Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Operations Monitoring Crucial to Improved Call Center Performance

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

A blog post at Medarch.net offers some insight on how “analytics and contact center quality monitoring are changing the way companies do business and dramatically improving contact center operations.”

Of course managers want “quick and accurate insights into the effectiveness of their contact center operations” in order to make decisions, but as the post notes, “they don’t have the time or resources to listen to and review the vast amount of customer interactions handled by the agents every day.”

Plus, “these days there seems to be more sophisticated tools including multimedia recording, desktop analytics, instant chat, self service options in the IVR, cloud computing... Therein lays their dilemma -- so little time, so much to accomplish in the course of a day.”

This is why, as the post notes, “contact center quality monitoring systems offered today are not only to evaluate agents but also to evaluate a contact center reputation. Yes, reputation might sound obvious but too often contact centers seem to miss this critical view point.”

Do they ever. “Call center reporting and call monitoring systems are a means to an end in that one has to learn from the information and who else to translate these to actions and outcomes than the supervisor,” the post explains, adding that “this has to be one of the most critical and unforgiving roles within the contact center next to the agent,” saying it’s like being a quarterback called in to throw a touchdown pass on each attempt -- and then being asked to play linebacker as well.

The post does note that the role of the supervisor and their agent has been so devalued over the years that “it is not a surprise the attrition rates for these roles are in double digits. This is not a malaise or a disease or caused by the recent global financial crisis or globalization. We did this to ourselves.”

And it’s not a good thing: “We have become part of a culture that communicates via a keyboard than by voice skills and the traditional skills that our parents taught us about being polite and respectful. We complicate the connection with our customers and prospects through voice prompts and boring scripts to keep the agents from really having a connection with the customers.”

As the post says, quality assurance “is everyone’s responsibility, and by giving power to the people who influence agent behaviors, then the supervisor should be the quarterback that determines the outcome of the game.”