What is the goal of a quality monitoring system? What should these systems do, ideally? What should a call center expect from them?

Shelley Veazie, Director of Marketing Communication, CTI Group: The goal of a quality monitoring system is to improve and simplify the customer service and sales processes. Ideally these systems should be tailored to work within the call centers existing system and provide management with the reports they need to effectively monitor all communication transactions quickly and efficiently.

A call center should expect a quality monitoring system to be easy to use, reliable and provide the exact information they require for their type of business

Anton Greiersen, Vice President of Global Sales, ASC telecom AG: Quality monitoring (QM) makes interactions between customers and agents more transparent. Content, communication skills and adherence to corporate identity may be reviewed and evaluated. Deficiencies or lack of skills become obvious and may be efficiently addressed. Contact centers should be prepared to carefully re-think their value system to really benefit from QM. Only organizations who understand and diligently pursue their quality goals will see a significant ROI.

Rick Daley, VP Sales and Marketing, CallCopy, Inc.: The goal for a quality monitoring system is to provide a suite of tools that can be easily used to monitor and maintain quality in a contact center. It should support a high degree of customization, and it must have the ability to integrate with third-party systems (CRM, IVR, WFM, etc.).

An ideal quality monitoring system will enable you to record up to 100% of your audio traffic and desktop activity (screen capture). Screen Capture should be available synchronized with the audio recordings and as a stand-alone component (e.g., for recording email or chat handling). The system should include a module for building custom Quality Monitoring forms, and it should include a dynamic range of reporting options. At minimum, reports should provide the ability to quantify data for a form or groups of forms; sections within a form; and individual questions within a form. Calibration reports, which show the number of evaluations entered by each user and the average score that user gave, are also critical.
Your Quality Monitoring application should have the ability to assign each user with access rights. These access rights, customized for each user, will determine what recordings that user can access and what actions that user can take with those records. For example, a user who is a Supervisor may be limited to accessing records for his/her team, and may not have the rights to delete or export those records.

Patrick Botz, Global Director of Marketing, Voice Print International, Inc.: Once considered just a basic business tool, the term "Quality Monitoring" now pertains to much more than a simple service observe function and the subsequent "post mortem" analysis of agent behaviors. In order to compete in today's harsh economic climate, modern contact centers are equipping themselves with powerful, real time quality monitoring applications that tie performance of the call center to overall business issues.

With the advanced tools available today, organizations shouldn't settle for less than real time quality monitoring. Contact centers operate in real time and fed a constant diet of real-time customer intelligence. By constantly monitoring and automatically responding to real-time intelligence, an organization can avoid potential disasters resulting from a poorly executed marketing campaign, procedural fiasco, or unpopular policy implementation.

Up until a few years ago, the contact center was an overlooked and relatively untapped source of business intelligence. However, advances in digital recording technologies and the emergence of sophisticated, real time performance management applications have enabled virtually every division of the enterprise to benefit from the vast store of valuable information gathered by this frontline communications hub. For example, marketing departments can now gain extensive marketplace feedback on specific campaigns, the performance of individual products, and customers' attitudes towards competitors' brands. For the HR department, contact center interactions are an essential tool for conflict or complaint resolution, disciplinary action or training programs modification, and improvement of scripts for recruiting and interviewing. At the boardroom level, reports formulated from intelligence gathered from the contact center can assist in strategic decision-making -- from organizational positioning to resource allocation.

Advanced real time quality monitoring applications bear little resemblance to the very basic quality monitoring tools of a few years ago. These powerful technologies have redefined the very meaning of the word "quality" in the contact center. In addition to monitoring agent performance, the process of reviewing calls can now yield valuable insights and intelligence. From a store of hundreds of thousands of recordings, these applications can deliver recordings of a specific nature, so that the interactions reviewed are not just random. For example, instead of performing QA on 25 random calls from one group of agents, a manager can review 25 of the group's calls that pertain to a specific marketing campaign or new product. In addition to reviewing the agents' performance, valuable customer feedback can be passed along to the appropriate departments.

From the very narrow perspective of agent training and coaching, real time quality monitoring solutions offer automated capabilities that reach far beyond the walls of the contact center. In addition to enabling contact center managers to deliver multimedia training to agent desktops on a schedule or rules-driven basis, track evaluation results over time, and quickly identify training weaknesses and flaws and implement prompt remedial measures, the new real time agent coaching and performance management applications enable management to gauge the effectiveness of sales and service tools, such as scripting, training, calling lists, etc.

Virtually every division of the enterprise can benefit from the vast store of valuable information gathered by their front-line communications hub. For example, marketing departments will have the ability to gain extensive real-time marketplace feedback on specific campaigns, the performance of individual products, and customers' attitudes towards competitors' brands. At the boardroom level, both real time and historical reports formulated from intelligence gathered from the contact center can be used to assist in strategic decision-making -- from organizational positioning to tactical decisions, like resource allocation. Instead of waiting for days, weeks, or even months for a performance report, executives and managers can be promptly and automatically alerted to the fact that a specific objective is (or is not) being achieved as planned and why. For instance, the system will report that a campaign is resulting in an above or below-average number of sales or other objectives -- even as they are in progress. Simultaneously, automated business rules will trigger the delivery of targeted training materials directly to the desktops of the agents handling the campaign. Department managers can easily drill down to individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale (or another objective) and discover what the customer is responding to and why. To confirm the significance of these findings, combined speech and business analytics can deliver statistics suggesting the causes of declining or exceptionally high performance. This information can be used immediately to strengthen and focus the campaign and/or make other adjustments, leading to maximized profit margins and customer satisfaction.