Contact Center Outsourced Quality Assurance Primer

What you need to know about outsourcing your Contact Center's Quality Assurance in 3 minutes

In today’s business environment, there is no question of the value of contact center quality assurance and its role in driving improved customer experience. The challenge remains how to ‘do more with less’ – fewer resources, less budget, less time. It is critical to look at the value of conducting agent quality monitoring – not just from a check-the-box perspective – but also as a vital tool for tapping into what is happening in your business and where the opportunities lie to improve the customer experience within your organization.

Why re-evaluate your Contact Center QA now?

• Customers are evaluating their experience with YOU and comparing it with their own personal experiences with companies across all sectors. It’s no longer good enough to be best-in-your-own-class. Having a third-party perspective will help close the gap.

• Customer expectations have been changing … rapidly. Not only do you need to raise the bar to meet their expectations, but you also need to be tapped into their changing expectations to meet them tomorrow. It’s time to think outside the box and re-evaluate how you engage customers.

• We are all being asked to ‘do more with less’. That’s not going to change. It’s important that you are able to demonstrate real value to the organization through your quality monitoring efforts. Do you have the right tools, training, management, etc.?

Click here to download "A Guide to Outsourcing Your Contact Center's Quality Monitoring"

Just to be clear

Contact center QA involves:

1. Evaluating a customer interaction against predetermined criteria for quality, compliance, sales effectiveness, etc.

2. Highlighting best practices, opportunities for coaching, and grievous customer situations.

3. All contact center channels, including calls, emails, and chat interactions.

4. Analyzing data captured for agent performance, business insights, or both.

5. Calibrating results to ensure they align with the reality of the customer’s experience.

Outsourcing your contact center QA involves:

1. Engaging a third party to do some or all of the above.

2. Introducing an impartial point-of-view.

Is Outsourced Contact Center Quality Assurance right for my business?

Whatever the reason for monitoring your customer interactions, it almost always makes sense to outsource some or all of your quality monitoring to an independent third party. The following are the top 10 benefits companies who outsource their QM to VereQuest realize:

1. Access to contact center QA expertise and best practices

2. Independent third-party point-of-view; perspective closer to that of customers

3. Greater cost efficiencies (based on the type of contract)

4. Online, real-time results

5. Consolidation of contact center QA efforts across all channels

6. Data analytics spot opportunities for improved customer experience, operational efficiencies, etc.

7. (Unique to VQ) A real-time measure of the customer's experience … most valuable when you can’t survey customers directly

8. Improved agent performance (Sales, Churn, NPS, etc.)

9. QA continuity during periods of high volume and/or contact center disruption

10. Less management time required

Evaluating the performance of your outsourced contact center

You may have outsourced your contact center, and as part of their services, they conduct quality monitoring on their own work. That's great! They should be monitoring their own performance. But rather than take their word that their results are great, it makes good sense to engage an independent third party to validate their results and review how they engage your customers and represent your brand. Otherwise, it's like hiring a fox to mind the hen house.

Outsourced Contact Center QA – delivered by a third party like VereQuest – can give you peace of mind that the results you are hearing about from your contact center reflect reality and that everything is on track. In addition, while the contact center’s priority may be on agent performance, Third-party outsourced QA can also capture, track and gain insight into opportunities for improvement outside of the contact center.

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What’s different about VereQuest?

We can’t comment on what other companies doing Outsourced Contact Center QA do, but here are the top 5 things our customers tell us that is different about what we do for them:

1. We don’t use call center people to do the evaluations. We use individuals with years of experience roleplaying in a corporate setting. They have the skills and experience to effectively ‘listen’ from the customer’s perspective.

2. We are experienced in the markets and industries we work in. This is key to adding value to what drives customer behavior and how to influence improved customer satisfaction results.

3. We capture quantitative and qualitative data related to both agent behavior AND the customer’s experience. To ensure we are reporting accurately, we calibrate ourselves against our client’s survey results. Our customer experience measures and observations have been proven to represent how customers FEEL accurately.

4. We provide actionable, detailed written coaching that frontline management can readily leverage and agents find both objective and valuable.

5. Our proprietary contact center QA software is very user-friendly and facilitates a free real-time flow of information and insight. It enables our customers to consolidate findings across channels and expand the contact center experience and insight to other key organizational stakeholders.

Sharon Oatway is President & Chief Experience Officer of VereQuest. Sharon is a Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing professional with over three decades of hands-on experience elevating the overall customer experience and multi-channel contact center performance. Sharon and her team at VereQuest have listened to/read, and analyzed several million customer interactions for some of North America’s leading brands. As a result, Sharon is a recognized thought leader in what it takes to build and sustain great customer experiences.

Established in 2002, VereQuest provides organizations with various customer experience services, including a robust contact center quality monitoring offering. Working with businesses throughout North America, VereQuest provides a unique perspective on a complex, ever-changing customer environment.

Get in touch at info@verequest.com