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Struggling with manual quality management processes in a contact center is so 1990s. Given modern technological advancements, quality automation is a necessity now more than ever before.
After all, it's the 21st Century, and you must be able to automate agent performance evaluations, tracking and reporting metrics, and compliance monitoring.
You can use Hear, a modern AI-powered conversation intelligence platform for contact centers, to streamline quality assurance automation.
Hear can automatically analyze and score interactions, monitor compliance, and offer actionable insights for agent coaching and training.
Can't wait to automate quality management? Book a comprehensive Hear demo today.
What Is Quality Automation and Why It Matters
Quality automation in a call or contact center is the use of technology or software to streamline and improve how the center monitors, evaluates, and manages agent-customer interactions.
For these centers, quality assurance (QA) is the most important part of quality management, which is why they prioritize it over automation in quality control for several reasons:
- Promotes Better Efficiency: Automating reduces manual effort and allows your quality management team to focus more on strategic tasks using the time they free up.
- Reduced Human Error: Automating repetitive tasks minimizes human error to ensure your QA processes, such as evaluating agents, are always consistent, fair, and accurate.
- Improved Agent Performance: Evaluating agents automatically leads to timely feedback and data-driven insights that CX leaders can use to provide targeted coaching and training. As a result, your agents improve their performance and deliver better customer service.
- Enhanced Compliance: Modern quality automation systems monitor interactions and flag potential issues to help you ensure your agents comply with company, legal, and industry standards or regulations.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: One of your ultimate goals is to ensure your customers' issues are resolved and they are happy with your service. With quality automation, you get a framework for improving your processes on an ongoing basis to deliver consistent high-quality service. Better service increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Core Components of Quality Automation
Contact center quality automation can include the key elements below.
- Automated Interaction Monitoring: Modern quality assurance automation tools can automatically record, transcribe, and analyze calls based on established criteria. For example, you can prioritize customer sentiment, adherence to scripts, and certain keywords. These tools can also handle other forms of agent-customer interactions, including chat and emails.
- Automated Agent Evaluation and Scoring: Instead of manual evaluation, you can use modern tools to automatically analyze and evaluate customer interactions. You can also score them against predefined criteria through automated quality assurance scoring.
- Performance Analytics and Reporting: Quality automation software can generate detailed reports and provide dashboards that track key metrics related to call and contact center quality assurance. You can see where your agents need to improve, which means you can make data-informed decisions for continuous improvement.
- Compliance Management: Your contact center must comply with specific internal and external policies and regulations. Quality automation helps you ensure that agents adhere to these requirements by flagging potential violations and sending instant alerts.
- Multichannel Support: Modern quality automation platforms can handle interactions across multiple channels like voice (calls), chat, and email. You get a holistic view of agent performance and customer experience, which allows for consistent quality assessment and management across different touchpoints.
- Automated Insights for Personalized Coaching: You can use modern conversation intelligence software to get instant insights that can help you tailor feedback, coaching, and training to individual agent needs based on their performance data.
Types of Quality Automation
You can use different types of quality automation to become an autonomous contact center. These automations mix technological enablers like AI with functional applications like speech analytics for better results. Let's check out a few.
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence (AI) recognizes patterns in agent-customer interactions or agent performance, personalizes agent coaching, and helps you make data-informed decisions.
AI is useful in:
- Predictive analytics to forecast quality issues
- Evaluating agent performance without manual input
- Auto-scoring interactions at scale across calls (voice), chat, and emails
- Generating summaries, insights, and suggestions based on customer conversations using large language models (LLMs) in Generative AI
2. Machine Learning (ML)
A branch of AI, machine learning is the use and development of self-improving systems that learn from historical data.
In a contact center setup, you can use ML in:
- Anomaly detection, such as unusual agent behavior
- Refining your scoring models based on QA outcomes
- Trend analysis to optimize agent coaching.
3. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Natural Language Processing is another branch of AI that helps you interpret human language in both text and speech, and can be used in:
- Speech-to-text transcription for calls
- Churn intent and sentiment analysis to understand customer emotions
- Detecting compliance phrases and soft skills, such as empathy
4. Speech and Text Analytics
Text and speech analytics help you analyze interactions on a large scale and can be used in:
- Identifying keywords, topics, and customer sentiment
- Flagging low-quality or non-compliant interactions
- Estimating customer satisfaction
5. Software Integrations
Your contact center conversation intelligence software should connect with your other software for uses such as:
- Synchronizing QA tools with CRMs, analytics tools, and telephony systems
- Centralizing performance data for detailed reporting and analytics
6. Co-Pilot Assistance
While most contact center tools act as agent-side assist platforms, some software systems act as co-pilot assist platforms for CX team leads.
A co-pilot assist platform can be used in:
- Visibility into agent performance through interactive reporting or conversational dashboards with natural language querying
- Predictive analytics for customer churn, performance trends, seasonal interaction volume spikes, and high-performing agents
- Instant coaching recommendations based on live or post-interaction speech/text analysis and sentiment analysis
- Instant alerts to help reduce churn risk, customer frustration, and compliance breaches
- AI-driven quality assurance, including monitoring and improving various QA metrics
- AI-based compliance monitoring
How to Implement Quality Automation Effectively
You'll need a strategic approach that combines automation with human input to succeed at quality automation. What must you do?
- Establish Smart Quality Standards and Metrics: Set quality standards that you can measure and achieve across all customer interactions. Prioritize metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as customer satisfaction and agent productivity, that are critical to your operations. Align these metrics and quality standards with your overall business goals and customer experience objectives.
- Choose the Right Tool: Select the best automation tool that integrates with your technology stack and aligns with your business objectives.
- Conduct Automation Tests with the Tool: Perform different automation tests for your most critical and frequent tasks. You can test things gradually, beginning with analyzing interactions, scoring, and generating reports on selected metrics.
- Balance Automation with Human Input or Oversight: Use quality assurance and automation analysts to periodically review the results of the tool you've chosen. Monitor its automated scores to see if it's accurate and identify potential biases in the automated processes themselves. That's not all. Combine the insights from the tool with human knowledge to guide your agents on areas where they need to improve.
- Monitor, Maintain, and Improve the Process Continuously: Ask your agents and supervisors for feedback on the effectiveness of the automation and the tool itself. Monitor how automating things affects quality metrics. Adjust your automation rules, scoring criteria, and feedback systems to maximize the results you expect.
Metrics to Track in Quality Automation
You can track a mix of efficiency, performance, and impact metrics across QA, agent performance, and customer experience to see whether your quality automation process is effective.
Evaluate crucial metrics such as:
- QA Coverage: Check whether you can now analyze 100% of interactions, especially across multiple channels. A higher coverage means more data, better insights, and increased visibility into agent performance and customer sentiment.
- QA Efficiency: Analyze how long you now take to analyze and score interactions. Automated QA significantly reduces the time to free up your team for other strategic activities.
- Agent Performance Trends: Look for significant changes in quality scores, empathy, and script adherence, among others. You should be able to identify and improve agent behavior faster.
- Improvement in KPIs: Monitor how automation improves metrics such as first-call resolution (FCR), compliance adherence, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and average handling time (AHT). For example, ensure QA scores are objective and consistent across all interactions and fair across all agents. Your average handling time should reduce without compromising first-call resolution and customer satisfaction.
How to Choose the Right Quality Automation Tools
Besides identifying your QA pain points and goals, let's discuss other important considerations when selecting quality automation software.
- Analytics and Reporting: Choose a tool with an interactive dashboard, detailed reports, and comprehensive performance tracking.
- Ease of Use: The tool should have an intuitive or user-friendly interface that your agents can navigate and use with minimal learning required to optimize adoption.
- Flexibility and Scalability: You should be able to customize various aspects of the tool to adapt to your specific QA scoring criteria, workflows, or business rules. The tool should also accommodate increasing interactions and agent numbers as your business grows.
- Integration with Systems: The software should connect with your CRM, analytics tools, and telephony systems. You'll want to avoid manual data entry and switching between systems, which can make achieving consistent data a mere imagination.
- Investment and Return on Investment: Evaluate the total cost of the tool, including the initial purchase price, implementation, ongoing subscriptions, and training costs. Estimate the potential return on investment without forgetting factors like increased agent productivity, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced operational costs.
As a quality automation tool for contact centers, Hear meets these criteria perfectly.
You can integrate Hear with your existing CRM and telephony systems and adapt it to your scoring criteria.
You can also improve key metrics, increase operational efficiency, and generate reports from an easy-to-use, chattable dashboard.
Check out Hear today to turn your contact center into an autonomous entity and value-generating hub.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Quality Automation
Making inevitable mistakes in the automation of quality assurance can render your efforts fruitless. You must avoid the following costly mistakes.
- Lack of a Clear Strategy and Goals: Automation efforts without a well-defined strategy and goals can be ineffective and result in wasted resources and limited impact. Establish clear goals from the onset regarding which processes you want to automate, the metrics to measure, and how you'll integrate the results into your overall quality management strategy.
- Not Consulting Stakeholders: Implementing automation without the input of your agents and supervisors can lead to poor ownership. Consult with your agents, supervisors, and top leaders to get enough buy-in and contextual feedback based on real needs.
- Delayed Coaching and Training: Delivering feedback, coaching, and training to your agents when it's too late can dilute effectiveness. Your agents may repeat the same mistakes, further reducing effectiveness. Use instant feedback mechanisms that allow for timely feedback shortly after the interaction or analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Here are answers to common contact center quality automation questions to wrap up the guide:
How Does Quality Automation Differ from Test Automation?
Test automation is a subfield of quality automation that specifically deals with automating the execution of tests to verify the practicality of a solution and identify defects before deployment.
As the broader aspect, quality automation continuously monitors and evaluates agent interactions to ensure consistent service quality.
Is Cloud-Based Automation Better Than On-Premise?
Cloud-based quality automation generally offers superior benefits over premise-based automation. The former is more scalable, cost-effective, flexible, and faster to deploy.
An on-premise automation strategy is ideal if you prioritize infrastructure and data control, particularly if your industry has strict security requirements or compliance needs.
Can Automation Improve Regulatory Compliance?
Automation can significantly improve regulatory compliance in a contact center through automated interaction analysis and compliance monitoring.
Monitoring interactions for compliance helps you identify mistakes sooner and address them in time before your agents repeat them.
Conclusion
Effective quality automation can be a gateway to improving contact center operational efficiency, agent performance, and customer satisfaction.
You must first understand your needs, choose the right automation tool, and implement it correctly to achieve these results.
Hear stands out as a highly effective contact center quality automation tool. With Hear, you can automatically analyze and score 100% of conversations across voice, email, and chat at scale.
You can also integrate Hear with your existing systems, automate compliance monitoring, and improve various QA metrics.
Request a demo today to discover why top contact centers use Hear for quality automation.