How QA Software Can Help Solve Your Contact Centre’s Key Challenges

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Viki Patten at EvaluAgent explores how the right QA software can transform contact centres by addressing key challenges such as insufficient interaction monitoring and the balance between automation and human oversight.

The contact centre has always been a challenging place to work – fortunately, technology can help alleviate a lot of the most common obstacles, blockers and issues.

In fact, Deloitte’s 2023 contact centre report shows that modernizing infrastructure and agent-enablement technologies feature as two of the top three investment priorities.

So what challenges can best-in-category QA software help you solve?

The Primary Contact Centre Challenges

Great call centre software should help you alleviate tangible issues within your contact centre. With over 25 years of contact centre expertise, we’ve found that most contact centres typically experience one or more of the following QA challenges:

Not Enough Interactions Monitored

It’s difficult to make meaningful impact when you’re only sampling 2-5% of interactions. You’ll rarely catch the extremes of the scale with this amount of coverage – both good and bad. It’s these must-monitor interactions that can have the biggest impact in improving customer service.

Upping this number by getting as close to 100% as possible is vital for getting a true picture of your customer experience.

Random Sampling of Interactions vs Over-Automation

It’s a catch-22. You randomly sample interactions in the hope of catching at least some of the extremes in customer interactions, which gives you unreliable and inconsistent data. Or, you can leverage automation to find them all – only to drown in data, making it ultimately useless.

The key here is to find software that helps you strike the balance between automation and the human touch.

Using Data Meaningfully to Drive Improvement

Senior staff are spending too long sitting behind a screen of data – be it in already existing software, or spreadsheets – instead of coaching and developing their team. They get bogged down in admin, manual workflows and slow reporting.

They could really use real-time, automated workflows that surface important insights quickly and easily. There are tons of different methods and features to not only keep on top of agent development, but make great strides with actionable insights across the contact centre.

Engaging Agents and Teams

With agent attrition rates at a historically high average of 38% and contact centre leaders sharing that recruiting and retaining talent is one of their biggest challenges, keeping agents engaged is a big thorn in the side of today’s contact centres.

COVID shook up the norm and changed expectations of working models everywhere, with SQM reporting that 81% of agents prefer to work from home.

Not all contact centres are able to offer such flexibility, and the ones that are lack the visibility to engage those who might be ‘quiet quitting’.

Add to that the inevitably high-pressure nature of the job, the lack of recognition and feeling unsupported, it’s no wonder agent attrition continues to climb.

Software can and should promote data transparency, feedback loops and specific agent engagement features like rewards and gamification features.

Action Point: What Do You Stand to Gain?

Identify which of these challenges your call centre is facing and start to frame your business case around that. This is not the time for anecdotes or assumptions, so go on a fact-finding mission to uncover the numbers on metrics like:

Agent attrition rate
Time spent on reporting
Time spent coaching/in 1-2-1s
Number of evaluations completed
Percentage of interactions evaluated
Compliance breaches/fails
Customer satisfaction scores

Do this at a monthly and yearly timescale to start painting a picture of the obstacles you’re facing and, if available, benchmark your data against your industry.

This will be essential to making a strong case for software to transform your contact centre – as well as identifying which aspects the software should primarily focus on.