Why BPA Quality Contact Center QA

Analytics Driven Quality Service

BPA Quality‘s Analytics Driven Quality Service analyzes agent and customer behavior insightfully and objectively. The QA process becomes more than just checking boxes, it becomes a tool to increase agent performance, business intelligence, customer experience and operational effectiveness.

In today’s world where competition is more and more demanding staying on the leading edge becomes more important.

BPA Quality Managed Services help you stay on the leading edge and develop the capability to stay in front of the competition. 

Our Expert Managed Services ensure that you have a QA department that is second to none by supplying a team of experts that are there to monitor and develop the skills of your Agents.

Whether you want to outsource all or part  of your quality program, BPA’s industry  experts and managed quality services are  ready to take your organizations’ quality  program to the next level.

BPA Quality is located in offices in New York, Florida and the UK.  So, if you need to develop American customer engagement or looking for a global view, we can provide Quality Assurance programs in over 42 languages.

BPA Research

BPA Research Teams bring a scientific  approach to the measurement and  development of performance. Taking best practice and customer feedback, they  are able to construct metrics that will  produce successful outcomes to contacts  with customers.

BPA Psychometric Experts identify the  psychological attributes, including the  knowledge, skills and abilities that are  necessary to produce outstanding contacts  with customers. They identify behavior profiles  of successful contacts that can then be used as  a framework for optimizing performance.

BPA Process Development Teams identify and  develop processes that will remove barriers  and enhance the customer’s experience as well  as improving aspects such as AHT and FCR.

BPA Consultancy and  Professional Services

BPA is a global provider of expert managed quality services including: quality design, program outsourcing, and staff augmentation.

Whether you need advice or guidance in setting up  your quality assurance organization, maximizing the  effectiveness from your current activity, or you want to investigate how you best measure performance objectively  to drive customer engagement, our team of QA expert business partners can help.

We support you in developing your QA vision and strategy,  improving performance, and focusing on achieving specific  business outcomes. Our consultants provide in-depth  industry and technical knowledge in the areas of quality  management, form design, process excellence, customer insight, maximizing the human element in interactions, coaching and feedback, and helping you maximize contact center ROI.

Quality Monitoring Tip #1

Your program should be clear and to the point. The agents have limited time and bandwidth to absorb any feedback…they are busy!

Find more tips by going to our Quality Monitoring White Paper!

BPA Quality Managed QA Solutions USA

Culture, Tone and Language Considerations in Quality Monitoring

Here at BPA Quality, one of the services we offer under the umbrella of managed quality services is to unde
rtake large-scale quality monitoring of text and voice interactions in multiple languages.

On some global, multi-lingual projects, the client expectation is that agent tone should remain consistent, regardless of the customer’s language or chosen contact channel.

It goes without saying that agents’ tone should also sound genuine in any language – so for global campaigns, it is important to accommodate for cultural differences. Avoiding the use of language-specific figures of speech as fillers rather than making meaningful statements, and having a sound understanding of culture-specific etiquette are both key elements for success in soft skills. A prime example: whereas US and European customers might expect agents to express empathy for their situation at the opening of the conversation, in some Asian cultures, displaying unsolicited empathy is not appropriate, and monitoring should take account of these differences.

When considering text-based contact, aside from an inherent difficulty in establishing tone in written communications, there can be further cultural implications to consider. For example, in many European languages, using the formal register has historically been the common way to address clients in customer service interactions; some companies are now making a conscious choice to use the informal register (e.g. ‘tu‘ rather than ‘vous‘ in French) which may not always be well-received by more traditionally-minded customers.

This informality in written communication may sometimes occur in contrast to the voice channel for the same company, leading to situations where agents may be required to address customers using the formal register in calls but not in chat.

This can potentially have implications for overall tone, which may be drawn into particular focus if customers make use of multi-channel contact and are left with different perceptions of the brand depending on the channel (which form of address is the one which is most ‘on-brand’ for any particular company…?)

It is reasonable to expect that customers will increasingly equate web chat with other more informal modes of text-based messaging, like IM and SMS, and so may expect their web chat dealings with companies to be conducted in a similar vein.

Even though web chat may generally be viewed as a more informal medium, best practice is still for the spelling / grammar and typography to be held to stringent standards – not least due to the ease with which these interactions can be copied by customers and find their way onto the wider internet, on blogs and message boards, when compared with calls. Indeed, some companies now routinely forward web chat transcripts to customers, so accuracy, tone and being ‘on-brand’ is paramount.

Ultimately, establishing appropriate tone for agents regardless of language and method of contact is best achieved by frequent calibration sessions, taking all of the above considerations into account. Calibrations should take place on a regular basis with key project stakeholders, ideally using sample interactions across all languages and channels in which the project is delivered.

With over 25 years’ experience in quality monitoring and with global clients, our multi-lingual team have the skills, expertise and experience to add this level of detail and insight to your customer service or sales programmes.

To explore more about the subject of this article or to discuss any element of quality monitoring please feel free to contact me or BPA Quality via our website: www.bpaquality.co.uk or www.bpaquality.com.

By:  Helen Beaumont Manahan, Project Implementation Manager at BPA Quality UK

 

Recognising the importance of the Human Element in Customer Interactions

For over 25 years, BPA Quality has been working with some of the world’s biggest organisations with one aim: to improve customer experience and, through this, deliver increased sales, retention, loyalty, cost optimisation, compliance and profitability.

Our many valued clients have a common passion and commitment to create outstanding organisations and work in partnership with BPA Quality to achieve competitive advantage and deliver exceptional results. They understand the strategic importance of having a highly effective quality programme within their organisation.

As the sphere of influence and recognition of the importance of the Contact Centre and quality functions grow, covering all aspects of the business from Sales, Marketing, Product Design, Legal and Compliance to the Customer-Facing Operations, so the need to capitalise on this key resource becomes imperative.

Our many years of specialism in Contact Centre Quality Assurance places us in a highly informed position; we have listened to
millions of “human” customer
contact situations, covering almost every customer type, having every conceivable difficulty or requirement. We have also undertaken this
activity internationally, covering 45 languages, so we understand the differences between customer service expectations across multiple cultures.

All of this activity has enabled us to gain a detailed knowledge and view of the behaviours and processes that drive positive customer experience and engagement in Contact Centres and the development of effective quality and coaching programmes that enhance performance.

One of the key areas is a detailed understanding of the value and importance every customer interaction has in either positively or negatively impacting customer engagement with the organisation.

A great deal of focus in the Contact Centre quality programmes we encounter remains centred on scripting, process adherence, AHT reduction, risk avoidance, contact deflection and compliance, and not always on maximising the real opportunities presented in the Human Element of interactions.

Every conversation with a Customer is a lot more than just saying words and phrases – it’s an opportunity to make a real connection, to build the human element. As humans, unlike machines (chatbots), we have the ability to be creative, intuitive, show genuine empathy, feeling and understanding; to connect on a human level.

The human element in interactions provides great opportunities to:

• Build and reinforce your brand 

• Build trust, credibility, and highlight competence 

• Personalise the interaction and foster mirrored relationships
• Understand the reason for the interaction 

• Identify all elements of the contact 

• Build a relationship, show empathy, ownership and understanding; ensure the Customer feels like an individual, not a number 

• Paint a picture to show the Customer you are engaged 

• Offer flexible solutions 

• Negotiate suitable solutions, creating win/win situations 

• Build loyalty, retention, sales opportunities, advocacy, and increase first call resolution. 


Every interaction, whatever the duration, represents an opportunity to discover valuable information about your Customers, identifying their challenges, wants and needs. This knowledge, once identified, can provide you with actionable insight and intelligence that can be used to guide the conversation and help build more effective human connections.

So in our rush to automate everything, push Customers online and reduce expensive human contact, we must not forget the value these interactions bring to our business. Significant focus should be placed on developing the effective skills, behaviours and coaching programmes designed to maximise this great benefit to our people and Customers.

by Andrew Mutch, Chief Customer Officer EMEA

Above the Clouds – with Yvette Renda

 

Travel is part of my job as a trainer with BPA Quality, and I’ve journeyed all over the place for many years. But don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the clichés of the business traveller: upgrades, airline miles, hotel points, jet lag, ‘red eye’ flights, the psycho ADHD kid kicking the back of the seat….blah, blah, blah and yawn.

The truth is – at the end of a long assignment spent mostly on my feet – all I need from an airline is a flight that guarantees to get me where I most want to be (home!) in the quickest way possible. Luckily I’m quite small, so even the most meager economy seats can usually accommodate me without too much discomfort. That, and my ability to fall asleep the moment I hear a jet-engine start up, usually ensures a palliative experience.

Given all that, I’m sure you’ve realized that I’m not particularly tolerant of fellow travellers in adjacent seats who seem hell-bent on preventing me from gently snoring. And, my goodness, I’ve had experience of all of them on one flight or another: religious fanatics, power-salesmen, fantasists, hypochondriacs, phobic flyers, as well as common garden crazies…….you name it.

However, there are exceptions, and my companion on a flight back from Phoenix a few weeks ago was one of them. For a start he was reading a book. A real one…….without moving his lips. When was the last time anyone read a real book on a flight? Secondly, he was eating a bit of cake with frosting in a dainty napkin. “From my wife and daughter” he explained, showing me a little card that had ‘Daddy’ written on it in childish crayon, “It’s my birthday”.

Well, having demonstrated both his intelligence and humanity it was kind of easy to have a conversation, and naturally it turned to what we did for a living. It turns out that he’s a quality control scientist with a plastics engineering firm (I think that’s correct), so we weren’t able to get much further with that. But when he found out that I trained customer service agents, he was anxious to share some of his own experiences of ‘customer service’ with me.

Apparently he’d just tried to book an air miles flight with his preferred airline, and after a good start with (let’s call her) ‘Stacey’ he’d had a less than impressive follow-up call with (let’s call her) ‘Donna’. I’m not going to tell you how Stacey and Donna got the dates mixed up, and the consequences in terms of costs of upgrades/hotels/car hire and general inconvenience, because occasionally such things happen. And, as you know, it’s not always possible to get to the bottom of these matters and allocate blame like a teacher giving bad marks for wrong spellings.

Anyway, like most situations like this, the matter was resolved after a manager’s intervention and some intensity on the part of my new friend. No doubt, there were also a few ruffled feathers on the part of Stacey and Donna and the manager too.

No. What was interesting here was that this was a perfect example of how telephone language and tone – two things I teach as a trainer for BPA Quality – can immediately influence customer behavior.

So after listening to his long tale of woe I asked “At what point did you lose it? What was the final straw?”, and he told me it was when Donna had bluntly told him that “Stacey wouldn’t have told you that” as a firm rebuttal to something he said. To him it was tantamount to calling him a liar, and he had exploded with anger. Seeing my expressionless face he proceeded to add other crimes to Donna’s inadequacies up to that point: “She was dismissive”, “She didn’t give a XXXX” etc, etc.

Now, this situation was always likely to need a higher power to solve it (in this case Donna’s manager). But a great deal of unpleasantness and bad feeling could have been avoided if Donna had simply:

1. Used less confrontational language
2. Adopted a more personable ‘tonal’ demeanor

Donna probably didn’t even know what had caused the sudden outburst from the customer, and as a BPA Quality trainer I see this time and again.

Even when the language issue is staring training groups in the face they don’t always get it. For instance, I used Donna as an example recently, and found some quite sensible members of the group defending her choice of words as ‘not offensive’!

My approach here is to put the group in a hypothetical similar situation and ask them to rate the interaction using a scale from 1-10, negative to positive, and this usually works well in gaining consensus with a training group.

“So what would you have done?” asked my new friend. “Possibly the same as you” I reassured him. “My job is to prevent such scenes before they occur. I really can’t do much when they’ve already been provoked!”

By Yvette Renda, VP of Training Excellence at BPA Quality

Maximising the Effectiveness of Quality Scorecards

Here at BPA Quality we have over 25 years’ experience in providing expert quality monitoring services and consultancy for contact centres. Our clients are drawn from 100 different industries with the one common area being that they use contact centres to communicate with their customers. Being at the hub of all this combined experience and expertise means we are in the lucky position of seeing all elements of how through quality monitoring different companies attempt to implement exceptional customer experience.

Our experience and variety of client’s results in a unique BPA view on all things related to the delivery and achievement of quality monitoring.

Without selling the family heirlooms I have decided to write about the subjects we are asked about the most and share some thoughts.    

One of the main area’s we are asked about by clients and potential clients alike is; “what is the ideal scorecard.”

Regardless of the level of investment in quality in your contact centre you will invariably use a scorecard to identify problems, maintain quality standards, improve customer experience, and increase agent, centre and departmental performances.

Given the importance of scorecards, their creation and amendments should be considered and involve front line team members, managers, stakeholders, customers and, if possible,  industry experts.

Building a routine and process for regular reviews of your scorecard is crucial; scorecards in our experience have a habit of growing organically with areas added to reflect current needs, or latest trends. Over time, this can lead to scorecards that have duplicate areas measured or areas measured that are no longer relevant.

Scorecards should have measures that are aligned with your company view on how it should be delivering customer experience. It should also consider KPIs, external benchmarking and also customer expectations.

Once you understand the measures and are confident they reflect your version of a quality interaction, you then need to give serious thought on how these interactions are then measured.  Include examples that demonstrate excellent, average and poor quality of the behaviour/activity being measured.

Ask yourself, “Can I develop an action plan from the results of the scorecard. Can I communicate the results to the agents effectively? Am I able to identify outstanding performance as well as areas for improvement?”

Whilst oversimplified, this view of the creation of scorecards provides ‘food for thought’ about some of the key considerations regarding scorecards.

For more detailed information regarding scorecards and how to maximise their effectiveness, please feel free to contact me.   

Written by:  Martin Teasdale, Quality Solutions Director – UK & EMEA

June 6, 2016

3 Different Types of Quality Programs … Which is the best for your Customers?

Did you know that 76% of consumers that partook in the Aspect Consumer Experience Survey view customer service as the true test of how much a company values them?  How about, according to the 2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report by Parature, 65% of the 1000 consumers surveyed said they would sever their relationship with a brand over a single poor customer experience?  So … how do you make sure that your agents are providing a fantastic customer experience every time they interact with customers?  One word … QUALITY!

A potent Quality program that provides objective and customer-concentric evaluations can make the difference in agents’ abilities to understand the optimum way to provide first-class customer service.  There are 3 main platforms of Quality:  Internal Quality Team, Outsourced (offshored) Quality Team and Pro-sourced Quality Team.  Choosing the right one depends on the business needs and goals.

If you are looking to have total control over the quality program and to have analysts available to answer calls during high call volume, then an internal team may be your choice.  From my many conversations with call center leaders, they have complained that quality wasn’t being done because the analysts were pulled to help manage call queues. Since evaluations were not being done, then the agents were not being provided proper coaching.  Also, from the same conversations, there is also a high probability of nepotism because quality teams were co-workers/friends with the agents.  Since the evaluations are more subjective then objective, opportunities are lost to assist agents to be best-in-class.

Outsource (offshoring) quality monitoring will definitely get audits completed, in a check box mentality.  Since this work is outsourced to different countries because of lower wages, cultural issues arise.  Customers from the USA are quite a contrast from those in India, South America and the Philippines.  The cultural difference can be one word or tone away from losing a customer.  A quality program should contribute insight to all your customers’ expectations and benefit call center managers with appropriate information to properly coach agents.

The last main platform, far from the least, is Pro-sourcing Quality.  Just like FedEx is an expert on getting packages from Point A to Point B on time, a Pro-sourced quality company are experts in quality.  Listening to calls for quality is not a skill that everyone possesses.  It takes expertise in listening and analyzing calls for hours.  Uncovering business intelligence to help a company reach their goals and needs are all part of a pro-sourcing relationship.  Since most pro-sourcing quality companies are located where your customers live, it is capable of understanding the culture and even regionalism of your customers.  In a pro-sourcing quality partnership, they work with you (the expert in your business) and couples it with unbiased, customer-centric analysis of how to increase customer experience and loyalty.

As mentioned before, choosing the correct quality platform that works for your call center needs and goals can be a daunting process.  According to a whitepaper by Craig Antonucci at BPA Quality, there are 4 factors that make a quality program successful:

1. Make it clear and to the point
2. Integrate supervisors and managers into the process
3. Clearly define the program for the agents
4. Make it consistent, fair, objective and accurate

I would add one more factor …

Be sure your quality analysts and program are experts in quality, and they can provide insightful knowledge on what is excellent customer service to YOUR customers.

EES, ESAT, ENPS = CES, CSAT, NPS

Back from a couple of days at Customer Contact Expo, the self proclaimed “UK’s premier event for Customer contact solutions, workshops and connections”, where thousands of industry professionals gathered to hear about trends, see the latest technology and gain a vision of what the contact centres of the future will look like.

As anticipated there were lots of solution providers and discussions around the usual Contact Centre hot topics of Omni-Channel, process improvement and Customer Engagement with “Cloud Based” appearing to be the buzz phrase at the event.

What was refreshing to hear was the increased focus on two areas that I believe are vital to contact centres and business success; employee engagement and the increasing sphere of influence of quality in organisations.

Employee Engagement

In a highly interesting talk by David Macleod from the Employee Engagement Taskforce, the understanding, backed up by compelling evidence, that positively engaging your team can have dramatic impact on all of your business metrics was persuasively delivered. I encourage you to look at the Engaging for Success website where there are specific publications showing the weight of evidence of how positively engaging employees impacts profitability and service outcomes.

From personal experience, I have always believed that the engagement and development of team members with the same level of rigor used in measuring and managing customer engagement and experience can deliver exceptional dividends.

We are all aware of the drive towards reducing customer effort, satisfying customers and in encouraging customers to promote our products and services, indeed most businesses have robust processes for measuring these areas; CES, CSAT, NPS. Can the same be said for our employee practices?

Do we spend an equal amount of time tracking and measuring our employee effort, how easy it is to work for us, our employee satisfaction and our employee promotion scores, given the impact our people can have on our business and customers?

From a customer perspective, we measure the customer journey; from promotion to acquisition, utilization, satisfaction and retention, with teams looking at understanding and enhancing all touch points for consistency, simplification, cost optimisation and enhanced experience. We undertake detailed root cause analysis, process improvement, quality measurement and invest heavily in technology to ensure we are meeting business and customer needs.

In my opinion, a compelling case can be made for undertaking the same detailed approach to the employee journey from values, culture, skills, competencies, advertising, recruitment, on-boarding, induction, personal development, communication; in short all employee touch points. By identifying what excellence looks like in each of these areas, there can then be a drive and culture within the organisation for continuous improvement and enhancement.

With technology increasingly providing solutions for less complex interactions, the ability of our teams to handle higher value, more complex interactions across multiple channels will grow. Having a highly skilled and engaged workforce will enable us to better meet the future challenges, and is going to be an increasingly important area of focus in the Customer Service and the Contact Centre industry in the years ahead.

The second area; the increasing sphere of influence of quality in organisations, I will cover in my next article.

Written by:  Andrew Mutch, Chief Customer Officer,  BPA Quality UK Research Center

20 Call Center Quality Assurance Considerations – the Big Picture

1. Define goal:  Map your QA process to business goals
2. Build a QA quality culture and behavior framework:  framework centered around improving the customer experience by focusing on the effort the customer makes, minimizing conduct risk and providing the most positive customer outcomes
3. Remove the perception of QA evaluation as being a punitive process
4. Pay close attention to correlation between QA scores and customer survey scores – note:  Only 20-25% of customer satisfaction with a call is determined by the content of their conversation with agents
5. Progressive businesses are moving on from tick box, features and benefits format to customer engagement / active listening, matching and outcomes
6. The QA team should be regarded as experts in driving the customer experience agenda across the organization and be regarded as an integral part of the company value chain
7. Business Intelligence Team uses the data gathered through quality process for providing the business with performance insight & predictive analytics
8. QA should inform product and product governance:   Undertake product reviews / what do customers like, dislike
9. The QA and compliance teams need to work hand-in-glove; ensuring compliant customer interactions for both new and existing customers: regulatory rules are now given
10. Red flag process vigorously enforced
11. Senior Executives need visibility:  Customer experience, product / marketing / managing risk
12. Build processes and systems to share information across the business:  Share Voice of the Customer feedback with other departments
13. Hold regular round tables with Product, Marketing, Sales:  highlight trends, risks, feedback
14. Influence the organization:  don’t operate in a silo
15. Include agents and team leads in the calibration process
16. Calibrate based on expertise, not deviation from average or arbitrary targets
17. Use Calibrations to refine QA forms and remove ambiguity
18. Look to your teams to identify and share anecdotal feedback:  sometimes it is OK to work in the grey
19. Keep your QA forms fresh and relevant
20. Deep-dive analysis of the data to identify trends, insight and areas that require greater focus