role of customer quality in business success?

Customer quality impacts business success in a variety of ways, including:

• Customer loyalty and retention: High customer quality drives customer loyalty and retention, which is critical for long-term business success.
• Brand reputation and differentiation: High customer quality is critical for maintaining a positive brand reputation and differentiation in a crowded marketplace.
• Revenue and growth: High customer quality drives revenue and growth by increasing customer satisfaction and engagement, and driving repeat business and referrals.

But relying solely on customer feedback won’t give you the best actionable insights, especially as the trend of “quiet abandonment”—or customers leaving without telling you why—takes over. 

Instead, adopting a robust, automated, and intelligent Quality Management (QM) procedure with a dedicated QM team is a more proactive and accurate approach to achieving and maintaining customer quality.

What is Quality Management?

Quality Management, otherwise referred to as QM, is the act of overseeing end-to-end activities and tasks that are prerequisite to maintaining an optimal level of performance. It is an umbrella term for all processes that involve continuous evaluations and improvement cycles, such as determining quality policy, framing a quality management plan, taking measures for quality control, and undertaking actions for efficiency improvement.

Maintaining the highest levels of quality standards requires a comprehensive approach from all parts of the business. The buzz phrase used across contact centers today is Total Quality Management (TQM), an approach that levels quality standards for all stakeholders.

What is Total Quality Management and What It Means For Your Contact Center?

Total quality management is a business philosophy adapted from the early 1980s automobile sector. Today, it is equally relevant to contact centers striving to deliver high CX. Here’s how contact centers incorporate TQM in their workflows.

Identify factors‍

TQM starts with identifying all the factors shaping CX by addressing the pain points. These include your CRM, workforce management solution, rising dead air, or high rates of supervisor escalation. It’s only by identifying these areas of improvement that the TQM strategy and interventions can be built.

Intervene and measure the changes

‍Are the new process interventions making any difference? Can improvements be measured and quantified? Are we taking the proper corrective action to address customer complaints? A good quality assurance solution is data driven and ensures accurately measurable results.

Persistence pays

‍TQM demands cooperative commitment from all stakeholders. It may appear slightly challenging to build momentum, but TQM is an ongoing exercise, rife with trial and error, that pays off in the long term. 

What is a Quality Management System (QMS)?

The big challenge in QM is analyzing 100% of customer interactions. Most contact centers monitor only about 2% of the interactions on average, while a huge chunk of data is neglected.

This results in a QM strategy built on skewed data — clearly not a great strategy! 

Advanced QM using quality management software is the solution to this problem.

It is an automated, holistic approach to QM that ensures close monitoring of all interactions and results in improved KPIs, including AHT, FCR, and CSAT.

It automates all quality processes in a single application regardless of the data source, channel (phone, email, chat, etc.), or recording platform. It automatically captures, sorts, and scores 100% of customer interactions, leaving no room for chance.‍

What is Quality Management Automation?

QM automation is all about replacing the manual processes of call center QA, designing optimized coaching programs, and improving sentiment analysis with a brilliant new technology: Conversation Intelligence.

Conversation Intelligence enables you to:

• Carry out automated AI-driven agent evaluations on 100% of customer interactions, scoring them without subjective bias or errors.
• Avoid settling for a one-size-fits-all coaching program as contact center AI enables a tailor-made design and agent-oriented coaching workflows. 
• Perform an automatic sentiment analysis of all calls with over 82% transcription accuracy.

At its core, conversation intelligence provides you with visibility into 100% of your conversations so you can better understand what’s actually happening on the front line. 

When you know what’s happening, you can provide more personalized agent coaching and make better business decisions across the board, from marketing to operations to logistics.

What is the Purpose of Automated QM?

There is a strong correlation between quality of customer interactions and contact centers’ overall growth. Positive interactions are at the root of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, eventually driving higher revenues. 

An automated QM regimen ensures:

1. 360-degree view of agent interactions – Automated QM gives you the opportunity to scan every interaction and zero-in on the problem areas. Additionally, more visibility into every conversation means more insights the entire business can use, from marketing to product to logistics. For example, if 80% of customers are asking for a specific feature or complaining about a certain area of the website, now you know and you can fix it.
2. Improved customer service – Due to consistent feedback, agents are able to engage customers in positive interactions, which leads to enhanced CX. Contact center analytics also help you identify macro trends over time, enabling you to adapt to reap ultimate benefits.
3. Customer retention – Positive interactions and better customer experience translate into loyalty and customer retention, ensuring steady revenue.
4. Improved employee experience – Removing subjectivity and the uncertainty of manual processes, automated QM enhances the agent experience, which reflects in their customer interaction.
5. Opportunities for agent training – You can easily discern the weak links of an agent through automated QM and design coaching programs that suit their specific needs.
6. Improved hiring decisions – Automated QM can inform hiring decisions by identifying indicators of past success and key behaviors of high-performing agents.

What are Signs of Both a Good and a Bad QM workflow?

QM workflows emanate from the genetics of your work culture. Some pointers to evaluate your QM workflows include:

• Is a customer-centric culture at the heart of your business? Do you prioritize customer needs and expectations? All aspects of your business, from product development to customer support, should have a customer focus: They should be aligned around the customer journey and voice of the customer. A few examples of what this might look like are a dedication to customer success, easy and cost-free onboarding, agent satisfaction, zero hidden costs, reasonable pricing, and complete transparency.
• Do you offer fast time-to-value? In today’s intense competitive economic environment, time and efficiency are the greatest assets. Thus, rolling out QM solutions within the shortest possible time frame is a must. Clear timelines and accountability, technical support throughout the roll-out, and training for fast implementation are indicators of a fast time-to-value workflow.
• Is your QM platform easy to navigate? For seamless adoption of the new QM platform, every level of your contact team must be able to log in and view it. A simple UI and cross-functional insights indicate an ease of navigation of the QM platform.
• Is your data accurate? Data quality management and accuracy lie at the heart of your QM effort. Transcription accuracy has to be above 80% and anything below that is not good enough. Transcription self-learning and tuning, AI-driven redaction, and an in-house machine learning team demonstrate a strong commitment to accuracy.
• Do you have feedback loops and other data-gathering mechanisms in place? Customer feedback and insights are invaluable for improving customer quality. Companies should implement processes for gathering customer feedback and using it to inform product and service development, as well as to improve customer satisfaction and retention.
• Do you proactively address customer issues and concerns? Proactively addressing customer issues and concerns is critical for maintaining a good QM workflow. Companies should implement mechanisms for identifying and addressing customer issues and concerns before they become major problems.
• How are you leveraging social media and other communication channels? You should use social media and other digital communication platforms to engage with customers, gather feedback and insights, and provide exceptional support and service.

Metrics for Measuring Customer Quality

Measuring customer quality is critical for understanding customer perceptions and improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are some key metrics for measuring customer quality:

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT): CSAT measures how satisfied customers are with their interactions with a company. It is typically measured through customer surveys and other feedback mechanisms.
2. Customer retention: Customer retention measures how many of your existing customers continue to do business with you over time. It is a key indicator of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
3. Quality control metrics: Quality control metrics, such as Six Sigma, are used to measure the effectiveness of quality management initiatives and processes.
4. Voice of the customer (VOC): VOC metrics measure how well a company is meeting customer needs and expectations. They typically include customer feedback and insights gathered through surveys, feedback loops, and other mechanisms.

Transform Quality Management with Conversation Intelligence

Contact center QM is an elaborate and continuous exercise to improve your service quality, agent performance, and customer interactions. Conventionally, it is marred by the lack of accuracy, minuscule, and random selection of interactions and subjectivity in scoring. But, powered with conversation intelligence, QM is eager  for a more accurate, comprehensive, and standardized practice transformation. This liberates critical human resources in the QM team to focus on tasks that matter the most for agent improvement, greater CX, and higher revenues.

See conversation intelligence in action. Get a demo.