Quality management (QM) is the backbone of a successful call center, ensuring that customer interactions are smooth, efficient, and satisfying. It's not just a single department—it’s a holistic strategy that spans multiple dimensions. The Andrew Reise Center of Excellence (CoE) model for quality management comprises seven domains that empower organizations to optimize performance and drive ongoing improvement. Let’s take a look at each domain in detail.
Seven Domains of Excellence
Organization and Team Design Capabilities
Laying the Foundation for Success
Organization and team design are the architectural blueprints of the QM model. This encompasses defining the structure of the QM team and harmonizing roles and responsibilities to attain peak performance. For companies with multiple lines of business with significantly different types of interactions, there may be multiple teams required to meet the quality needs of the enterprise.
A well-structured organization results in every team member understanding how their contributions contribute to the greater whole of service quality. Ensuring alignment between individual roles and the overarching objectives is pivotal to unlocking the full potential of your team.
Adoption of Best Practices
Empowering Excellence
An effective CoE ensures best practices are employed by all individuals and teams and leads to continuous improvement of QM programs. Certain aspects of the program, such as collecting data on interactions and agents, can be done in a myriad of ways and impact the view of overall performance.
Similarly, how these best practices relate to interactions with other enterprise departments is pivotal. it is important to be able to work effectively and consistently with peers in customer service, workforce management, marketing, sales, compliance, and finance. These groups and teams need to be aware of the capabilities of the QM program, understand what they can gain in terms of insights, and find an effective partner to help them to further their efforts.
Guidance and Learning
The Journey of Knowledge
Investment in coaching, knowledge management, and training is the vessel that carries your agents to the achievement of expertise and the retention of excellence. It ensures your agents remain well-prepared to navigate the myriad of customer interactions they encounter.
This ongoing learning culture acts as a compass, guiding your team through changing industry trends, deepening their understanding of product knowledge, and helping them anticipate and adapt to the evolving preferences of your customers. Too often, agents are provided ample training at the start of their employment, only to be given little to no ongoing training until they move to a new role. Embracing the journey of continuous learning ensures that your team remains ready to deliver top-tier service.
Activity Monitoring and Feedback
Closing the Loop
This facet of quality assurance is what comes to mind for most people. However, it goes beyond monitoring performance and providing feedback and coaching. Leveraging other forms of feedback besides is important as well. This includes leveraging the voice of the customer through post-interaction surveys and leveraging the voice of the employee through departmental surveys or focus groups.
Finally, feedback is about more than what went right or wrong with a certain interaction or set of interactions. It also means taking the right action, whether that be a corrective action or providing recognition and rewards. Recognizing strong performance is just as important as giving constructive feedback.
Systems and Tools Support
Enabling Excellence
It is not accurate to think that the same systems and tools that were effective several years ago will cut it today. Simply adding on more and more tools isn’t the answer either. Too often, contact center agents are saddled with a ridiculous number of systems to navigate, conflicting information sources, and ineffective tools while trying to provide an engaging interaction.
Key aspects of any quality CoE include the provision and use of those systems and tools, the related technology roadmap, any automation or analytics, and integration with the rest of the enterprise systems. At the very least, access and permissions to tools need to be aligned with roles and responsibilities.
Governance and Strategy
Charting the Course for Success
Governance and strategy in the realm of QM set the navigational guidelines for quality assurance efforts. This is where the objectives and guiding principles are meticulously crafted, shaping the strategy that fuels your call center's overarching mission and vision.
It acts as a compass, ensuring that quality assurance initiatives sail in the right direction, aligning with the broader organizational goals.
Evaluation and Assessment
Driving Results
This aspect of the CoE ties in closely with activity monitoring and feedback but is more tailored to providing the organization with the outcomes and aggregate findings. It is one thing to effectively monitor and analyze agent behaviors for the benefit of agent performance; it is another to take the overall insights and bring them to the table for the rest of the company. This is where reporting, communications, dashboards, and other activities take place that involve the benefit of the broader organization.
Turn Each Customer Interaction into an Opportunity for Excellence
Quality management in call centers is the bedrock for successful customer interactions, shaping a holistic strategy across seven domains of excellence. These domains encompass organizational design, empowering agents, continuous learning, governance, quality objectives, and the pursuit of greatness.
Effective decision-making and QM maturity planning ensure alignment with organizational goals and keep quality assurance efforts in step with evolving needs.
Through the seven domains, QM drives a culture of perpetual improvement, transforming each customer interaction into an opportunity for great outcomes. Call centers leveraging this approach set new standards, propelling organizations to redefine service quality.
Quality management is a journey where each customer interaction represents a chance to excel, making the call center a beacon of customer-centricity. With the CoE model at its core, quality management propels call centers to achieve efficiency, satisfaction, and customer experiences that are nothing short of extraordinary.
Learn to Improve Contact Center Experience With Journey Analytics
Mastering the seven domains of excellence and perfecting your QM program can lead to success in the call center. However, there are more ways to elevate your call center’s efficiency, improve agent performance, lower costs, and drive better outcomes. Read our article, Improve Contact Center Experience With Journey Analytics, to learn how to analyze customer interactions and use insights to optimize the call center.
