HOW ARE CONTACT CENTRES USING QUALITY MONITORING?

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1 1 HOW ARE CONTACT CENTRES USING QUALITY MONITORING? REPORT COMPILED BY BUSINESS SYSTEMS (UK) LTD USING SURVEY RESULTS FROM OVER 100 CONTACT CENTRE PROFESSIONALS.

2 2 CONTENTS CONTENTS... 2 INTRODUCTION... 3 Q1. How many agent calls do you play back and evaluate per month?... 4 Q2. How do you select the calls for agent evaluations?... 5 Q3. What s the primary purpose of evaluating your agent s calls?... 6 Q4. What tools do you use to assist with evaluating agent calls?... 7 Q5. What kind of insights are you uncovering when conducting agent evaluations?... 8 Q6. How do you monitor agent performance across other channels, i.e. , live chat and social media?... 9 Q7. Who is responsible for evaluating agent calls? SURVEY RESPONDENTS BREAKDOWN Q8. What size contact centre does your organisation operate? Q9. What sector does your contact centre operate in? CONCLUSION... 13

3 3 INTRODUCTION How are contact centres using Quality Monitoring? We wanted to find out. When your agents are successful, your contact centre is successful. Unfortunately the reality isn t always that simple as tough targets, tight budgets and staff shortages mean that contact centres sometimes struggle to perform at their best. Quality Monitoring is a means of monitoring calls and measuring agent performance. The right Quality Monitoring software quantifies the success of agent interactions - making it easy to score, evaluate and report on agent calls. This data can then be used to improve agent performance, boost customer service and drive business revenue. Most contact centres have some form of Quality Monitoring in place. Yet the methods used to collect data can vary greatly - potentially impacting the value of any programme that has been put in place. We thought it was time for an overview of how, when and why contact centres monitor their agents. To find out, we conducted a survey on the usage of Quality Monitoring in today s UK contact centres... We designed a simple seven-question survey and asked 100 contact centres of various sizes and from various sectors for their answers. The aim was to get a broad snapshot of how different businesses are using Quality Monitoring in their organisation. The survey was able to capture and represent contact centres of many different sizes, from those with fewer than 50 agents to those with more than 250. We were also able to explore data from ten different industries, from motor services to housing, banking, finance and public sector organisations. This is what we found.

4 4 Q1. How many agent calls do you play back and evaluate per month? When you know exactly how well agents are performing, you can improve the success of any contact centre. The more calls you evaluate, the more insight you get. Yet for many contact centres, finding time to analyse a reasonable sample of calls can be a problem. Call evaluation was the norm for our respondents, with roughly 9 out of 10 contact centres evaluating at least one call per month. Results suggest that the majority of contact centres, 43%, evaluate between 4 and 10 calls per agent per month, with only a fifth taking a more thorough approach and sifting through more than 10 calls each month. To evaluate and feedback on one call it can take up to half an hour, as such 4 calls per month per agent is a respectable amount. Agent evaluation is in place in 92% of contact centres 8% of contact centres do not evaluate calls Most contact centres analyse between 4 and 10 calls per month

5 5 Q2. How do you select the calls for agent evaluations? It is important contact centres choose the right calls to evaluate. This can be a big challenge. Most calls follow standard processes and provide little to learn from. It s the exceptional calls - those that somehow deviate from the norm - that tend to reveal examples of best and worst practice. The technology exists to flag these anomalous calls automatically. But is it being used? Only 12% of the contact centres we targeted were selecting calls based on deviation from certain parameters - such as call duration. Instead most respondents were evaluating calls at random. This suggests either: 1) gaps in appropriate technology (like automated Quality Monitoring); or 2) a lack of best practice understanding when it comes to agent evaluation. 1 in 5 contact centres were asking agents to perform some level of self-screening: an effective way to wheedle out the calls that matter, but one that eats into agent productivity. More than two-thirds of contact centres randomly select calls for evaluation 19% ask agents to provide some level of self-screening Only 12% are following the best practice of evaluating calls that deviate from pre-set parameters - such as call duration

6 6 Q3. What s the primary purpose of evaluating your agent s calls? Whether you are monitoring customer service or sales technique, there s always room for improvement. Always new insight to glean. Especially in a service that has a high staff turnover compared to other professions - our Contact Centre Guide shows that the annual rate of agent attrition can be as high as 43%. Providing continuity against a backdrop of ever-changing staff is about knowing what works - and what doesn t. Our respondents cited agent improvement as the overwhelming motive for evaluating calls. There was also a clear ambition to improve customer service, which has an obvious link with improving agent performance. Sharing best practice amongst staff was not a priority. This suggests businesses are approaching staff training on a reactive, case-by-case basis, rather than proactively training all staff in methods that get results. With sharing best practice and identifying broken processes currently at low levels, the data would indicate that Quality Monitoring is being used as a reactive process more so than a proactive one. Contact centre mangers are predominantly focusing on the agents, whilst the information gathered through Quality Monitoring is not being used at its full potential. Quality Monitoring statistics could proactively support all areas of the contact centre. They could be used for many other purposes and by many departments, from operation, training to IT & recruitment. For example the Training department can use quality reports to determine the success and failures of inductions and review ongoing training development needs.

7 The small number of businesses evaluating calls to find broken processes (9%) indicates that contact centres trust their frameworks and are more concerned with improving customer service through agent behaviours. Nurturing agent performance is normally the primary motive for evaluating calls Improving customer service is the top purpose for a quarter of contact centres Contact centres are less concerned about best practice or identifying poor processes 7 Q4. What tools do you use to assist with evaluating agent calls? Call recording technology has been available since the late 1980s. More than three-quarters of our respondents use some form of it today, meaning the outdated practice of side-by-side agent monitoring is now the exception. Quality Monitoring software, which automates the process of agent evaluation, is used by around a third of contact centres. Advanced technology like speech analytics can dramatically improve the way contact centres select which calls to evaluate - yet take up is in its infancy. Use of call recording technology is now widespread - with more than three-quarters of contact centres using some form of it 30% of respondents are following the best practice of using Quality Monitoring software to automate call evaluation Contact centres are slow to integrate new technologies like speech analytics

8 8 Q5. What kind of insights are you uncovering when conducting agent evaluations? Answers to this question were extremely varied (summarised below). However there was a trend for contact centres to express surprise at the performance of their agents. Other contact centres noticed how agent performance tends to homogenise, with staff adopting the best and worst habits of those around them. Good agent performance A handful of our respondents were pleasantly surprised with the insight they gathered from call recording, finding agents to be: Providers of excellent customer service Empathetic Able to resolve support tickets on the first call Professional communicators Able to react well to different situations Bad agent performance Unfortunately the contact centres that were pleased with agent performance were the exception. More commonly, respondents noted that call recording revealed: Poor communication skills Knowledge gaps and lack of business understanding Inability to answer FAQs Discipline problems This insight meant that contact centres could identify where training was needed and implement measures to improve performance. A spotlight on process... Some contact centres noted how call recording enabled them to eliminate unnecessary processes and share examples of best practice. Worryingly, a couple of respondents revealed that call evaluation made them realise that their agent scoring systems were slanted to give the impression that agents were performing well - at the expense of designing processes that improved customer service. Customer insight

9 The final trend from our data was for contact centres to benefit from enhanced customer insight by evaluating calls. They identified: Issues that frustrated customers Poor user experiences on key web pages Common queries This insight allowed contact centre managers to influence board level strategy - pinpointing opportunities to improve products and services as well as the way they were marketed. 9 Q6. How do you monitor agent performance across other channels, i.e. , live chat and social media? Digital communication has transformed the customer service landscape over the last decade. Consumers are now just as likely to make contact through or social media, rather than using the phone. And the digital culture of immediacy means consumers expect fast, accurate responses. This makes it crucial for contact centres to have a means of monitoring, tracking and responding to digital interactions. Those with robust processes in place are likely to win a lot of ground in the fight for customer service. So it s surprising that among our respondents who used digital channels, only around half monitored them. Techniques included: Random selection Live monitoring of social media with results documented in MS Excel Automated customer surveys after live web chat interactions All customer-facing s manually screened before they are sent There is a clear need among the contact centres we talked to for integrated monitoring software - a means of monitoring and evaluating calls as well as all digital interactions through one platform. Doing so would avoid lost support tickets and bring an end to the lack of cohesion between calls and digital interactions. It would also help to prevent missed opportunities in terms of building stronger connections with customers through social media interaction. Many respondents noted that they were currently researching their options with a view to implementing the necessary technology as soon as possible.

10 10 Q7. Who is responsible for evaluating agent calls? When it comes to evaluating agents, the key to reliable data is having a consistent method for selecting and scoring calls. That way it becomes easier to spot patterns in the data. Consistent evaluation is also important for keeping agents engaged, showing them that you have a fair and open method for assessing their performance. Team leaders/supervisors were responsible for evaluating calls among half of our respondents. The problem with this is that contact centres are busy environments. Familiar issues like tough conversion targets and staff shortages can mean that supervisors sometimes struggle to meet their evaluation commitments - rushing through their analyses or not doing them at all. A better way is to establish a dedicated Quality Monitoring team, whose sole purpose is to regularly monitor calls and ratchet-up agent performance through training and best practice benchmarking. A quarter of our respondents had such a team. This seems to chime with the 18% of businesses evaluating ten or more calls per month (see Question 1). Team leaders or supervisors evaluate calls in 50% of contact centres A quarter have a dedicated Quality Monitoring team

11 11 SURVEY RESPONDENTS BREAKDOWN The information outlined below, provides a snapshot of the location, industry type and size of contact centre that responded to the survey. Q8. What size contact centre does your organisation operate? We targeted contact centres with varying staff numbers to get a broad overview of how call evaluation was being used across small, medium and large businesses. The majority (34%) of our respondents had between agents. The second most numerous set of respondents were smaller contact centres, those with between 1-50 agents. Larger contact centres are also well represented in our data, with a third of respondents from contact centres with more than 100 agents.

12 12 Q9. What sector does your contact centre operate in? Due to the importance of agent performance in certain niches, we have targeted a number of businesses from the banking and finance sectors as well as a large amount of government and public sector organisations. Yet one of the aims of our survey was to gather data from a number of different industries. Housing, charity and retail operations are well represented in the data. So too - albeit to a lesser degree - are telemarketing and construction. Among the Other industries there were a high number of businesses from the IT & Technology sector, an industry where customer support is all important.

13 13 CONCLUSION Contact centres are busy. Sometimes call evaluation is hard to squeeze in. The typical contact centre is a hive of activity. Agents often have demanding targets to meet. Add in the typically high turnover of staff and it s easy to see how call evaluation can sometimes slip down the list of priorities for contact centres. This may explain the fact that although 30% of respondents have Quality Monitoring software in place, only 25% of contact centres have a dedicated Quality Monitoring team and just 18% get around to evaluating more than ten calls per month (Questions 1, 4 & 7). Agents represent your business. They have to perform well. Contact centre staff are often on the frontline of business. They have a huge role in terms of how businesses are perceived by their customers. Yet many contact centres are often surprised at how poorly their agents perform, citing a lack of business knowledge, poor communication skills and discipline as problems. Our anecdotal data suggests that call evaluation can transform agent performance and influence board level strategy. But contact centres can fall into a trap of self-fulfilling processes. Processes that make it easier for agents to score highly in evaluations - at the expense of designing to improve customer experience. New technologies can transform Quality Monitoring. And they re needed now. Despite the self-fulfilling processes described above, 49% of contact centres cite a commitment to improving customer service as their primary reason for evaluating calls. Unfortunately it seems they sometimes lack the technology to gather the data they need as quickly and easily as possible. This is set to change. A number of contact centres stated a need for technology that enabled them to monitor several channels ( , social media, web chat) at once via one platform. The growing onus on businesses to be reactive to multiple contact points, particularly social media, will accelerate the speed at which new technologies are implemented in contact centres. Quality Monitoring solutions and advice are available from