Why you Cannot Afford to Ignore Quality Management

Anna Byrne from Scorebuddy, illustrates how best to set up quality monitoring and the consequences of it's absence

Quality management plays a large role in the day-to-day running of today's contact centres.  It is seen as a strategic resource to drive overall customer experience.  As contact centres increase in size and complexity, managing quality becomes more critical.

Establishing & maintaining a robust quality monitoring framework

Contact centres are under fire from many angles; customer service, regulatory bodies, numerous competitors and management.  The quality of frontline workers must be higher than ever to meet these demands.

Agent performance should be monitored quantitatively AND qualitatively.

Quality management in customer service must be established at the roots, sustained constantly, and re-evaluated after a growth period, if not the company may see a shrinkage period thereafter. Quality monitoring should not by restricted to calls and emails either, it should infiltrate all customer communication avenues. Customers today are knowledgeable and have the ability to severely damage a company's reputation by a single social media posting. A company can't afford to have a less than expected service.  It's common place to find a company's social media pages littered with customer complaints and this trend doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.  A company must ensure they have a solid quality framework in place that addresses the increased bargaining power of the customer.  Responding correctly to the worst complaints will instil customer confidence in your brand, responding incorrectly to even the smallest complaints can be catastrophic. A classic example of a mishandled customer complaint that blew up beyond belief occurred in 2008 when Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, complained to United Airlines regarding damage done to his guitar while he flew with them.  After months of back and forth with the airline Dave took to YouTube with a song he penned €˜United Breaks Guitars' detailing the service.  The song was an instant YouTube and iTunes hit upon its release gaining millions of views online as well as coverage on many television channels.  The exercise was a significant public relations embarrassment for the airline. Having a comprehensive quality monitoring framework in place should allow you to firstly avoid major mishandling of customer interaction, secondly to flag high priority cases needing to be resolved, and thirdly if all doesn't go to plan, having a contingency plan ready to deploy at a moment's notice. What sort of steps are you implementing to ensure your quality framework is bulletproof?  We would love to hear your feedback, please comment below. This blog was submitted by Scorebuddy. Scorebuddy is a simple staff scoring solution allowing users to easily build their own scorecards for monitoring quality, take a 30-day free trial today at www.scorebuddy.co.uk.