Concentrate on the quality

Jaime Scott explains how the right quality assurance processes can empower contact centre agents to continually improve the customer service they offer.

While awareness of the business benefits of good customer service is growing, the utilities sector is seemingly still struggling to provide an excellent customer experience.

Despite positive steps being made by many suppliers, both the Institute of Customer Service’s 2019 UK Customer Satisfaction Index and TTi Global Research’s Customer Satisfaction Benchmarking Survey found that customer satisfaction levels have in fact fallen over the past year.

Consumer expectations are growing, and with more choice of supplier than ever, businesses that fail to provide a high level of service may find themselves losing customers and falling behind the competition.

But achieving customer satisfaction is easier said than done, so where to start?

Contact centres are gradually becoming more widely recognised as the beating heart of an organisation. It is where most of the critical communication with customers takes place, meaning a well run contact centre can make or break customer satisfaction levels.

And the key to a well run contact centre? Quality assurance.

Not only has it been shown that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, research would also suggest that increasing customer retention rates by just 5 per cent increases profits by 25 per cent to 95 per cent.

It’s also worth noting that customers are often willing to pay more to companies that offer better customer service. In fact, 86 per cent of customers would pay up to 25 per cent more in order to get a better customer service experience.

Meeting the regulators’ requirements

For utilities, there are also regulatory pressures to consider.

Ofgem has called the level of customer satisfaction about complaint handling “unacceptably low”, and last year opened customer service “compliance cases” against four major energy suppliers. It also asked a further seven to improve their procedures, with the threat of fines if the required improvements were not achieved.

Similarly, “great customer service” is one of the four key themes of Ofwat’s PR19, with the regulator stating that water customers should receive the high standards of service they are used to from other sectors. In its initial assessment of plans, Ofwat gave almost half of the UK’s 17 water companies a grade C when it came to customer service.

So with customers’ interactions with their utilities providers more important than ever, how can businesses ensure empathetic, high-quality customer contact across all channels? While there are a number of contributing factors to customer satisfaction, quality assurance should be playing a vital role here.

What is quality assurance?

Broadly, quality assurance is the maintenance of a desired level of quality in a service or product, especially by means of attention to every stage of the process of delivery or production. In a contact centre setting, quality assurance typically refers to the process of monitoring agents’ interactions with customers and analysing the quality with respect to customers’ requirements and expectations.

More than just listening into calls, quality assurance is about training and refocusing contact centre agents, and empowering them with the skills they need to consistently deliver the best possible service. When executed correctly, it has the power to transform a contact centre’s performance and help maximise customer satisfaction. This is because quality assurance processes work to maintain call quality standards, increase operational efficiency, improve compliance, and boost the customer experience.

At the heart of quality assurance processes are regular one-to-one meetings between team managers and their agents. These meetings ensure that agents always know what is expected of them, how they are performing, and how they can improve. They also provide an opportunity to demonstrate improvement following feedback from previous sessions.

Despite the benefits, there can be resistance to the implementation of quality assurance among both managers and agents. This is usually because of pervasive negative perceptions of the process, often as a result of past experiences in which the process has been implemented poorly.

How to achieve great results

Unfortunately, quality assurance is sometimes viewed through a negative lens, seen as a way of catching people out or as an excuse to be overly critical. In reality, it should be a positive, encouraging process, purely designed to enable agents to be more effective and deliver a better service. In order to achieve this, businesses should follow quality assurance best practices.

This includes appointing a dedicated quality assurance professional, in order to send a clear signal to everyone about the importance of the quality process. This is the best way to ensure the process is taken seriously by all involved, and not just viewed as a box-ticking exercise.

It’s also important to involve all stakeholders in the creation of the quality assurance programme. A predetermined set of rules and procedures are likely to be received reluctantly by agents, making them less effective. Involving them in the process will make them ambassadors for the cause, and boost results.

Equally, it’s vital to ensure that evaluators are all in agreement. If the programme is left open to interpretation, this may leave agents feeling they have been treated unfairly. Regular calibration sessions to produce more consistent scoring are a must.

Businesses should never overlook the importance of a happy, effective contact centre. Implementing a well-designed and run quality assurance programme is one of the best ways to ensure that customers leave every interaction feeling satisfied, enabling businesses to unlock the benefits great customer service can offer.