What is Automated Quality Management (AQM) for Contact Centers?

What is a Quality Management Process in Contact Centers?

In contact centers, quality management is the evaluation and continuous improvement of customer satisfaction by weighing the quality of customer interactions against pre-defined quality standards.

Quality management ensures a top-notch customer experience, providing your business with a competitive advantage. 

Recent research suggests that 78% of customers back out from intended purchases or subscriptions due to negative experiences with the company, and the only way to reduce these negative experiences is to establish a consistent quality management process that captures and analyzes accurate data.

 In a typical quality management process, the target standards are set, and quality analysts evaluate customer interactions to measure how they compare to these standards.

Additionally, quality management can uncover product or service issues that may not be easily recognizable without customer feedback.

What is Automated Quality Management?

Automated Quality Management (AQM) involves automating the whole quality management process, from interaction assessment to agent coaching, to improve call center operations effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

With AQM, you can automatically score 100% of the voice and text interactions and get detailed insights about the causes of the low scores and what you can do to improve them.

AQM can also be used to target particular business units by specifying which questions should be scored. This is much more efficient and allows for advanced data analysis that can’t be achieved with old-school sampling methods that only monitor a small number of interactions.

Quality Management Challenges in Contact Centers

Among the common challenges you may be facing in your call center’s quality management processes include:

High Influx of Calls

Large-sized contact centers may face an increasing volume of customer interactions, especially after the release of new products. This can make it difficult for your QA team to keep up, resulting in inaccurate assessment and scoring. 

Human Error and Random Sampling

Humans are naturally biased, and your QA auditors may unwillingly score agents in a biased way, resulting in poor scoring that doesn’t give you the full picture.  

The inaccuracy is amplified by the reliance on random sampling, which only considers a limited number of customer conversations for QA evaluations. 

Limited Automation Capabilities 

Manual QA can be very resource intensive. Without automation, your QA team won’t be able to provide accurate quality insights and reports. 

The lack of automation also means that QA teams and agents can’t access any performance analytics necessary for skill development. 

Why is AQM Important for a Contact Center?

Some of the benefits of incorporating AQM in contact centers can be illustrated in the following points:

AQM Can Increase Efficiency

Automated quality management enables contact centers to accurately track processes that impact the quality of the customer experience, without the footprint. Compared to traditional quality management, AQM doesn’t require significant management efforts or investments.

It allows contact centers to effectively allocate their resources to improve quality, without the associated overhead costs.

Increasing Compliance With AQM

Unlike manual tracking, AQM tracks 100% of the customer interactions, as opposed to the traditional method that relies on random samples that don’t exceed 0.3% of the actual number of calls.

As a result, the insights you get about your call center’s non-compliant interactions will be more accurate with AQM.

AQM also monitors customer interactions and automatically detects whether agents are adhering to compliance guidelines. 

For instance, if a customer shared their CVV data, the agent shouldn’t record this information — AQM can capture these instances and flag compliance issues when guidelines aren’t followed, ensuring that these mistakes don’t turn into habits. This can help you avoid hefty non-compliance fines and penalties.

Detailed Reporting

AQM utilizes advanced speech analytics that enables you to automatically generate detailed reports. These reports take various parameters into consideration, ensuring that you get accurate insights about your employee performance and customer satisfaction cues. 

By understanding what’s happening in your contact center in more detail, you’ll be able to identify issues and come up with solutions that improve the overall customer experience. 

Flexible Automation for Focused Intel

Evaluation questions – both for your employees and customers – are an integral part of QA. With AQM, you can automate evaluation questions granularly and create new forms that specify the questions that need to be automatically scored. 

This enables you to focus your analysis on particular aspects or business units of your contact center. You can even create a narrower focus by targeting a particular group of users.

Further, AQM lets you specify the percentage of calls to be scored, making it easier to control the changes that automation has introduced.

Better Coaching With AQM

AQM enables you to create a personalized coaching experience for your agents as it helps you identify their strong and weak points, as well as their performance.

By continuously assessing agents and empowering them with personalized learning sessions, they’ll be able to expand their skill set and do their job more effectively, which also contributes to higher job satisfaction rates and a lower turnover.

Faster Onboarding With AQM

Automated Quality Management (AQM) for contact centers can speed up agent onboarding by providing standardized training procedures, automating evaluations, offering coaching and mentoring, and improving compliance.

With AQM, new agents can have facilitated access to training materials and receive real-time feedback on their performance, enabling them to improve their performance faster and shorten the onboarding process.

Better QA

Maintaining quality and compliance standards can be challenging when you consider variability and bias. Manually scoring calls against your pre-established guidelines may not yield accurate results. 

That’s not the case with AQM, where interactions are measured without bias or assumptions. As a result, your QA scores will reflect what’s actually happening in your customer interactions. You’ll be able to identify non-compliance issues, take actionable steps to improve customer service quality and learn which employees require additional training or guidance.

Integrated and Streamlined Workflow

Introducing new tools or platforms to your contact center can be a complicated process if these tools don’t integrate seamlessly with the rest of your system and software that you already rely on. 

It can significantly set back your quality assurance efforts since collecting and migrating data from so many apps that don’t properly integrate with one another is very resource-intensive and often leads to flawed analytics.

An Automated Quality Management system can extract large amounts of data from numerous resources and provide a single pane of glass visibility into what’s going on in your customer interactions. 

Manual quality management, on the other hand, typically involves using many tools, which could lead to missed data and other inefficiencies that affect the accuracy of your quality evaluations and reports.

Improved Agent Performance

AQM significantly improves agent performance by helping you understand your agents’ weak points with automated evaluations. It also provides agents with real-time guidance during live calls to help them provide a better customer experience.

How AI Supports Automated Quality Management

Artificial Intelligence has been gaining traction in AQM applications. 

With AI and machine learning, you can collect and analyze large amounts of data in less than a minute, and get key decision-making quality insights and recommendations based on the analysis.

Instant Data Analysis

Contact centers have traditionally relied on manual quality monitoring, which isn’t just.

AI enables automated and accurate quality monitoring, making it easier to detect and flag issues in real time without consuming your resources.

With data-based resolutions and recommendations, your quality team is presented with a gold mine of decision-making insights right under their fingertips.

AI-driven AQM systems are capable of analyzing both structured data, like customer survey responses, and unstructured data, such as call records. Having the ability to collect and analyze data from multiple resources supports your quality management efforts and leads to consistent experiences for your customers.

Predicting Potential Issues

AI-powered systems are capable of proactively identifying potential issues in your contact center before they turn into bigger problems. For example, if the algorithms detect a rise in the number of complaints in a specific product category, you’ll get recommendations on how to overcome these issues based on big data analytics. 

Possible solutions may include improving agent training on how to handle complaints related to the product category or communicating with the product team for design refresh or adjustment suggestions.  

Real-Time Key Insights

AI AQM solutions systems can pinpoint and analyze key moments in every customer interaction to provide real-time insights about your customers.

For example, if a customer calls your contact center to inquire about a delayed order, the AI system identifies their sentiment by analyzing the customer’s tone of voice and word choice in real-time. 

Certain phrases or tones may indicate that the customer is frustrated or having a bad experience with your product or company. In that case, the AQM solution can suggest to the agent phrases or actions that help them de-escalate similar situations, like providing a more detailed explanation or giving the customer a free gift to compensate them while the issue is being solved.

Things to Consider When Choosing Quality Management Software

Comprehensive Interaction Scoring

Your AQM tool should be capable of automatically monitoring and scoring all customer interactions on all communication channels so you can get accurate reporting of customer satisfaction and agent performance.

Beyond-Compliance In-Depth Analysis

Compliance is essential for establishing business continuity, but your AQM system should go well beyond the ability to monitor compliance to capture customer sentiments and emotions. Based on a recent report by Microsoft, up to 95% of customer interactions will be analyzed by sentiment analysis tools by 2025.

When agents understand what your customers need, they can provide a better experience and handle issues more efficiently. 

Seamless Integration with Existing Software and Processes

To streamline quality management for your team, your automated quality management software should integrate seamlessly with your existing contact center and business systems. 

 Consolidating all data and analyses onto a centralized platform makes it easier for your business to better set up workflows and action plans, with insights and recommended steps automatically delivered to the right team members through the appropriate channels.

Tips for Implementing AQM in Your Contact Center

1. Adopt a Customer-Centric Approach: Make customer needs your top priority in your decision-making process to foster better relationships and loyalty.  enhance the overall customer experience.
2. Set Clear Goals: Define your AQM goals and review them regularly. Having clear goals ensures that everyone in your contact center (not just your QA team) is moving in the same direction to support them. These goals could be improving customer satisfaction, or maintaining compliance and script adherence.
3. Engage your stakeholders: Establish a line of communication with all departments in your company to gain comprehensive insights about your customers and their needs.
4. Choose a Comprehensive AQM solution: Invest in AQM technology that offers advanced automation, in-depth analytics, and scalability to get better results out of your QA efforts.
5. Collects lots of Accurate Data Collection: Capture relevant data from different sources to make better decisions and maximize your contact center’s efficiency and consistency.
6. Continuous Improvement: Identify key metrics and KPIs to track the results of your quality management efforts. Actively collect feedback from customers and agents to refine your strategy.

Improve Your Quality Management With Balto

Balto’s AI-powered, real-time QA capabilities automatically score 100% of customer interactions, providing you with more accurate insights that are simply not possible to derive with random sampling.

Easily identify non-compliance by exposing the root cause of low scores in interactions and prevent mistakes from becoming habits. Empower your team and boost agent performance with personalized data-driven coaching and scale best practices for your whole team.

We’re happy to offer you a free demo of the Balto software so you can explore how it works in practice.