‘Outdated’ quality assurance methodologies ‘a thing of the past’.

‘Outdated’ quality assurance methodologies ‘a thing of the past’.

Johannesburg, South Africa, 29 May 2008 - Merchants, the contact centre division of Dimension Data, believes that outdated quality assurance practices will become a thing of the past with its local launch of Survey 360 from Insight Now.

Based in the UK, Insight Now is a company at the forefront of real-time consumer interaction management.

It has developed a range of tools and techniques that enable organisations to engage with their customers and employees instantly at the point of service delivery.

The company’s survey tools and techniques deliver feedback directly to agents, showing how well they score on satisfaction as judged by the customers, their team leaders and against their colleagues - in real time.

Survey 360, particularly, is aimed at improving organisational performance by measuring operational efficiency and employee performance.

“Contact centres have evolved over the years based on foundations derived from a number of misleading metrics,” says Dave Howard, joint founder of Insight Now.

“Percentage of calls handled in a predetermined number of seconds and percentage of calls handled versus number of calls offered, both drive the wrong internal behaviours that add no face value to the customer.”

According to Howard, the only key performance indicator that effectively addresses the gap in delivering good customer service is first call resolution and focussing on number of resolutions instead of number of calls handled.

“Customer satisfaction is intrinsically linked to performance, which can translate directly to cost savings through a reduced number of repeat calls offered to a contact centre,” agrees Evan Jones, business development manager for Merchants SA.

To this extent, Jones says that contact centres need to discard the notion that they are “call centres” and adopt the ideology of a “resolution centre”

Insight Now Survey 360 challenges the traditional thinking around contact centre measurement (i.e. chasing efficiency), and places emphasis on measuring agent performance, continuous improvement and reaching true return on investment.

“Reducing repeat calls inherently improves agent efficiency, which translates to pure cost savings with regard to cost per contact centre seat,” Jones comments.

“Apart from physical financial savings, the resulting time savings can be translated into things that will benefit agents in the form of more breaks or additional training and development time.

“Survey 360 also allows contact centre management to measure variance between agent self-assessment scores, independent scores and caller scores, which brings a very interesting and eye-opening perspective on performance.

“Insight Now brings new measures into the business, which have never been there before – bringing a pure and simple dimension to measuring performance – asking the customer,” he adds.
One case study of the application in an outsourced contact centre here in South Africa, found that, while the contact centre was seen to be performing well over its 80% call-answer service level agreement, over 70% of those calls were repeat calls.

Using Survey 360, the customer was able to identify the fact that the majority of the repeat calls came as a result of incorrect call transfers and having corrected this problem, repeat calls were reduced to 5%.

“This improved the caller experience dramatically and also freed up agent capacity to handle additional responsibilities,” Jones says.

In another case study, line quality emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing the contact centre – something that the management would never have known.

For further information please contact:

Vanda Dickson, Marketing & Strategy Development, Merchants
Tel: +27 11 575 2479
Email: vanda.dickson@za.didata.com

Lee-Anne Poon, Tribeca Public Relations
Tel: +27 11 208 5500
Mobile: +27 82 818 4041
Email: lee-annep@tribecapr.co.za

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