2014 CUSTOMER MVP Quality Awards

ACCOLADES

2014 CUSTOMER MVP Quality Awards

By Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director  |  March 18, 2014

The business of business has always revolved around one central element – customer satisfaction. Though technology has delivered new ways of delivering services, and for end customers to communicate their levels of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), the core principle remains: Successful businesses deliver quality service and focus on customer satisfaction.

Over the 21 years TMC (News - Alert) has been naming its annual MVP Quality Award winners, what we’ve noticed beyond a shadow of a doubt is that those vendors that have embraced technology without sacrificing customer awareness and satisfaction – those that view technology and CSRs as requisite complementary elements to achieving CSAT standards – have been most successful. In other words, the best outsourcing vendors recognize that technology is a means to an end, not an end on its own, and that neither technology nor agent quality alone can succeed in such a competitive environment.

This, the 21st edition of the MVP Quality Awards, continues to provide a resource for businesses looking for some of the top teleservices companies in the world and, combined with next month’s Top 50 ranking of teleservices firms based on minutes, provides a starting point for any business looking for a quality outsourcing vendor.  We congratulate the 2014 MVP Quality Award winners and are pleased to share some of the compelling comments from their essays, which exemplify their elite status among their teleservices counterparts.

Gold

Agero 

Explain how quality has evolved in your contact center, how it is sustained, and how it is measured.

In our early years, we silently observed call monitoring in the live state from a supervisor workstation. In the early ‘90’s, we invested in our first call recording system, Auto Quality. At the time, the new monitoring system enabled us to obtain and listen to a wide sample of recorded calls. The best feature of the system was that the associates did not know when they would be monitored. This allowed us to capture a true sample of their call quality. 

A few years ago, we purchased the Witness eQuality call monitoring system. Witness has enabled us to capture both the voice and data portion of a recorded call. As an added benefit, the monitor form has been integrated into the system to allow us to simultaneously monitor and grade phone calls. The ability to run complex queries on the quality database has enabled us to identify trends and create training modules to correct them faster than we have ever been able to do in the past. We are very proud to say that we have greatly improved our ability to measure quality and identify opportunities for improvement at every level of the organization.

In addition to internal monitoring, our associates are graded from the point of view of the customer (by the voice of the customer), which is captured in real time via IVR, and also receive feedback from “Listening For Quality” sessions where associates from each site gather to listen and critique calls from other sites. This has led to significant sharing of best practices and overall call quality improvement.

InfoCision Management Corp.

How do you handle complaints from customers?

Only a small fraction of our calls results in any type of inquiry. This is a direct result of our belief that quality begins and ends with hiring, training, and retaining the very best Communicators. When we do receive an inquiry, supervisors flag the call record electronically as a customer concern and forward it to our regulatory compliance team.

Every inquiry, complaint or concern is handled to resolution with the utmost respect and care. This is a crucial aspect of InfoCision’s (News - Alert) quality model. Research shows that a person who has a complaint that is effectively addressed will have a more positive relationship with the client in the long run than one who never complained at all. Our regulatory compliance team makes apology calls to any person who inquires regardless of whether the issue is about the phone call or something else. After the apology call is made, the client is informed of the inquiry and our response.

Silver

Alorica

How do you handle complaints from your client’s customers?

Alorica handles customer complaints through a systematic approach, which helps to identify trends in the marketplace. The goal of handling customer complaints is to ensure first call resolution. By empowering employees to resolve customer complaints during the first point of contact, we are able to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Alorica works closely with its clients to shift quality measurements to focus more on customer interaction and relationship. The process starts through joint analysis with the clients to identify root causes in calibration scoring gaps. Alorica uses its DMAIC approach for performance improvement and outlined a plan for re-aligning quality guidelines and building a new monitoring and scoring approach that was more customer-centric. Along with the process changes, Alorica created and implemented a comprehensive training program that provided the agents with the skills and behaviors necessary to provide the premier customer interaction that was required to exceed the new guidelines and scoring. This year, Alorica continues to close the gaps in calibration scoring and has consistently exceeded client expectations across its verticals. Alorica continuously works with all of its clients to continuously improve quality and promote customer satisfaction.

Ansafone

Describe all efforts to promote the quality image of teleservices to the public.

Ansafone works through several social media platforms to promote the quality image of teleservices to the public. We utilize several social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (News - Alert), and Google+. We use social media and blogging efforts to convey our commitment to quality to millions of online users worldwide.

Over the years, Ansafone has expanded its role in the teleservices industry to become more than just your average call center. We are a multi-channel communication management service. We connect our clients to more customers than ever before by keeping the channels of inbound/outbound phone services, live chat, e-mail management, and social media support open. Through our partnership with Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert), we are able to utilize a new software suite that enables us to route calls, e-mails, web chats, and social media interactions using a single queue so we can respond faster and more consistently to customers regardless the communications medium they choose.

The Connection

What do you do for customers that gives them the impression of quality and high ethical standards?

We work closely with each client to focus on individual quality issues and give our clients ownership in the level of quality we provide by having them conduct their own customer satisfaction surveys. After the results have been tabulated, we meet with our clients to review and address any issues. We also run in-depth surveys of our clients’ customers to ensure the performance of The Connection is in line with a client’s expectations.

The Connection focuses extensively on a true partnership approach. We have a complete open door policy and encourage client visits to our call centers and corporate headquarters. We provide complete access to clients to monitor their calls 24x7. The Connection also offers our clients fully automated remote monitoring capabilities. Clients may choose to monitor their calls remotely at any given time by accessing the Aspect (News - Alert) ACD’s Remote Call Monitoring capability. All clients are assigned a password that allows them to monitor only their programs.

Bronze

Synergy Solutions

Explain how quality has evolved in your contact center, how it is sustained, and how it is measured.

Synergy Solutions has developed an online quality monitoring module as part of our enterprise wide proprietary system known as SPOT, which stands for Synovative Power of Technology. All online quality critiques are customized per program and are designed to mirror either a client’s internal checklists or are developed to capture all elements that are of importance to that particular client’s program. These online quality forms are navigated through by our Quality Coaches, and we have the capability to digitally record all or part of the monitoring session for future review.

We are in the process of implementing speech analytics as part of our quality solutions, which will allow us to standardize quality measurement, identify focus areas quickly, collect voice of the customer data that impacts results, and ensure stringent compliance.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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