Top ten tips for implementing a call center quality monitoring solution

Top ten tips to conducting a successful quality monitoring implementation in a customer service call center:

1) Write a clear outline of the reasons behind bringing a call recording system into your call center’s work flow:
o Benefits to agents
o Benefits to customers
o Benefits to company

2) Introduce the concept of quality monitoring well in advance and initiate tasks to empower agents to participate in the process
o The purpose of call quality monitoring is NOT to catch employees slacking off, but to help improve customer service and meet overall performance metrics.
o Employees can help define the quality assurance metrics and play a significant role in continuous performance improvement

3) Reiterate company customer service goals
o Customers are the ones who actually pay salaries and wages
o It is often much easier to retain customers than get new ones
o Treat all co-workers as customers and good habits will form

4) Create a “team” atmosphere for your agents
o Set up a team recognition and rewards program
o Highlight stellar service examples via internal emails and newsletter articles/photos
o Sub-teams should be formed to make task management easier

5) Make sure the Telephony and IT sub-teams know their roles and responsibilities in carrying out their end of the plan
o All part of the same larger team along with the agents, managers and supervisors
o Create detailed project plans for each sub-team

6) Educate your call center agents on their sub-team’s specific quality improvement goals
o Increase upsells
o Increase saves
o Increase new sales
o Call time to resolution
o Caller time on hold
o Ask them for other ideas

7) Include agents in coming up with evaluation criteria and forms
o once the metrics are defined, your agents can help you define evaluation criteria, in essence, creating the forms

8) Appoint a few agents to a “system review sub-team” to represent agent feedback on what could be improved with the quality monitoring program.
o System improvements wish list
o Team goal review
o Evaluation criteria review

9) Throw a great kick off party
o Announce weekly performance goals and prizes
o At the party, allow your agents to evaluate supervisors’ calls

10) Schedule a benchmarking session with another call center that has been quality monitoring for over a year and seen improvements
o Exchange discoveries, stats, tips

What's the difference between VoIP and IP Telephony?

We found the answers from several different sources....

From Avaya:

VOIP and IP Telephony are closely related. IP Telephony is DEPENDENT upon VoIP.

VoIP delivers conversations over an IP network. IP telephony services can provide the means to manage the traffic, assure the quality of the conversation, enable the end user to control the calls with advanced business features that they have grown accustomed to using at work, then the enterprise will not be pleased with the VoIP experience.

IP Telephony facilitates the delivery of voice packets across the network with speed, plenty of options, and gives the caller control over the experience.

IP Telephony unites an organization's many locations - including mobile workers - into a single converged network. It provides cost savings by combining voice and data on one network that can be centrally maintained, as well as by eliminating toll expenses for calls between locations. Avaya Services help companies select the right solutions, assess the readiness of their LAN or WAN to carry voice traffic, implement the solutions, and maintain them after installation.

We also posed the question in the newly relaunched ask.com. Here was the top response, a post on a bulletin board on a student's website:
Voice over IP and IP telephony are terms used generally to describe the same type of technology; passing packetized voice traffic over IP networks. IP telephony can also represent the practice of passing traditional voice service traffic over packet networks, such as call centers, voice mail, caller ID and ANI, and others.

Lastly, we posed the question on Yahoo's new "Answers" service. We'll post the answers as we receive them in our email...