Most centers treat quality as one person's job: the QA analyst with a scorecard and a headset. On Advice from a Call Center Geek, Tom Laird has argued for years that this sells quality short.
1. QA needs a team, even in a small center. "Even for a smaller center, you need a team for this. This is not going to be a one person QA show." (2022-10-06, 07:27) At Expivia, Tom said, WFM "sits kind of in with our QA folk" (07:19), so the people watching schedules and the people watching calls work side by side.
2. Measure how agents and customers feel, not just what was said. "For me, I love having agent sentiment and customer sentiment scores. I think that's really important on the culture of the organization and also how we're really treating our customers." (2022-04-18, 08:37) A checklist tells you whether a step happened. Sentiment tells you how the call landed for both people on it.
3. Your insight is only as good as your data. Talking about routing calls on CRM data, Tom put it bluntly: "if it's garbage going in, it's garbage going out... It's all about the data, right?" (2022-12-28, 11:21) The same holds for any QA or analytics program: messy records and a bloated form produce scores nobody trusts.
For more on running QA as a team, see how to run a QA calibration session and what makes an effective QA scorecard.
What to do Monday: Put QA and WFM in the same room once a week. Add sentiment to the metrics you review. Pick one data field your team fills in badly and fix it.
Book a demo and bring your QA form, or run it through the QA form analyzer first. OttoQA scores calls against your own form, with about two weeks to set up.
About the author
Tom Laird is the founder of OttoQA and CEO of Expivia, with about 30 years in contact centers. He hosts the Advice from a Call Center Geek podcast. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.