Anton Greiersen, Vice President of Global Sales, ASC telecom AG:

Most call centers skip the pre-implementation phase, when quality content must be carefully defined. In addition to knowing "what quality is," how to improve poor quality is equally important. So, ways to "discover and ameliorate issues" should be discussed upfront! Only time and the right group of participants will create a pragmatic and usable value system.

Rick Daley, VP Sales and Marketing, CallCopy, Inc.:

I think the most common mistake is to spend too much time monitoring and not enough time analyzing the results of your evaluations. Just monitoring each agent 10 times each month does not achieve results. You need to find out how those agents are performing, and more importantly, why they are performing that way. Is their quality rating down because they have poor soft skills, but they happen to be a whiz at navigating their desktop tools? Or just the opposite, they have excellent soft skills but they take too long to find the correct answer?
Best practices start with calibration sessions. There must be a common understanding of the quality goal. Calibration should include your agents as well as your management. If the agents do not truly understand what you expect from them, how will they meet that expectation? In order to set them up for success, your agents must understand your goals.

Patrick Botz, Global Director of Marketing, Voice Print International, Inc.:

Mistakes:
Opting for selective recording or "sampling" -- Organizations often fail to recognize the importance of full-time recording. Full time recording provides an accurate representation of activities as well as 100% insurance for compliance and liability management. Storage -- the only major obstacle to full time recording -- is no longer an issue. DAT tape and clumsy reel-to-reel devices have long since become a thing of the past, replaced by NAS/SAN devices and DVDs for unlimited online storage capacity.

Failure to implement open standards -- It's vital to invest in a quality monitoring system that is truly "open". Many vendors claim to offer open architecture, but when the time comes to add functionality or to leverage new integrations or storage strategies, organizations are forced to "upgrade," which really means they have to completely re-architect their infrastructure. True open architecture will enable utmost flexibility in inwards and outwards integrations and endless scalability. With an open system, easy upgradeability is assured, as well as prevention from obsolescence. An open system will integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure -- meeting the needs of a specific environment. It will be platform independent, which means its software can operate on the server of choice -- enabling it to sit behind the firewall and work in harmony with network operations.

Best Practices:
Review calls that result in exceptional or poor outcomes -- Contact centers need to listen to calls that help improve customer experience, agent performance, and business processes. Instead of randomly listening to calls, today's reporting solutions allow supervisors to drill down to individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale and discover the actual root cause of the customer behavior.

Deliver Targeted, Timely Training -- Instead of waiting for a weekly report to inform agents that their conversion rates have dropped or that they haven't been adhering to new quality requirements, present them with constant update -- providing the impetus to take additional training sessions and take control of their own performance. Real-time, automated agent coaching solutions enable managers to deliver multimedia training to agent desktops on a schedule- or rules-driven basis when predetermined thresholds are reached.

Motivate Your Agents -- Real-time analytics and coaching solutions are also highly motivational tools for agents. The dashboards create a positive energy and sense of camaraderie between the agents. They can engage in healthy competition, support and celebrate each other's achievements, pass-on tips and advice, and motivate themselves when they most need a boost. Happy agents are more productive and provide better customer service.