Contact Quality Control - Can this be delivered through coaching?

Markus Novak, Team Manager Blizzard Entertainment, explores different methods for ensuring high contact quality.

Contact Quality Control At an NPS CCMA event in Cork a conversation unfolded around the topic of different ways to ensure a high quality standard for each contact. At the moment it seems there are two options available for contact centres:

  1. Have a separate quality control department
  2. Have the quality control put into the team leader's responsibilities via coaching.

There are positives for both options.

Quality Control Department

A quality control department is specialised and has therefore a higher productivity. Due to the higher volume managed by the Quality Control department the operation is able to react much quicker to for example deviations from a script, low quality performance on the contact in general and/or any other issues up to misconduct. These benefits are especially important for sensitive contracts when the advisor has to adhere to legal requirements.

Coaching

For the other option, the implementation of quality control into the team leaders responsibilities via coaching, the benefits lie in a different area. Team Leaders, as all people managers, require a good relationship with their team to be successful. They have the ability to work together with their individual team members over a longer period of time and can therefore support and empower their advisors to come up with individual performance improvement measures themselves. To be able to focus on constant performance improvement this type of quality control needs a strong initial training for the individual contract to ensure that minimum quality requirements are met on the advisor's first day on the floor.

From my experience, the human touch of the feedback provided by the direct manager increases the feeling of responsibility for the advisor for their own performance.

Instead of being sent a review of their own work by a different department, the advisor feels empowered to bring in their own strengths to their work, personalising the contact and creating a sense of pride and satisfaction for them. This will lead to a workforce that steadily improves the quality of their responses opposite to steadily meeting minimum requirements. Unfortunately it is not feasible in all areas to move the quality control to the team leaders. This option is most successful if there is a steady environment and as well as steady teams. Not all contracts are able to facilitate this option and for those a QC department has its value. I wanted to spark the conversation for your centre to maybe rethink if all contracts are benefiting from a Quality Control department or if there are areas in which Team Leader coaching would be the better alternative?