1. White Paper
Why is Quality Fundamental to the Success
of Your Contact Center?
Using quality management, advanced analytics and performance management
to create an environment of continuous improvement
Most contact centers today have well embedded quality management
processes in place, but many of these quality programs are falling short
and failing to deliver on the promise of continuous improvement.
While many companies can “check the box” to say they have a quality program, too often it is little more than
a one-dimensional process that records and scores five calls per agent per month. Such a program may see
performance spikes at implementation but these results will quickly flatline over time, and before long the
objective becomes servicing the process, not improving the contact center environment.
There are many reasons why quality programs fail to deliver benefits and for most contact centers these issues
can’t be addressed merely by creating better programs. There’s also the need to vastly improve the customer
and agent experience by adopting a few easy-to-implement tactics and processes.
This paper offers some best practice tips to make quality a fundamental part of your contact center environment
and the impetus for continuous improvement.
Understand the Purpose of Your Quality Initiatives
Many contact centers have never changed their quality
Decrease Transfers
process since it was first implemented, perhaps many
Provide Agents with
years ago. At the time this process was implemented it Relevant Product Information
likely had an important strategic focus and its objective Improve Self-Service
and purpose were clearly defined. But are the quality Decrease Average Improve First
Handle Time Call Resolution
initiatives you implemented years ago still aligned with siness Pro
ve Bu ces
current corporate objectives? pro se
Conduct Im s Perform
Competitive Targeted Agent
Research has shown that today’s contact center Analysis Assessments
Improve Customer
managers and supervisors are universally concerned
ase Market
Satisfaction & Retention Impr
Performance
Intelligence
about three core objectives: Eliminate
Decrease
Ineffective
ove Agent
Decrease Training
Marketing
1. Improving customer satisfaction and retention levels. Operational Costs Costs
Campaigns
Incre
Improve Increase Revenue
2. Decreasing operational costs. Product and
Increase
Training
Service
Efficiency
3. Increasing revenue. Offerings
M on e
i t o r Co m p l i a n c
Improve Policy Adherence
Decrease Liability Risks
Provide Improved
Agent Information
Four areas of focus for quality analytics drive optimal outcomes, which
support the primary management objectives at the core of every contact
center’s foundation.
1 © 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

2. WHITE PAPER
Table of Contents
Understand the Purpose of Your Quality Initiatives................................................................................................................. 1
Key Technologies for Maximum Results..................................................................................................................................... 3
Understand the Results of Your Quality Program..................................................................................................................... 5
Consider Who is Responsible for Monitoring Interactions and Why.................................................................................. 5
Determine the Optimum Frequency and Number of Evaluations........................................................................................ 6
Review Your Scorecards on a Regular Basis............................................................................................................................... 6
Ensure Your Coaching Process is Effective and is Taking Place............................................................................................. 7
Ensure You Have a Closed Loop Training Process.................................................................................................................... 7
Don’t Forget Reward and Recognition......................................................................................................................................... 8
Quality is Fundamental.................................................................................................................................................................... 8
2 White Paper Why is Quality Fundamental to the Success of Your Contact Center? © 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3. WHITE PAPER
Quality analytics, as the foundation of your contact center, can help you achieve better outcomes aligned with
your core objectives by:
Improving Business Processes
1.
Decrease transfers: Identify calls where supplying agents with more information or widening permissions levels
would reduce unnecessary transfers.
2.
Improve self-service: Mine information to find what is driving call volumes and locate areas where an IVR menu
could be improved or augmented.
3.
Improve first call resolution (FCR): Use call categorization and root-cause analysis to determine the relationship
between and the issues behind repeat calls.
Monitoring Compliance
1. Improve policy adherence: Discover where agents are deviating from established protocols and procedures.
2.
Decrease liability risks: Search for key terms in calls to measure agents’ knowledge of standards and their
adherence to policy.
3.
Provide improved agent information: Use agent assist and real-time monitoring to provide agents with clearly
defined policies, procedures and expectations as calls occur.
Improving Agent Performance
1.
Perform targeted agent assessments: Provide meaningful feedback by reviewing calls on key corporate
objectives.
2.
Decrease training costs and increase training efficiency: Target training to the individual and the call type; don’t
waste money on blanket programs.
3.
Decrease average handle time: Identify which call types have the longest average handle time (AHT) and when
a lack of agent information or broken process is causing the time to increase.
Increasing Market Intelligence
1. Provide agents with relevant product/service information: Utilize ESI–Monitor and Agent Assist to ensure agents
have the most relevant information as a call is occurring.
2.
Conduct competitive analysis: Automatically categorize calls where a competitor is mentioned and the context.
3.
Decrease money spent on ineffective marketing campaigns: Determine the effectiveness of campaigns while they
are occurring and the opportunity for modification still exists.
4.
Improve product and service offerings through market research: Leverage tools for call categorization and call
driver metrics to determine what actual and desired products and services are driving calls. Use feedback
recorded during beta phases to help drive future marketing and product plans.
If your current quality program is not delivering value in all of these areas today, then it’s time to step back and
reassess the analytical tools you are using.
Key Technologies for Maximum Results
Voice recording tools are almost considered a commodity today. Most enterprises actively record agent-customer
conversations, but the volume of recordings can be overwhelming and supervisors rarely have time
to listen to more than a handful of calls.
The ability to capture real-time interaction intelligence is very difficult if you depend solely on a voice
recording tool. The real value of captured data is its ability to render meaningful information to generate timely
decisions that directly impact quality initiatives. Simple, one-dimensional, voice recording tools fail to deliver.
Key technologies that incorporate speech and desktop analytics and infuse these findings into performance
management applications will allow enterprises to deliver customer experiences that exceed expectations.
3 White Paper Why is Quality Fundamental to the Success of Your Contact Center? © 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

4. WHITE PAPER
Speech Analytics
Speech analytics applications are compelling because they deliver positive benefits such as reduced costs and
increased revenue while improving the overall customer experience. Speech analytics also has the potential to
reach beyond the contact center to help the enterprise improve processes and product quality, making it hard to
ignore the possibilities.
Speech analytics provides these possibilities through functionality that analyzes large volumes of unstructured
audio from customer-agent interactions and allows you to extract meaningful business intelligence.
The benefits are significant:
1. Analyze 100% of customer calls to capture a full-spectrum view of your operations in both the front and back
office.
2. Categorize calls to perform root cause analysis so you can really understand where the problem is.
3. Pinpoint process improvement and understand where the bottlenecks are in your contact center.
4. Identify training/coaching opportunities – are agents following proper procedure (compliance), and are they
providing a great customer experience?
5. Enhance your customer’s experience by increasing first call resolution and reducing average handle times.
6. Improve your overall sales effectiveness by creating up-sell/cross-sell opportunities.
Desktop Analytics
The ability to capture and analyze user activity at the desktop level is useful in many ways. With information
about individual application usage, enterprises can better manage IT resources and spending. By understanding
how agents interact with their desktop environment to perform tasks, managers can gain valuable performance
insights that can help identify and replicate best practices across the enterprise. Evaluating agent activity may
allow for the detection of process bottlenecks, possible compliance violations and other value leaks. And by
tracking processes both before and after process improvement projects, you can measure the impact of your
efforts.
1.
Analyze business processes: Monitor individual processes such as order entry or call wrap-up to identify
opportunities for automation. Track specific processes that relate to key performance indicators (KPIs)
or business metrics, such as sales promotion success or AHT in the contact center. Detect and alert on
suspicious activity, procedural deviations or compliance violations in front- or back-office processes.
2.
Perform workflow analysis: Gather workflow information across the entire workforce for aggregated reporting,
or filter to review by group, team or region, or drill down into individual user performance.
3. easure the impact of process improvement efforts: Establish accurate baselines and benchmarks before
M
implementing process improvements so the impact can also be accurately measured.
4.
Archive activity data: Store user activity data in a central repository for audit trail purposes, compliance
reporting and historical analysis.
Performance Management
Performance management, along with speech and desktop analytics, provides the data you need to assess how
well you are meeting your quality objectives. Performance management helps turn this data into actionable
intelligence for management, supervisors and agents. It provides the ability to get a full view into how well you
are serving customer needs while meeting service-level commitments such as AHT, FCR, wait times and more.
And with the workflow capabilities that are part of performance management, you can infuse this intelligence into
your operations.
1.
Automate workflows: Create alerts and notifications based on KPIs that balance performance and quality
outcomes and take corrective action immediately.
2.
Create a better coaching process: Score and evaluate based on a full view of agent effectiveness and efficiency
and measure coaching against balanced KPIs.
4 White Paper Why is Quality Fundamental to the Success of Your Contact Center? © 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

5. WHITE PAPER
3.
Balance effectiveness and efficiency: Create a comprehensive view into your operations with both time-based
(wait times, handle times) and value-based (quality, customer satisfaction) metrics.
4. easure progress against corporate objectives: Leverage enterprise-level data stores, such as customer
M
relationship management (CRM) and human resource data repositories (HR systems), to identify impact to
corporate objectives (attrition, customer retention, customer spend).
Understand the Results of Your Quality Program
Once you have agreed on the objectives, desired value outcomes and quality monitoring tools you want to deploy,
you need to be able to measure and articulate the results of the process you have in place against all the areas
described above.
Publishing a weekly quality score on a performance dashboard seems to be a common method of assessing and
articulating the results of the quality program, but quality scores do flatline over time and this methodology does
not show the true value the process is delivering.
Many call center professionals admit that their quality assurance personnel don’t always receive the time and
resources they need to lead an effective quality program. This often stems from the fact that they aren’t sharing
enough of the key data uncovered during monitoring with the enterprise as a whole, and are not expressing the
value of the quality monitoring process in real terms.
Results of the quality process should be measured in real terms and shared across the enterprise including:
1. Improvements in productivity
2. Enhancements in customer loyalty, satisfaction and share of wallet
3. Improvements in inefficient and broken operating procedures
4. Increased sales and service performance
8. Reduced operating costs
6. Improved employee satisfaction
7. Reduced attrition
Ensure your quality monitoring program has a process for capturing, measuring and reporting the results in each
of these areas on an ongoing basis.
Consider Who is Responsible for Monitoring Interactions and Why
Once you’ve decided why you are monitoring interactions, you need to think about who is the appropriate person
or group to evaluate the calls. If the quality program is going to be effective in all the desired value areas, then
different groups should be responsible for evaluating.
Quality and customer experience is often measured from an internal perspective and is the sole responsibility of
the team leader. Can a team leader really judge whether a particular call delivered a great customer experience?
Does your quality process and technology enable you to have customers evaluate calls?
The team leader should be responsible for agent performance and development, but consider having a separate
quality assurance (QA) team that is responsible for monitoring strategic initiatives on an enterprise-wide basis.
QA teams should also monitor the final transaction disposition in the back office, back office trends and root
cause analysis to get to the bottom of problems and process improvements. However, that QA team cannot work
in isolation but needs to be closely aligned with the team leader to ensure that quality and performance are not
evaluated in a silo.
The training and education team should also be part of the call evaluation process to measure the impact of the
training courses they are developing and delivering and to identify opportunities for improvements in their area.
Finally, bring the agent into the process. Have the agent evaluate their own calls and potentially their peers’ calls.
Engaging agents in the process will foster motivation and empowerment in addition to enhancing their perception
of the program’s credibility.
5 White Paper Why is Quality Fundamental to the Success of Your Contact Center? © 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

6. WHITE PAPER
Determine the Optimum Frequency and Number of Evaluations
In order to have confidence in the results of the program, you will need to ensure they are based on a statistically
significant analysis of service delivery and quality. What do the number and type of interactions you are
evaluating per month represent as a percentage of the total interaction volume, and does that percentage
represent a statistically relevant sample?
Most contact centers do not have adequate resources to conduct a statistically valid sample because recording
interactions and evaluating them is a labor intensive and time consuming process. Consider moving away from
the one-size-fits-all, low value approach to a more strategic approach to the challenge, such as performance-
based monitoring. Heavily monitor your best performers to understand what they are doing that makes them
excel, and identify ways to start driving this best practice throughout the organization.
By leading monitoring activities, agents are able to flag calls where they feel they need more training, when they
did a great job or to bring a potential customer or process issue to management’s attention. This also engages
agents in the process and can impact employee satisfaction and attrition.
Review Your Scorecards on a Regular Basis
Many contact centers spend a lot of time developing scorecards when the quality monitoring program is first
implemented. While the business focus and the contact center objectives may change over the years, the
scorecards tend to remain untouched and therefore are often no longer aligned to the corporate objectives.
Scorecards should be reviewed and assessed for appropriateness at least every 9–12 months.
As more and more companies are embracing customer-focused quality, the scorecard should become less
about metrics and more about improving the value from the customer’s perspective. Moving the external quality
metrics and numbers to a customer-driven and focused approach frees the contact center from managing to a
number and servicing a process.
A numerical, results-oriented scorecard with potential agent disciplinary actions based on low scores creates
a distraction for everyone and has little impact on the customer. Quality programs that focus on behaviors and
use scorecards as a mechanism for identifying opportunities for developing critical skills and knowledge provide
agents with the tools and feedback needed to truly improve the customer interaction. In turn, this allows your
team leaders to become coaches rather than scorekeepers.
Many organizations evaluate and score calls in isolation from other performance data. Scorecards that do
not provide a holistic view of performance and trends over time place the focus on the score rather than the
performance opportunity. Consider incorporating quality scoring into a performance management solution to
provide a broader, more discerning perspective. A performance management solution will enable you to recreate
scorecards and also embed additional performance data, graphs and trends to ensure that the process remains
performance focused, rather than score focused.
On a regular basis, it’s important not only to review the questions and sections on the scorecard, but also the
scoring ranges. The ranges should be high enough to clearly identify an excellent transaction but not so high
that few agents can attain an excellent rating. Plus, be sure to tighten the ranges over time to ensure that the
scores do not flatline. For example, when a quality monitoring program is first implemented, excellence might be
represented by any score over 85 percent. Most customers are unlikely to think that 85 percent is excellent, so
the range needs to be gradually narrowed to 90 percent and above.
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7. WHITE PAPER
Ensure Your Coaching Process is Effective and is Taking Place
Lack of coaching is the primary reason why most quality monitoring programs fail. Typically, organizations
conduct quality coaching sessions on the back of calls that are evaluated and scored to provide feedback and
mentoring to improve agent performance. Unfortunately, these sessions don’t take place as often as they should
because of team leader time constraints. Listening to calls without providing feedback not only deprives agents of
valuable insight into performance improvement, it also diminishes the potential value of the quality process itself.
Coaching is the most important part of the QA process and is the delivery mechanism for improving performance
and providing value. Advisors and team leaders should be as prepared as possible for such sessions. Advisors
should have had the opportunity to listen to the call or monitor the agent’s screen and consider what was good
and what could be improved so that coaching sessions are as effective as possible.
All too often, coaching sessions take place with no output or actions. Feedback alone may be enough for
some agents to up their game, but for most people some additional actions, such as setting incremental goals,
attending additional training, etc. is required to derive performance improvements and value from the process.
Most companies have no visibility into this part of the QA process and they assume that because the procedure
says five coaching sessions per week, then these sessions will be conducted and that they will be conducted well.
Consider all quality factors, including how you can track the number of coaching sessions that need to take place,
time to action, time spent in coaching and the effectiveness of that coaching session. You may be surprised at the
results, and certainly, you would then be able to identify opportunities to improve and deliver more value out of
the quality process.
Integrating a performance management solution into your quality process would allow you to track these
coaching sessions in terms of timeliness and value, and then report on how effectively this part of the process
is being managed. This will help drive the transition from coaching to numbers – to coaching to behaviors.
Furthermore, incorporating the quality process into the performance management solution would enable you to
capture, understand and then incorporate best practices into all coaching sessions.
Ensure You Have a Closed Loop Training Process
Developing a closed loop training process is an important part of any quality monitoring program. Use
knowledge gleaned from the quality process to identify trends and training opportunities and also to measure
the effectiveness of your training department. Include a process for funneling recommendations to the training
department, or ideally have them be part of the evaluation process itself, and ensure all training, reference
materials, policies and procedures are accurate and up-to-date. The training department and quality team should
hold monthly meetings to assess the effectiveness of training and identify new opportunities.
An integrated eLearning solution can ensure agents receive consistent and timely training based on opportunities
identified in the quality process. Great interactions can be transformed into best practice audio clips and sent
via eLearning for the benefit of the whole team or contact center. This can prove to be a great way to show what
a good customer experience sounds like and provide a great motivational tool for agents whose calls are turned
into training sessions.
A well-constructed quality program conducts call and screen recordings and identifies opportunities for
improving process, procedure, systems, etc. It also delivers timely updates to agents without impacting service
levels, ensuring they have the relevant knowledge and skills they need to deliver great quality.
An eLearning solution that is integrated to the automatic call distributor (ACD) and the workforce management
system will ensure that agents can receive more personalized reinforcement training, as well as regular
communication updates regarding improvements to process and procedures and new system and policy
requirements without increasing costs and impacting service levels.
Results of training and communication content delivered to agents through this method can be reported upon to
ensure they have experienced the training and understood it. A closed loop process can then be implemented to
drive business rules on your recording platform around whom, when and how often to record agents based on
results of their training sessions and overall performance.
7 White Paper Why is Quality Fundamental to the Success of Your Contact Center? © 2012 Aspect Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

8. WHITE PAPER
Don’t Forget Reward and Recognition
Some contact centers use the quality monitoring process simply to identify
opportunities for performance improvement. It can also be a powerful tool for
motivating agents and as such, a rewards and recognition element of the process
is a must. Recognition can be as simple as sharing a great call amongst peers or
inviting top performers to take part in department activities, such as coaching new
hires, becoming a subject matter expert or delivering an up-skilling session.
However, recognition must be done in a way that ensures it is not always the top
performers being recognized – remember the most improved agents and the ones
that add value by flagging calls that identify broken processes. This helps to drive
empowerment and adoption by everyone.
It is never too late to evaluate your quality process and it’s important to recognize
whether your organization is servicing a process or adding value. Your quality
process needs to be assessed regularly to ensure it is delivering results – if it’s not
adding value then make changes now. Implementing best practices and evaluating
the entire customer experience will deliver business benefits that go well beyond
agent productivity and will ensure that you make significant steps in advancing the
perception of the contact center’s value within the organization.
Quality is Fundamental
The Performance Management Process represents a continual improvement
cycle for enterprises that:
1. Aligns employee goals with the enterprise to set achievement benchmarks
2. easures employee attainment of their KPIs to understand
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performance shortfalls
3.
Automatically coaches low performers as part of a continuous
improvement process
4. easures ongoing coaching effectiveness as part of a performance
M
improvement culture
Quality is fundamental to the success of this process. Key technologies such as Corporate Headquarters
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About Aspect
Aspect builds customer-company relationships through a combination of customer contact software and Microsoft platform
solutions along with workforce optimization for the enterprise. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.
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