Outsource QA for your Outsourced Contact Center BPO Partners
Updated: Apr 30, 2021
You decided to outsource your contact center. You put out an RFP and did your due diligence. You carefully considered the key drivers of success: retention of agents, training excellence, quality monitoring, coaching, flexibility, technology, culture, and of course cost. You spoke with other (satisfied) clients and investigated their track record over time. And you carefully considered how this provider would/could represent your brand. You made a well-informed, logical choice.
If you haven’t yet outsourced your contact center, check out this FREE resource!
Now think ahead 3-6 months. The outsourced contact center you chose brings on another, larger account or two. The great management team who worked with you through the launch move on. Or the high-quality agents you initially trained move on. Or both. The cost savings you counted on aren’t quite there given longer talk times or lower first call resolution rates. The internal quality scores that your outsourced contact center is providing don’t align with what you are hearing yourself or customer survey results. That happens. Frequently. You need to plan for it all.
Well, the reality is that outsourcing your contact center doesn’t mean you can step completely away. You need to stay engaged. Even the best outsourced contact center providers have inconsistent results from time to time. The key is to stay on top of what is happening in the contact center so you can address concerns ‘just-in-time’. To tap into your customer’s experience with each agent.
The most obvious way to do this is via quality monitoring -- evaluating and mining each customer interaction for valuable insight into individual agent performance and more. However, can you trust the outsourcer to provide insight that is objective and transparent? It is only human nature that they would want to protect you (and their reputation) from ‘bad news’.
How Much is Peace of Mind Worth?
You’ve seen the value of outsourcing your contact center. Now is the time to leverage an independent, third-party perspective of quality in your outsourced contact center. That’s where outsourced quality monitoring comes into play.
We aren’t suggesting that you replace the outsourcer’s quality monitoring but rather augment it. You can do this for just a fraction of what you are paying your outsourcer. Think of it as insurance for consistently good outsourced contact center performance – and your peace of mind. These 3 steps will help you stay informed and highlight opportunities for improvement:
Hire a qualified outsourced QA provider (like VereQuest) to conduct incremental evaluations of randomly-selected calls across a category (e.g. service, sales, brand, product, etc.). Don’t forget to include email and chat!
Leverage the results to calibrate with the outsourced contact center’s QA results so you can build ‘trust’ in their internal reporting. And give you the assurance that your brand is being well-represented.
Capture other insights (that may not be related directly to agent performance) like customer demeanor, business insights, high effort, etc. to inform process improvement. Or analyze results to focus on those skills that matter most to improving the customer’s experience.
The net result is that you will be well informed and in a better position to work with your outsourced contact center partner.
Download our QA Checklist to evaluate whether or not you are getting the most out of your Contact Center Quality Monitoring effort.
Managing Possible Tension Between Your Partners
Of course, you might be worried that bringing in a third-party quality monitoring provider into your relationship might put your contact center outsourcer’s nose out of joint. What if they become defensive and insist that their QA efforts are just fine?
Certainly, the conversation needs to be respectful, positive, and open… and here’s something else to keep in mind: if your contact center is truly committed to continuous improvement they will welcome the opportunity presented by the additional support. The best partners are the ones who are constantly asking “What else can we be doing to reduce cost and improve performance?” and “How can we better engage the customer?”
The common denominator in all of this is that the most important partnership you have is not with any third-party provider, it is with your customer. At VereQuest, we help protect and grow your customer relationships by delivering insight from the perspective of your customer… not your contact center.
To get a sense of how VereQuest can add more value to your QA program, get in touch to arrange a FREE, no-obligation assessment.
VEREQUEST is a consulting firm specializing in driving and sustaining the quality of the customer experience in the contact center environment. We help our clients, each a leading organization in N.A., to strive to win the hearts and loyalty of customers through a wide range of proprietary tools and techniques.
Our outsourced Quality Monitoring solution pairs VereQuest’s highly-skilled Customer Insight Specialists with our proprietary quality monitoring technology to capture the level of detail you need to understand the motivations and experiences customers have when interacting with your call center — across all of your channels (calls, email, chat, video, etc.). This same technology is available in a cloud-based, SaaS model for internal quality monitoring teams.
Our quality monitoring solutions not only inform coaching at the agent performance level but can also provide valuable insight needed to build innovative and differentiated solutions to improve your customer’s experience.
Get in touch with us today for a no-obligation demonstration and test-run of our high-quality evaluations and coaching at info@verequest.com .