So, you’ve invested the time and dollars to create a contact center of which you’re proud. You’ve done your due diligence, your research – installed best of breed systems and hired an outstanding team. You’ve anticipated customers’ needs and trained your workers. Time to switch on that ACD, sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, right?
Nope.
In order to assure continued satisfaction from your customers, you and your team must first understand what quality is and what it is not. Quality is everyone’s job. This thinking must begin with the CEO and permeate throughout the organization.
Even the best-designed contact centers should boast an environment of constant challenge, refinement and change. Across all sectors, the businesses that succeed are those which steadily evolve to meet the needs of their customers or prospects. To borrow a manufacturing term, we’re talking about continuous improvement. For both internal and outsourced centers, those customers and prospects are going to call, email, chat or text. And despite the noblest of intentions, these customers’ wants and expectations can be easily derailed if you take your eye off the ball or, worse yet, become complacent. For our purposes, we’re focusing on quality in your center. When speaking of quality monitoring and measurement, one used to think of only callers. However, given today’s technologically savvy customer, quality can and should be measured on all interactions being processed in your center. Be it phone calls, emails, chats, texts or social media, if you’re not creating quality minded customer advisors and do not have the ability to measure all customer interactions to truly capture the voice of your customer, you are setting yourself and your center up for inevitable failure. Every dissatisfied customer erodes confidence. That quickly translates into lost business. If you’re not paying careful attention, you’ll miss the cues: most people don’t complain – at least not to you. They simply don’t return and then take their “beef” with you to the world by criticizing your center and your company in an open forum on the vast www! The moment you assume you know what customers want and what they’re getting, you’ve positioned yourself for disappointment.
In today’s business world – with rapidly evolving technology, wide access to information, low tolerance for poor service and enormous competition for a consumer’s “share of mind’ – centers can only thrive by taking a proactive approach to customer satisfaction and a good customer experience. That means monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and updating. Most importantly, it means the end to complacency.
Every contact center interaction must be looked upon as a moral contract between the client (in-house or outside), the customer, and your customer advisor. Each of these participants has specific needs. The client needs their message delivered accurately and seamlessly. The customer or potential customer needs specific, often personalized, information delivered efficiently and understandably. And customer advisors need deep knowledge of your company along with the technology, skill set and empowerment to deliver it. The job of quality management is to evaluate how well all of those needs are being met and to continuously improve the processes and people. Evaluations used to assure these are both objective and subjective. They may be updated by the month, the week, the day, the minute, or at random intervals. Information may be gathered by computers, written surveys, online forms, phone contact, supervisor observation or in meetings or casual conversation. The variables are enormous, but vigilance and building quality into your center pays very well!