According to Call Center Quality Monitoring Study IV, a recent report by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), only 55.8% of the 870 call center professionals surveyed stated that their quality assurance personnel receive the time and resources they need to lead an effective quality program, down from an already low 58.2% in a 2004 study.
Centers' struggles to obtain the resources they require could stem from the fact that they aren't sharing enough key data/trends uncovered during monitoring with the enterprise as a whole.
Barely half (52%) of respondents reported that their center shares monitoring data/customer feedback with other departments within their enterprise.
The study also revealed that while they are doing a decent job of monitoring traditional phone calls and customer email contacts, most centers have failed to extend their quality assurance efforts to their self-service channels, thus setting up their promising IVR and Web-based support strategies for ultimate failure. Only 25.8% and 27.4% of centers monitor their IVR and Web self-service contacts.
Some findings, however, were more optimistic. For instance, 72.4% of centers surveyed are explaining the center's monitoring program and objectives to agent candidates to ensure understanding and acceptance early, and 71.1% are empowering agents to self-monitor and evaluate some of their own contacts prior to receiving formal feedback.
However, most centers would vastly improve their quality programs and the customer experience -- as well as the agent experience -- by adopting a few other easy-to-implement tactics and processes, such as seeking agent input when developing the center's monitoring form, utilizing e-learning modules to enhance the efficiency of feedback delivery and the complexity of feedback content, and implementing a dynamic "voice-of-the-customer" component to help give the center and agents a clearer view of customer preferences.
The following are other key findings from ICMI's Call Center Quality Monitoring Study IV:
Phone calls to live agents are the most common type of contact monitored; with 95.8% of centers (that have a quality program in place) monitoring these contacts.
Over three quarters (77.7%) of centers handle customer email transactions, with roughly two thirds (64%) actually monitoring email contacts (up slightly from 61% in ICMI's 2004 monitoring study.)
Supervisors conduct monitoring in 55% of centers surveyed. Other positions that commonly monitor staff are internal quality assurance specialists (48.1%), team leaders (44.7%), and managers (40.7%).
The top reasons for monitoring cited by respondents were the same this year as in the 2004 study:
Ensure that quality standards for each call are met
Measure agent performance
Evaluate level of customer satisfaction
Identify customer needs/expectations
Identify additional training needs for individual agents
While most centers (80.4%) use a combination of monitoring methods, the most common method cited in the study is call recording " used in 81.9% of centers surveyed.
The percentage of respondents whose centers use automated monitoring technology is down from 58% in 2004 to 51.8% today.
In nearly three quarters (73.8%) of centers surveyed, those who conduct monitoring receive formal evaluation and coaching to ensure that they carry out their quality assurance duties effectively. To help ensure consistency among monitors, nearly all centers (92.8%) use a standard monitoring form during evaluations.
ICMI's Call Center Quality Monitoring Study IV may be purchased directly from www.icmi.com/ccko, ICMI's Call Center Knowledge Online site.
ICMI's Call Center Knowledge Online, launched in 2003, is an online resource center that provides call center professionals with 24-hour access to downloadable documents, such as Call Center Management Review article bundles, ICMI research studies, tutorials, checklists and book excerpts from the industry's definitive source of call center knowledge.
