"Customer Interaction Center and the CRM"

Almost everyone has a nightmarish customer service story to tell. It's not surprising. Up until the last decade, most businesses had no need to differentiate themselves through superior customer service. Consumers had little influence on how and when businesses responded to their needs for service and support. With none or few alternative choices, poorly served customers reluctantly continued to do business with service-challenged companies. 

But now, consumers have their choice of more than enough businesses to meet their needs. State-of-the-art technology has dissolved many of the remaining obstacles to truly differentiated customer service. And savvy businesses have concluded that, in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors, they must provide superior customer service--regardless of the customer contact channel. 

Providing exceptional customer service while continuing to manage expenses effectively is a key objective for competitive, customer-focused businesses. Two key questions are as follows:

• How do we maximize the value received from our customers by optimizing the value we deliver to our customers? 
• How do we identify and create lasting relationships with the customers who will be of greatest value to the organization?

Customer Choice

Customers now have more choice in service contact streams than ever before. Whether they initiate contacts by telephone, Web site, Internet chat, e-mail or fax, customers are demanding high-quality interactions and personalized levels of service and support. To provide these levels of service, astute companies have recognized the CRM principle that a real-time, 360-degree view of the customer is necessary regardless of the channel of communication. In order to accomplish this goal, these businesses are designing and implementing customer interaction centers (CIC) which:

• Provide consistently high-quality service access regardless of channel 
• Provide real-time information, customization and personalization to their customers 
• Use a robust customer-centric information database 
• Integrate with existing front and back office legacy systems.

Universal Queue

A critical component of the CIC is the universal queue. This central system receives an inbound contact, regardless of channel (phone calls, e-mails, faxes or Web chats), and routes it to the appropriate customer service representative (CSR) based on established business rules. Along with the contact notification, the CSR receives a 360-degree view of the customer's contact and transaction history as well as a recommendation for dealing with the request or problem and identification of sales opportunities. 

The CIC system automatically logs every contact event and agent response. It allows agents to add notes on customer issues and problem resolution for every transaction. 

The real power of such a system is that each customer issue can be matched to the agent who is best able to service the customer. This is accomplished through a contact identifier such as an in-bound 800 number, e-mail address or customer phone number. This matching process may be as simple as connecting a customer to an agent trained in the product or service that is at issue, or as complex as taking advantage of an agent's education, people skills and experience to deal with an escalated problem. High-value customers would be identified immediately and receive high-priority service. 

The fully functional CIC uses several sophisticated hardware and software technologies including the following:

• CRM front office technology 
• Interactive voice response 
• Computer-telephony integration (CTI) 
• Fax, e-mail and Web chat communication technology 
• Campaign management 
• Knowledge management 
• Reporting and analysis

CRM Front-Office Technology

The objective of CRM applications is to integrate all customer interactions and data, no matter what the channel, in order to provide the company's agents, partners and customers with a single view of each customer's relationship with the company. An important feature of this objective is the integration of the various points of customer interaction in such a way that any customer event is fully informed by all other customer events, regardless of the medium of communication. Finally, there should be a consistent set of business rules managing all channels. 

To be fully integrated into the CIC system, Web-based interactions must be governed by the same standards, values and business processes that govern other forms of customer contact. The CRM applications should also provide real-time recommendations for customer interaction based on customer profiles, transaction histories and clickstream analysis. This CRM function focuses on customer transaction, up-sell and cross-sell potential more than the strategic aspects of customer relationships. The application makes product or service purchase recommendations and provides a personalized customer experience that is based on past history, customer segment analysis and real-time, trigger-based analysis. Having "learned" individual customer's wants, needs and interests, it then delivers the content that matters most to them. 

The technology then pools the customer's updated information with knowledge gained from a community of other individuals who share similar tastes and interests in order to provide predictions of future customer behavior. Some other specific requirements might include the following:

• Portal desktop: The system should be browser-based for both users and agents and have HTML support for comprehensive usage. This Web browser provides access to customer information, recommendations and knowledge management simultaneously. 
• Internet application architecture: The overall system can be designed with an Internet application architecture (IAA) that has best of breed functionality and accesses and aggregates resources both inside and outside the corporate firewall. 
• Real-time personalization capabilities: This uses clickstream tracking, self-learning analytics, collaborative filtering and real-time customer profiling to deliver highly targeted product recommendations, loyalty offers and other personalized content for Web or call center visitors. 
• Multichannel capability: This includes phone, e-mail, fax and Web chat. 
• Co-browsing: This function pushes and shares any screen or content to the customer via the Web during a customer service interaction.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

IVR technologies are those ubiquitous systems that enable customers to respond to voice prompt menus using a touch-tone phone or verbal input. These menus typically lead customers through a number of different processes, including placing orders, providing verification information, making inquiries and self service.

Computer-Telephony Integration

CTI connects the customer event data (such as that provided in the IVR interaction) with pre-existing customer information and campaigns that may be under way, and sends all this information to the CSR interface in what is commonly called a screen pop. Simply put, the CSRs are instantaneously provided with helpful information specific to the customer with whom they are interacting.

• Skill-based routing to transfer customers to the most suitable CSR.

Smart Linking - Voxtron Communication Center integrates Microsoft Lync

In economically troubled times, many companies were again on reliable values, especially the strengthening of client relationships. The most important optimization tool was the internal service, call and contact center at the heart of the customer interaction. The software manufacturer Voxtron has now developed a solution, the call center agents networked seamlessly with employees in the back office: the Voxtron Client for Microsoft Lync. 

Multimedia Contact Center Software, Voxtron Communication Center integrates "seamlessly with Microsoft Lync. She sees to it that internal communication channels work together. Voxtron, together with its system partners IP Dynamics and Telefonbau Schneider, two major players in the telecommunications and contact center industry. Jointly presented solution is the wide range of Microsoft Lync: As a platform for instant messaging, presence, audio, video and web conferencing software offers its users a wide range of real-time communication media in a single application environment.  

"Lync soon will attain it's place as indispensable from the contemporary corporate communications and is already setting the benchmark in the field of unified communications," said Christian Stölken , CEO of IP Dynamics, talking about the importance of Microsoft's development on the market. Voxtron has strengthen it's cause by integrating Microsoft Lync, into its known Voxtron Client. The innovative combination leaves the contact center features much robust in it's applications. By skill-based routing, for each contact - no matter which channel such as phone, fax, email, chat, video, social media - the best-qualified employees are assessed. At the same time, it allows the call center agent, to use all the features of Lync application (for example, instant messaging, video telephony, desktop sharing and real-time conferencing). Thus, employees in the back office or experts could be connected easily and would be simple to redirect the caller quickly and professionally.  

With the intelligent linking, all users can benefit, who have been already working with the Voxtron Client, or have deployed Microsoft Lync alone. "The integrated solution combines the best of two worlds: Unified Communications and Customer Interaction Solutions," says Marc Schneider , CEO of Telefonbau Schneider GmbH. "For businesses it is a great opportunity, its call center to adapt to changing customer needs and to improve performance. " "As a Gold Certified Partner of Microsoft, we have recognized the potential of Lync and immediately developed a standard interface to Voxtron Communication Center. The first installations have been successfully implemented, and we look forward to further market development in the UC environment, "adds Ralf Mühlenhöver , CEO of Voxtron GmbH www.voxtron.com

Voice Biometric Authentication Best Practices: Overcoming Obstacles to Adoption

Overall Best Practice: Amplify Organic Adoption

Both customer care and security specialists see the value of establishing higher levels of trust with their customers and fellow employees. That equates to stronger authentication of individuals, not “end-points,” tokens or mobile devices. With Apple’s introduction of Siri, a speech-enabled mobile
assistant, the general public is getting tuned into the power of the spoken word for search, control and dictation. Authentication will not be far behind. The pre-requisite here is one of packaging.

The result of these “best practices” is reflected in the slope of the curve in Figure 1, which is Opus Research’s forecast for registered voiceprints on a global basis. Note that, in this document we sometimes refer to “indicated best practices” which we define as the approaches that solution providers have indicated they will carry forward because they are finding the highest acceptance rates in real world implementations.

Voice biometric solution providers are unlikely to be able to change behavior among the general public. But they can demonstrate how automated speech processing, when coupled with “artificial intelligence” (AI) as it is with Siri, is an empowering force. Early application of multi-factor authentication (including voice biometrics) helps accomplish two very important goals. First,
as people carry out more e-commerce and other routine activities on their phones, biometric-based security will help prevent fraud in general. Second, during each conversation, strong authentication promotes “trust,” meaning that both parties can have confidence that they are in touch with the
individual that they want to carry out business with.

“Mobile” Means Feature Phones, Smartphones and Tablets
Enterprise security experts know that they cannot rely on any single factor, but must instead look to more robust security methods. As soon as a C-level executive starts using her iPad for work and personal use, it becomes more important to authenticate the person who’s in possession of that device. The move to mobile makes user authentication more important than ever,precisely because it is no longer sufficient to merely secure hardware endpoints. Participants want assurances that the individual at that endpoint is the person he or she claims to be.
Waiting in the wings are large-scale implementations by large government agencies that have the need to closely manage disbursement of transfer payments (like social security or unemployment benefits). Such implementations have already moved past the “pilot” stage in Australia and
New Zealand. The largest pension organization in the Philippines has been offering voice-based authentication of retirees, leveraging an existing smart card-based identification/verification infrastructure. The ability to enroll and authenticate remotely has proven to be valuable in all of these cases.

Lessons from the past
The rest of this document provides specifics surrounding what Opus Research regards as “best practices” based on the lessons learned over more than a decade of bringing voice biometric-based solutions to the market. In it we evaluate a set of offerings, including proof-of-concept, trials and formal offerings, that failed to reach a level of enrollment or use that would deem them successful. Our assumption is that today’s best practices – at the very least – will be those that correct long-standing shortcomings. This will lead to high growth in both the enrollment of voiceprints and the repeated use of voice authentication.

To support our efforts, we will organize the roots of failure into five major categories:

Product shortcomings - including technological failures, which were prevalent in the “first generation” of voice biometric-based authentication 1999-2003.
• Packaging – addressing how well the technology was integrated into solutions to known problems.
• Partnerships and Promotion – looking at the go-to-market strategies and relationships with system integrators, third-party solution providers and specialists in adjacent industries like identity
management and credit service bureaus.
• Personnel – assessing the considerations that need to be given to organizational structure on both the buy side and the sell side, as solution providers learn which executives and departments influence
acquisition and implementation strategies.
• Pricing issues – looking at the ROI of specific implementations and making comparisons to alternative forms of authentication, access control and transaction authorization.

Today’s voice biometric-based authentication engines start with greater accuracy than the turn-of-the-century technologies. Solution providers also benefit from indicated best practices that package voice-based authentication as an extension of existing caller authentication and imposter detection
software and services. Thus, the primary point of integration is not an IVR.
Instead, solutions are, more accurately customer-centric and context sensitive, leveraging business logic to apply the proper level of security as needed given a caller’s identity and the nature of the transaction being undertaken. They also leverage the token-based service that back-ends today’s PIN and Password infrastructure.

Partnering To Address Perceived Deficiencies
Voice biometric-based authentication platforms are on the front line and in the critical path of all manner of secure e-commerce. Thus it is understandable that large companies in financial services,
telecommunications, healthcare and retailing might hesitate to contract with small, unproven firms. This explains why a number of the early adopters with large, customer-facing implementations contracted with large system integrators or solutions providers.

Voice authentication was only “one of many” IVR applications. It was also treated as one of seven major IVR applications relevant to user authentication. It was primarily treated as a PIN replacement when PINs are forgotten or they expire. Trials were also delayed during protracted vendor evaluations.

Lessons learned include:

• Make sure security is balanced with customer usability
• Engage your stakeholders early in the process and take them along the journey with you
• Prove the technology works and gain business confidence
• Be ready to adapt, including improving call flows and / or business rules
• Think about the future, including upgrades / new technology
• Plan ahead for change, for example an aging template

These cautionary suggestions, especially those involving the engagement of stakeholders early in the process, can be considered best practices for implementations in large businesses as well as government bureaucracies.This brings us to ABN AMRO, which provides another set of cautionary
considerations for today’s solution providers. In this case, a commercial bank sought to differentiate itself by giving a high profile to a novel approach to user authentication and security. In 2007, as it started to evaluate and deploy speaker authentication in its contact centers, it was one of the top 20
independent banks in the world. Its Dutch contact center received over 35 million calls each year and all but 7 million were routed to live agents.

In 2006 ABN AMRO began two separate but related initiatives surrounding speech technologies. One was to replace the menu-driven IVR systems with voice-based self-service with speech-recognition-based navigation. At the same time the bank initiated a “PIN replacement” effort that closely linked voice biometric-based user authentication with a token-based device. In essence it was replacing the “PIN” part of “Chip and PIN” with a spoken passphrase. This approach was quite different to other layered, multifactor approaches that we had observed.

Opus Research believes that replacing PIN-based authentication with an approach that requires unique hardware and multiple steps, where entry of a simple PIN would have sufficed, was a barrier to adoption. While it was promoted as a mechanism for voice-based verification of frequent callers,
bank management approved the technology based on the use of a hardware token as a back-up for the less frequent callers.

Pricing and ROI Concerns
There is much evidence that many firms have found themselves unable to cost-justify voice biometric implementations. This is quite frustrating for veteran sales people in both the security and the speech application domains. At a time when e-commerce fraud and identity theft is reportedly at an all-time high, it is frustrating that banks, credit card issuers, major retailers and even government agencies find it necessary to leave the losses from such activity largely undisclosed. What’s more, they seldom “connect the dots” between strong authentication and reduction in such fraud losses.

By contrast, the providers of speech-enabled applications have become adept at proving the ROI of their solutions by documenting that the combination of speech-based navigation and voice biometric-based authentication shortens the average time that it takes for a caller to complete a phone-based transaction. For high-volume, customer-facing contact centers, saving seconds can amount to millions of dollars in savings over the course of a year.

Opus Research sees that a best practice in pricing is to bring implementation costs in line with the expected savings that will result from the reduction in call times. These are the “hard dollar” savings resulting from reduced personnel costs, minutes of use on communications networks and facilities
costs. Beyond these documented benefits are “soft” benefits that related to customer satisfaction, retention and the ability to up-sell and cross-sell based on rapid authentication of callers and high levels of confidence that the individual on the other end of a phone call is, indeed, who he or she claims to be. But the unspoken benefit of strong authentication is, of course, fraud reduction. While most companies (especially among financial services providers, card issuers and retailers) are loathe to reveal exact figures for fraud losses, they are well-aware of the “hard” dollar benefits of fraud
reduction.

Does Enrollment Equate to Loyalty?
Acceptance and repeated use of voice-based authentication starts with an enrollment process that puts emphasis on a long-term relationship. The largest implementers have learned that a proposition that says, “We’d like to take about 3 minutes of your time to save you a minute on all your subsequent calls” elicits a significant positive response and a large percentage of callers opt in to the service.
When it comes to promoting a loyal, long-term relationship, hosted voice biometric solutions provider, VoiceTrust, experiences very high enrollment rates for its G2P (Government to People) transfer payment services. In this case, registering one’s voiceprint is a pre-requisite for receiving pension benefits.

Is Bulk Enrollment a Possibility?
Because some compliance directives (in healthcare, insurance, banking) require audiofiles to be stored for a matter of years, it has been suggested that large companies could take advantage of this rich set of spoken utterances to engage in bulk caller authentication. Once a single speaker’s voice has been isolated from others on a phone line and it can be associated with a known identity and, upon capture of sufficient spoken material, be distilled into a voiceprint.

There are ethical, and perhaps legal, issues associated with this “passive” approach to enrollment. But some vendors have argued that callers can be informed that their voice is being recorded to provide more convenient security on future calls. It cannot be characterized as a “best practice” and, given the pace at which buyers move to new approaches, it probably won’t become a common practice either. What is more, the “creepiness factor” will always be very high for capture of personal characteristics (whether voice, fingerprints, iris scans or pictures of one’s face); it will always seem surreptitious.

What’s in the Wings for Authentication?
The most common practice, when looking at the largest, customer-facing implementations, is the use of a pass phrase – such as “my voice is my password” – for speaker verification. Such “text-dependent” solutions predominate because they have proven demonstrably more mature. Enrollment routines are well-defined, Equal Error Rates (EER) are well documented and tools exist for assessing scores and adjusting acceptable False Accept Rates (FARs) and False Reject Rates (FRRs) to suit each use case.
Where randomness is required, as part of a routine to discourage replay attacks, a digit-based system is well-received by current implementers. In these instances, enrollment involves capturing the digits zero-though-nine a number of times from which the voiceprint is distilled. For authentication, the
digits are displayed in a random order so that the replay of a tape-recorded pass phrase would not be accurate. Providers of pass phrase-based authentication systems have other ways of detecting the use of a tape recorder, such as detecting a “tape hiss” or humming sound that commonly occurs with playback equipment.

Is Text-Independence a “Best Practice”?
Text-independent methods for enrollment and subsequent authentication are making slow headway out of development labs and the government sector, where text- and language-independent solutions have matured as part of surveillance and speaker detection schemes. Prior to acquisition by Nuance,
PerSay had installed its FreeSpeech solution at a commercial bank in Israel. Text independent, “passive,” enrollment has been demonstrated for several years. A few investment houses have trialled “convenient and secure” interactions to high net worth individuals.
Text-independence equates to language-independence as well and, for that reason, a number of multinational banks have been monitoring or trialing new systems with an eye to determining the minimum length of spoken utterances required to build a voice print (this had been 30 seconds to a
minute but has been reduced to 20 seconds “in the lab”) and the minimum amount of “conversational speech” to do an accurate authentication (moving toward 10 seconds).

As layered, multi-factor and risk-based authentication solutions prevail, we expect to see more creative, text-independent applications. In many industries, enterprises are required to monitor and record all phone-based interactions, which means that a certain amount of forensic work can be
performed on stored audiofiles. Text-independent solutions can support “passive” enrollment as well as “speaker change detection,” for which there is an obvious need from educational institutions that offer remote testing or certification and need assurance that the person taking the test is the person
he or she claims to be. There are similar applications for companies with virtual contact centers that require work-at-home agents to authenticate themselves at the beginning of a shift but offer no assurance that the same person is there to complete a shift.

Promoting Trust and Long-term Relationships
After initial enrollment, constant behavioral reinforcement is required to keep interest and activity up. The most conspicuous and appropriate applications have been for financial services companies who have launched voice biometric-based authentication services designed to give high net worth
individuals confidence that their financial services provider is making a special effort to provide good service and high levels of security.

Fitting into Multi-factor Solutions
The mission for solutions providers at large is to make voice biometrics part of a multi-factor, layered solution that provides a highly secure, convenient service to targeted customers. This will become especially important as transactions of all kinds are initiated from mobile devices and it becomes
more crucial than ever before to authenticate the individual in possession of the mobile device through which each transaction is initiated.

In all cases, such solutions should provide a pleasing experience for callers. One strategy is to closely link voiceprints with a very convenient mechanism for strong authentication on an “as-needed” basis. Other factors that may come into play are obvious signs that an individual is an imposter. For example, if a customer living in California, originates a call from Sudan or a caller named “Dan Miller” has a decidedly female voice.

When it comes to detecting imposters or assigning the “high-risk” tag to a particular caller or individual the “voice channel” alone does not provide all the answers. Most large businesses already have rule-based systems and business logic in place to support the goals of the Chief Security Officer.
These well-established and time-tested rules are the ones that should be applied to govern the level of risk associated with the individual on the other end of the phone or at a student or employee’s workstation.

Expect Accelerated Adoption
Bolstered by real world experience, regulatory guidelines and analysts’ recommendations, executives at financial services companies, healthcare providers and telecommunications service providers are forging ahead with plans to implement voice biometric technologies. Opus Research has identified approaches to user enrollment and subsequent authentication that overcome long-standing barriers to adoption by creating a pleasing and engaging user experience and leveraging existing security infrastructure to support the goal of fraud prevention.

To answer the question, “What has changed?” in regards to adoption of the technology in the past year: companies are finding that both employees and customers have grown comfortable using multiple mobile devices and making seamless transition from real-time conversations to ones that happen over a period of time via texting, chat, tweeting or other social network-based tools.
What’s more, they use smartphones, wireless PCs and laptops as “mobile assistants,” on which personal contact lists, applications and data coexist with sensitive information that is supposed to be under tight corporate control.

In the social, mobile environment, user authentication (as opposed to device-oriented access control) has become more important than ever before in order to prevent unauthorized access to corporate resources. Meanwhile, “user experience” aficionados are new to the security discussion, but have
rapidly come to a similar conclusion: banks, insurance companies, government agencies, telcos and retailers serve customers, not their phones or other devices. Over time, they will find that strong, rapid authentication will enable them to serve their best, longest-standing customers in the most
personal and efficient way. Because the devices are often phones, voice prints are perceived as the most natural and efficient authentication mechanism. In conjunction with “layers” of other factors, protocols and business rules, decision makers are making voice biometrics part of security solutions that provide high levels of confidence and foster stronger customer bonds over time.

To support secure, customer-centric e-commerce using voice biometrics, the time is now.

IRiS Enterprise SMS Platform - Voxtron ME

30 tips to improve your Call Quality Monitoring

Monitoring isn’t all about spotting problems and dealing with them. It’s also about identifying and amplifying positive messages. Even in today’s technologically sophisticated contact centers, a simple ‘thank you’ can work wonders. 

1. Make good use of the information you gather

Call quality monitoring is essential for any contact center, providing invaluable insight into how you are performing and what consumers are really experiencing.

The most useful results often stem from measuring and improvement processes that go beyond monitoring sample calls, impinging on wider areas of the business, from the setting and evaluating of standards, to advisor coaching, through to the training and development of staff.

2. Get the small things right

Having said that, regular monitoring is a good way of maintaining best practice, ensuring advisors get the details right: greeting consumers appropriately, adhering to the laid-down call structure, and using agreed positive phases throughout the call.

With regular quality monitoring, you can prevent bad habits creeping in, spreading from advisor to advisor, and contact center to contact center. Regular monitoring, support, feedback and training all help you maintain your high standards.

3. It doesn’t have to be hi-tech

But you don’t have to go hi-tech. Remember, some monitoring – even the most basic – is better than no monitoring at all. You can start with simple activities – a spreadsheet with tick boxes filled in manually – and work your way up slowly. And if you set realistic targets, achieving them will be motivating, paving the way to other more ambitious goals.

4. We’re not out to catch you out

Winning employee engagement and involvement from early on in the monitoring process is essential.

When monitoring is first introduced, there’s a tendency for some people to think it will be critical. On the other hand, where a monitoring system has been in place unchanged for a long time, advisors may start to take it for granted.

Call quality monitoring is not – or should not be – a negative, top-down activity, designed to trip advisors up. In the best contact centers, it is an integral part of the skills program, of benefit to advisors as well as consumers.

Monitoring that is collaborative rather than prescriptive, inclusive rather than authoritarian, is likely to lead to more acceptance and co-operation. Most advisors find it helpful to know what the company expects of them and why their calls are important to the business and its customers.

5. Feedback, support and training are fundamental

Feedback from the monitoring process should be objective, using a method of scoring and evaluating that is fair and agreed by all in advance, and it must be consistent and regular. Once milestones are agreed and set, they must be kept to, built on and progressed.

Feedback can be delivered one-to-one, remotely, or via group sessions where advisors share and spread best practice. Whatever method is selected, the important thing is that there is an opportunity for individual advisors to contribute to the discussion.

Not only does this encourage their buy-in to the process, their comments and suggestions are often extremely insightful. But bear in mind that advisors are sometimes harder on their own and colleagues’ performances than supervisors would be.

Staff support should be provided through interventions such as refresher and formal skills training, and development and action plans to improve advisor performance, always with the aim of improving the customer experience and achieving your business objectives.

6. Quality people for quality monitoring

Quality evaluation is only as good as the person doing the evaluating.

If possible, it’s worthwhile investing in a dedicated person – or, in the case of larger contact centers, a specialist team – to monitor quality in your contact center. Supervisors are there to manage the floor and plan campaigns, not to monitor quality. By giving that role to a dedicated individual or team, you leave your operational staff free to manage.

Once you have identified someone to handle monitoring, evaluating and training, give them the resources, training and skills they need to carry out appraisals, coaching, training and development, either by developing your own people or by recruiting in the required expertise.

7. Time and effort spent on monitoring is never wasted

There’s a direct correlation between call quality and the accuracy, frequency and excellence of monitoring and coaching. The equation is simple: the more time and effort you invest in monitoring and coaching, the better the service to your customers will be, and the bigger the benefits to sales and customer retention levels.

8. External benchmarking

As well as internal monitoring, it’s also helpful to compare your performance with others, especially the competition. Internal checks will give you a more subjective picture, which could be misleading. For a truly objective result, you need external benchmarking. Contact centers with no monitoring systems or resources in place should consider outsourcing these functions to an external agency. It can be a cost-effective option.

9. Reward best practice

Reward high-quality work through mechanisms such as ‘advisor of the month’ awards and staff excellence certificates, or highlight it in your company newsletter and intranet site. And if consumers are pleased with the service, pass on their messages. Integrate all these positive points into the company’s annual appraisal and benefits schemes.

10.  Save your ‘Golden’ calls

Identify and save examples of your best practice or ‘Golden’ calls so that they can be used as a training aid to help continually improve the overall call handling process.

11.  Apply a well-thought-out quality management procedure

I am amazed at the number of companies who purchase call recording solutions in order to remain “compliant” with security or FSA regulations that do not have a structured call quality monitoring policy in place. It’s always one of those “we’ll get to it sometime” things that might not show itself as important, or possibly there are other larger fires to fight in your business. Others may baulk at the inordinate amount of time or effort to manage the process as well.

If you want to see uplift in the overall customer experience, a well-thought-out quality management procedure can work wonders. It gives your agents something to strive for. It gives you insight into the core traits and skills that your agents need to interact with your customers, and the customers themselves will also have a more positive experience when doing business with you, giving your business that competitive advantage.

12.  Get your contact center involved in defining the criteria

Section the call into a number of points where you can create criteria which would satisfy the majority of customers. It could be something very tangible such as offering your name to the caller, or something more intangible or subjective, such as showing empathy on the call. People tend to have shied away from those criteria, but, I can assure you, they are measurable, and there are methods and tools to coach in those sort of skills.

Make sure you get your contact center involved in defining the criteria. The last thing they need is another rule or policy that has been imposed on them. Having a team of people design the call quality procedure makes them advocates and champions to the cause.

13.  Put the time into training and coaching

In my experience, the biggest issue where these quality monitoring processes fall down is a lack of thought put to training and coaching the skills the agents are going to need in order to succeed. Be sure you have spent some time with some experts who can show you how to coach these skills effectively into your operation when required.

Also, don’t underestimate the power of an application to assist your agents and your team leaders through the procedures. Introducing a call quality process will also introduce another load of work on your team leaders and agents. Be sure to look for applications which will mitigate this. In some cases, the technology pays for itself in the form of reclaimed time.

14.  Include a feedback process

Lastly, make sure there is a feedback process in your operation to gauge customer satisfaction when interacting with your operation. There’s no point in assuming what your customers want in terms of call quality. A simple yet effective customer advocacy survey will help to validate the steps you are taking in your operation and will help identify where to fine tune the process.

15.  Define what good looks like

Call monitoring will not be effective unless you fully understand the reason for monitoring and what you are trying to measure or discover. Identifying what ‘good’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ looks like is essential for objective and effective call monitoring. ‘Good’ will be different depending on the reason for monitoring.

16.  Get your scripts right

Ensure the wording in your scripts, or what your agents are expected to say to be compliant, is identified in your call monitoring forms and that your scoring reflects the common understanding of what would be classed as compliant or a breach.

17.  Set up a call quality forum

An additional step of setting up a forum to reach a consensus on what good looks like will pay dividends. Ensuring that all stakeholders are agreed on what constitutes ‘good’ and capturing the criteria in your monitoring forms will support your call and quality monitoring staff in achieving the objectivity that is so essential.  It is critical that measurement criteria are clearly defined and agreed and there is consensus on what ‘good’ looks like.

18.  Set up call leveling sessions

The best way to do this is to set up call leveling sessions that are held on an ongoing basis. Take a random selection of calls. Get all stakeholders and, where possible, call monitoring staff, or managers if this is not feasible, and listen to the calls together. Score them as you go along.

After each call, discuss the scores for the criteria monitored and where there is a wide variation, the reasons. If all scores are within a narrow range you’re in luck, but more often than not, there will be a wide variation between the scores for many elements of the call, especially when you first start this process. Through the session the range of scores should narrow as the various stakeholders adjust their scoring and reach consensus.  Over time, opinion and individuals involved will change so it is important to have regular call leveling sessions in order to maintain the consensus.

19.  Use an independent call monitoring  facility

Objective call monitoring can be difficult to achieve and maintain when all monitoring activity is carried out internally using your own people. There are companies who offer independent call monitoring services and can provide you with a truly objective view of the quality of your calls, whether they are compliant with the prevailing industry guidelines and regulations and in some cases benchmarking. To keep control of costs, look for companies who are happy to give you a one-off report covering a batch of calls, perhaps the same batch of calls used for your call leveling sessions.

20. Assign quality ownership 

It sounds obvious, but if nobody wants to own the process, how can it be audited and calibrated to ensure it is effective and continues to improve and adapt to the business’s changing needs? Similarly, there should be a clearly documented process for monitoring and evaluating calls, and all agents and team managers should be trained and familiar with all areas of quality monitoring and how to get the most from the system they have in place.

21. Develop and maintain evaluation forms

Evaluation forms are at the heart of a good quality monitoring program  and when compiling them you need to ask yourself:

• Am I asking the right questions? 
• Am I getting the required results? i.e. output which leads to a continuous coaching and development plan for my team 
• Does the scoring mechanism allow agents to provide an ‘outstanding’ or ‘Wow factor’ service not just an ‘average’ or ‘satisfactory’ service?

22. Evaluation dispute process

Agents need to be given the opportunity to dispute their evaluation if they feel they are not happy with any aspect of it. The dispute process allows the agent the opportunity to have their evaluation re-evaluated by another person if they are unhappy with the result. This way, agents feel they have more control over their call evaluation, thus further empowering them to take ownership of their own quality

23. Agent synergy session

Synergy sessions involve groups of agents, team managers, CSMs and trainers listening to calls together to discuss call-handling techniques and evaluate the quality of the call. These sessions help reinforce quality standards and allow new and experienced agents to share experiences, best practice and provide a natural way to cross-skill agents from different departments. Recent studies have shown that agents attending regular synergy sessions achieve anywhere from 5% to 20% higher quality scores than the overall contact center.

24. Keep your call monitoring standardized

Keep your call monitoring standardized and consistent so you can build a steady, reliable picture of performance within your business.

25.  Don’t waste time searching

Don’t waste time searching through your database for suitable calls – use a tool which allows you to find and recall calls quickly and easily.

26. Record calls in the background

Remove agents’ stress from call monitoring by using a solution which records quietly in the background, without influencing the behavior of the individual under assessment.  [In one call center I went to the agents knew they were being monitored when the supervisor put her headset on - editor]

27.  Allow self-assessment

Gain “buy-in” from your teams by allowing agents to self-assess some of their work – make them feel their input is valued and that your team ethos is inclusive.

28.  Make it a habit

Monitor calls on a regular basis to build a progressive picture of your team’s performance.

29.  Assess the effectiveness of your training programs

Use call quality monitoring to assess the effectiveness of your training programs – listen in to verify that points taught in training sessions have been noted and put into practice. Call quality monitoring is also an easy means of assessing where gaps in knowledge or practice may exist – use this learning to build training solutions which close those gaps off.

30. Define what constitutes a quality customer interaction and what you are measuring

A typical example of best practice is a call answered in a timely and appropriate manner, dealt with swiftly and to the customer’s satisfaction, meeting service levels and KPIs.

The aim of quality monitoring from an operational point of view is to identify the calls failing to meet pre-defined standards and get to the root cause of why. You can then make informed decisions to make the process better, faster and quicker, e.g. implement or refine agent training and coaching initiatives to bridge skills gaps, correct broken internal processes, improve workforce scheduling, or perhaps alert other areas of the organization that are having an impact.

To achieve this you need to be able to evaluate a representative sample of interactions. The smaller the sample, the less accurate your benchmark scoring will be and you will run the risk of making the wrong decisions.

Using modern recording and quality monitoring tools, it is possible to capture not only the call itself but the activity that took place on the agent’s screen and score 100% of the interactions, giving an accurate and comprehensive view of agent, team, campaign and overall contact center performance.