What is Quality Management?

In contact centers, quality management is the process of ensuring customer interactions meet a defined quality standard within all channels and across all agents. As businesses increasingly compete on customer experience, quality management becomes even more important in order to ensure the contact center touchpoints with customers are consistent with the brand promise. Additionally, quality management efforts can unearth product and operational issues that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Quality management begins with establishing the desired standards for each channel and then creating an evaluation form based on these standards that the quality analysts can use when evaluating interactions. Interactions are typically rated on several criteria of agent performance based on both soft, qualitative behaviors and operational, more quantitative objectives. For example: Did the agent use the standard greeting? Did she address all of the customer's issues? Was she polite and professional? Did she offer cross-sell items appropriately? Every business will have unique evaluation criteria based on the customer experience they want to deliver.

Quality management analysts will typically evaluate a certain percentage of contacts each month and strive to ensure an adequate, representative sample is included for each agent. The analysts are responsible for not only assessing the contacts, but also for providing actionable feedback for agents to improve their performance. Agents typically get visibility into their quality results through agent dashboards, and they will become more invested, engaged, and receptive to feedback if they're provided an easy mechanism for dispute resolution and self-evaluations.

The traditional quality management approach of evaluating only a percentage of contacts is generally effective, but has gaps due to the sheer volume of interactions at most contact centers and their inability to evaluate more than just a small sample size. Integrating speech and text analytics into the quality process fills this gap by reviewing 100% of contacts and flagging certain interactions for supervisors to evaluate based on business criteria. When combined with the traditional approach, it provides more holistic quality management results.