How Quality Management Can Help Improve Your Customer Experience

What is quality management, and why is it essential for your contact center? Quality management (QM) is one of the most important strategies to improve your customer experience. More than simply gathering data, it’s about the broader vision. Improving your customer experience begins with understanding what you’re measuring and how that data relates to your end goals.

Quality management is defined as the people, processes, and systems for monitoring customer interactions to ensure they are being handled by agents in a desired fashion, also known as quality management. It’s a set of processes that can be implemented to ensure quality service is delivered on a consistent basis. According to ISO 9000, QM is “a part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled.”

Good quality management should achieve the following:

• Guide customer service staff in how to improve their performance
• Promote efficiency
• Help your company stand out by improving customer experience

Here’s how a quality management program can help your company stand out by improving customer experience.

Let the Customer Lead Your Metrics and KPIs

A customer should define what good quality management looks like in your contact center. A good Net Promoter Score is great, but finding out the reasons behind the score is even better. 

What are the hallmarks of good customer service staff? You might consider using “Agent Satisfaction” as one of your QM metrics, which shows the customer’s overall feeling about the interaction as a whole, not just how well the agent followed procedure.

Surveys are also an excellent tool to use to determine what customers really want from interactions.

When surveyed, 77% of customers said that valuing their time is the best way a company can provide a good customer experience.

Customers want personalized service that goes beyond problem-solving. How do you improve your customer experience? Recognizing the customer’s needs and desires and ensuring they’re fulfilled is the best next step. Ask your customers questions based on your business and industry. Most customers are happy to give you feedback as long as they know that you’ll listen and implement changes to address their needs. 

Related Article: How to Preserve Your Contact Center QM Budget

Focus on the Things That Really Matter

An overload of information can create unnecessary challenges. Too much data can lead to “analysis paralysis,” and when you over-measure, your contact center team might not know what metrics matter most. With the abundance of information available in today’s world, it’s easy to drown in meaningless numbers. 

Decide what’s most important to your company mission and concentrate on it. An evaluation form that’s too long runs the risk of confusing your staff and increasing your call time. Define the most important KPIs for your organization, and then use QM to measure from there.

Get Buy-In from Customer Service Staff

Nobody knows your customers better than your customer service team. They have insights that nobody else in the company does since they interact with customers on the ground day in and day out. They’re on the front lines and are truly your best asset to help your company stand out by improving customer experience.

Often the only way to assist customers in a reasonable timeframe is to have well-trained and empowered customer service staff. Customers have limited time and patience to wait around for a supervisor to approve a request or another department to weigh in. They expect the customer service agent to be able to handle their request from top to bottom. For these reasons, getting buy-in from customer service staff is key to QM success.

Remember to Get Input from All Channels

Customers interact with companies on many platforms: phone calls, email, live chat, text messages, social media, and more. Each channel has its own rules, norms, and set of expectations. How quickly your customers expect an answer to their query depends on the channel. For example, a phone call should be answered immediately, a social media message within a couple of hours, and an email should have a 24-hour response window.

When determining what good quality management looks like, your answer will probably be different for each channel. Incorporating these standards will help your organization establish a strong quality management strategy that can make a difference and improve your customer experience. 

Focus on the Three Parts of a Quality Management Evaluation 

Once you’ve decided on the qualities you need to measure, you can divide the quality management evaluation into some key areas:

• What is the required process?
• How well did the agent follow it?
• What was the customer experience?

Good quality management is a constant process of observation, evaluation, and adaptation. And remember, one of the most essential roles of quality is to give your customer service agents feedback on the caliber of their work and how they can improve your customer experience.

When your agents deliver top-notch work on a regular basis, you can count on good CX. The more you fine-tune your approach, get feedback from your customers, and train your staff to improve customer experience, the better your CX metrics will be.

Celebrate Good Work to Improve Your Customer Experience

Of course, it’s important to praise and reward good work by your staff — after all, happy staff members make happy customers. 

We’ve all been there: We’re tempted to focus on fixing what’s going wrong instead of celebrating what’s going right. In your quest to help your company stand out by improving customer experience, it’s easy to fixate on the problems.

But there’s so much to gain when we turn our eyes toward what is going right. It’s much easier to train for good performance when you focus on promoting the good instead of criticizing the bad. After all, no one signs up for seminars on learning to play golf by studying the worst players of all time, right?

Top-performing staff members might enjoy training others in how to deliver excellent service. It shows how much you value their expertise while helping other staff members climb to the top of their game.

Follow Quality Managment Best Practices

Once you’ve gathered your data, use it to formulate your best practices. It might help to have a dedicated quality management professional to oversee the whole process. If you keep in mind the steps outlined above, your quality management program can help take you to heights of improved customer experience and profitability.

Improving your customer experience strategy is crucial for the success of your contact center. And the process is a continuing cycle. It’s important to regularly reevaluate your strategy to ensure it’s working properly and is up-to-date with current trends. Request a demo today to see how Playvox can help you improve customer experience in your contact center.