Automated Quality Management (AQM) for call centers might be a controversial topic. How will AQM impact roles, processes, and systems in call centers today? And, will this automation really work, or is it just an attempt to add technology where technology can’t really do the job (yet)?
Snowfly has an Automated Quality Management (AQM) for call centers solution. As this newer solution has become more popular in the call center industry, with different vendors talking about it in different ways, and people at organizations asking for and evaluating AQM solutions, things start to get confusing. In this post we hope to help you understand Automated Quality Management (AQM) for call centers so you can find and pick the best solution for your environment.
AQM Goes Way Beyond Transcription Analysis
Transcriptions were everyone’s first try at automating quality. Get a transcription of a call and then … um… read through it? Highlight good or bad parts?
Transcriptions have come a long way, for sure, but it is not AQM. Transcriptions give you what amounts to raw data while AQM gives you information, context, direction, suggestions. AQM helps you know what the problems are. They help you understand why your best performers are your best performers and why your worst performers are your worst performers. They help you figure out what your training needs to focus on.
Automated Quality Management (AQM) for call centers can transform your operation from reactive to proactive, from putting out fires to being strategic. Snowfly’s AQM tools give you dashboards and prompts. They make it easy to find patterns and figure out triggers. They also help you understand where your legal liabilities are (perhaps agents saying illegal things).
Transcriptions just dumps a bunch of documents, either real or virtual, on your desk, and says “go through these hundreds of pages to figure out what’s going on.
AQM Can Be Highly Accurate and Cover 100% of Your Calls
Don’t make the common mistake of confusing transcription accuracy with AQM accuracy. When you are talking to AQM vendors make sure you understand these are different, and ask them which they are talking about when they tell you about their accuracy.
Snowfly’s minimum acceptable AQM accuracy threshold is 85%. The industry threshold is 70%.
85% is unheard of. You better believe we shoot for more than 85%, which some will say is not possible. But we have our secret sauce, our black box, our trade secrets, and systems that help us actually get an accuracy level that leaves people in this space wondering how we do it.
Additionally, using an automated quality management tool like ours allows you to monitor 100% of your calls. Can you imagine the staff you would need if you wanted to cover 100% of your calls manually? It’s unfathomable. It’s cost prohibitive. It would be a crazy use of resources.
However, with our technology, you can, if you want, cover every single call. Here’s the cool thing, though: You don’t need to cover 100%. Maybe you only need 15% coverage to get the information you need to make better decisions. Maybe you want 30%. Whatever you want, we can do. And I bet we can do multiple times more coverage than you would be able to manually.
If you are one of those manual quality employees, don’t worry. We’re not advocating getting rid of you, rather getting you into a more valuable, strategic role to complement AQM.
AQM Should Give You More, and Richer, Data and Information to Make Strategic Decisions
I’m not going to beat up how simple transcriptions are on this point, although it would be easy to say that AQM gives you much more, and richer data and information to make strategic decisions.
I want to talk about how better AQM systems will give you better data/information than simple AQM systems. You see, not all AQM tools are the same. Some are basically glorified transcriptions. Others give you information to help you understand what’s really happening with the calls and what tactics/strategy you should move forward with.
Leadership and management need better information to make better decisions. Everything going great? Maybe don’t change hardly anything. Or, does everything seem to always be on fire, and you run around putting out fires? Maybe there’s a lot to change, but where do you start?
Your automated quality management (AQM) for call centers systems should help you know where your strengths and weaknesses are. They should help you know what metrics you should focus on and how your training and onboarding needs to change. They should have an impact on your hiring procedures
AQM Can Reveal Real Issues You Should Resolve
No one buys any service like an automated quality management system because everything is going really well. They buy it because they want to optimize. They want to future proof their operation. They want to figure what can improve. Perhaps there are massive improvements, perhaps there are marginal improvements.
AQM should surface those big and small opportunities. We’ll not only help you find what you think you are looking for (based on information you give us), we’ll maybe surface things because of what we’ve learned from other customers.
One of the most valuable things we can bring to you, in addition to automated quality management, is figuring out how to think about optimizing call center operations. While we careful ly guard trade secrets and competitive advantages, we sometimes learn things from our customers that help make us smarter about the industry, improve the product, and help us bring more value to other customers.
This is what all service providers who do consulting should do. Learn a clever thing from one client and, if appropriate and ethical, bring it (or something similar) to another client. Perhaps we learn a best practice or common metric from one industry and introduce it to clients in another industry…
Again, we only do this in an ethical way. We never violate the trust of our clients and wouldn’t think of sharing anything they consider secrets. Learning what other organizations are keenly interested in helps us be aware of what you might want to be keenly interested in.
Automated Quality Management (AQM) for call centers
It’s time to seriously look at the benefits of automated quality management (AQM) for call centers. This can save you money and get you better, more timely data to improve your operations and reduce costly problems.
Want to see how we do it? Let’s talk!
