One of the questions we’re often asked at Leaptree is when to implement our range of features, and at what stage. That’s why we’ve developed The Call Center Quality Assurance Maturity Model, to help customers navigate this journey and get a clearer guide on what to put in place and when.
The first phase Unstructured Assessment covers our typical first engagement with someone who is becoming overburdened with the QA process within their organization. As a result, they often see inconsistent results, typically due to running the call center quality assurance process through time-consuming, ineffective, manual spreadsheets. More agents join the company, different types of assessments are required for different customer interactions, more evaluators are needed, and even simple tasks like issuing cases to be assessed become laborious. Errors increase and sometimes unconscious bias begins to rear its head which results in mixed or inconsistent results and things becoming increasingly more difficult to track and trace.
The second phase Structured Assessment is the initial adoption of a specialized Call Center QA software product, like Leaptree Optimize. Optimize addresses the challenges outlined in phase I: customer interaction assessments are all scheduled/automatically generated on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, the data sampling engine segments the assessments and spreads them across assessors in a round-robin system, removing any possible bias. New agents, new evaluators, and new assessments are easily added to the system. A dashboard is provided to track and trace all assessments/agents/evaluators.
The third phase Pro-Active Development is where we start to pro-actively improve agent performance. We need to separate coaching from disputes for this to be effective. Scorecard results can be challenged by Agents through the dispute process. Separately, Evaluators may want to include coaching tasks along with a completed assessment to ensure they are improving in the right areas. At a management level, we can look across the teams and see if there is a cohort of employees who are struggling with a specific area that may require dedicated training. The supervisor may only identify one person in their team, but by running trend analysis through the software, the manager/director can see the bigger picture and improve all teams holistically.
The fourth phase Motivational Gamification is where we bring agent improvement into self-determination mode. Through enabling peer ranking and award systems in the software, agents can see how they are performing on their customer interactions compared to their peers. They are now competing, in a fun way, against their peers for quarterly awards. These awards may have some simple rewards within them, but either way will always have value to keep agents motivated, and happy at work. As a result, customer experiences improve and revenue grows.
The fifth phase Assessment Calibration is all about ensuring quality at the QA Evaluator level. For example, you may have an auto-fail score of 75% for a Customer Support phone call assessment. Or you only pay the quarterly bonus out to Complaint Handlers who achieve an average score for the quarter of 70% on their interactions. How do we ensure these standards are set correctly? This is where assessment calibration comes in – ensuring that standards are being reviewed/assessed on an agreed pre-determined schedule. Maybe you wish to run reviews on previous QA assessments themselves to re-enforce quality? All these approaches help to ensure the overall standards are aligned.
In summary, there is more to these technologies than meets the eye, but with the right implementation approach, a significant amount of added value can be released and at the right time. We’ve also seen these technologies used within inside sales teams, where you may want to assess agent’s first qualifying calls or their first demos, for example. So why not extend these technologies across your entire revenue workforce, ensuring it is connected, aligned, and enhanced?
Schedule a demo to find out how Leaptree Optimize could work for you.