Close to 100 people attended the Community of Experts workshop ‘Creating a QA process that enhances customer experience and drives on-going performance improvement’ by Jackie Naughton. read more…
Quality Management
Quality Management
Close to 100 people attended the Community of Experts workshop ‘Creating a QA process that enhances customer experience and drives on-going performance improvement’ by Jackie Naughton.
Jackie is well known in the contact industry. She has been a convening judge for the BPeSA’s industry awards over the last eight years. She gained her an in-depth understanding of the challenges faces by contact centre managers while overseeing more than 4,500 workstations across 13 countries gave. Today she is a world-renowned expert on QA. Her company, BYC, today offers outsourced quality assessments, consulting and training to contact centre operators.
Outsourcing QA to BYC allows customer experience managers to “benefit from cost effective and objective understanding of their overall contact centre operations”.The BYC approach to quality assess is not just focused on results, but strives to provide insight into factors that are likely to prevent or delay the optimization of customer delivery through customer initiatives.
The event was introduced by Jackie with a video regarding branding, which explained that we are exposed to more than 3 500 brand messages per day and live in a brand saturated world. Jackie clarified that, although branding impacts on QA, it is not measured by QA, which is the process of determining whether products/services meet customers’ expectations and focuses on enhancing and improving the process used to create the end result, rather than focusing on the result itself.
With call centre agents engaging in 23 000 customer interactions in a single year, they carry more branding power than anyone else in the company, which makes it essential for agents to be involved in and part of the QA process. Jackie’s presentation made it abundantly clear that QA is the “dipstick of processes in a company”, and when correctly implemented and applied, it results in the sharing of significant statistics and information. Participants were reminded that a company’s brand is owned by its customers and is only as good as the customer says it is.
Total Quality Management, according to Jackie, is akin to continual improvement and should never stand still, leaves no room for grey areas, and she felt that it should perhaps be referred to as Customer Experience management, which “has to live and breathe”, as QA is “the living heartbeat” of any company. It should never be perceived as just a set of reports, and being flexible, QA gives insights that, for instance, allow companies to measure the effects of processes.
The presentation was extensive, eye opening and filled with useful and practical information that participants could use to ensure their company processes, products and services measure up to the highest standards.
It was heartening to see participants actively raising questions after the presentation and Jackie was able to answer a variety of questions, ranging from relationship building to motivating QA on agent level, as well as how to convince management QA was not just needed but a necessary tool to assist in optimising effective operations.
iFundi’s Community of Experts Series has been welcomed by the public as an innovative tool for both educating and networking, while addressing topics of common interests to the practitioners of various professional communities. These events expose the participants to new ideas as presented by a guest speaker and allow a forum for the participants to share their experiences.