On 24th July,2021, Omnichannel International held a webinar on Impact of COVID-19 on Contact Centre and Customer Experience operations. The event that was moderated by Julius Odemba, Head of Contact Centre & Customer Resolution at Ecobank covered areas like working from home, work-life blend for Customer Experience (CX) Professionals , automation for contact centres, workforce management and change management. Wavi Mungala who is the Head of Customer Experience at HELB shared a summary in this thread on twitter. The area that caught my attention is Quality Assurance (QA) Automation.
This is my 2nd year as a quality assurance officer and the process for me largely remains manual backed by automated CX processes. Evaluation of service is done based on data from call monitoring and recording solutions, CRM, Social miners, and Email integrated systems. Have I thought that development of these systems could automate the QA? Absolutely yes. The excitement on hearing companies like Connex One who have already rolled out such systems was unimaginable. CX systems have been implemented with certain pre-agreed upon deliverables. For example, the fields in any case in a CRM system can be defined to auto select from defined choices. That for an officer handling calls, certain script is shared with them during training and coaching. One thing though that remains certain is that CX QA cannot be automated 100% especially in service industries where nonverbal cues are key in determining the quality of an interaction. Below are a few channels based QA automation
1. Calls/Voice — QA automation is possible and has been done. Bernard Moseti from Connex One is the guru and his company is better placed to explain how this is done. I am definitely a convert waiting for my chance to experience it in my space, hopefully soon.
2. Email — Did you know that security features deployed by the technical staff on email to sieve out spam is part of quality assurance process? Deployment of templates on the either website or mobile app could largely standardize incoming emails thus providing a basis for QA automation. I am always mesmerized when phone app authentication codes can be read from SMS app or when I get the STK push. Every time I have this experience, I think about a system that can scan through an email linking key customer query say account balance with your current balance in response or you guys don’t respond with we are sorry/we promise to . This may remain hybrid but with the biggest chunk automated. Default apps like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail already do have prompts in place to alert on emails needing action but yet to be responded to, missing attachments or even trigger meeting for emails requesting such. For countries like Kenya where electronic documents are gaining traction as admissible documents in legal processes, emails remain largely a big part of customer experience and quality interactions are vital.
3. Chatbots — By the nature of their development, QA for chatbots is mainly for process and end-to-end experience improvement rather that the unique officer and customer interactions at a particular point. The ever-evolving customer will push for reviewed language, process or even product. QA full automation can easily be achieved though interaction patterns, place of drop in the process and offering options to type in feedback. Proactively, the in-out push should ensure that the quality of interactions is updated and as per the promise to the customer.
4. Social media- For standardized products-based companies, social spaces are becoming fully automated by use of chatbots to serve customers. However, for service and few product-based that still need human interaction, automation may mean brand denting engagements or possible leads falling through. Notably is that social miners have provided algorithms to enable track specific words and sentiments making it easy for automation of QA. A good case study is the July 2017 Twitter purge for accounts that had old content that violated community standards. Progressively Instagram and Tiktok have been on the forefront in banning accounts or suspending posts that deemed improper; not just captions but media like photos and videos.
5. Face to face ( Video chats, in store/branch) — Though COVID-19 has led to automation of most processes, companies still offer a hybrid CX. QA evaluation here mostly takes the shape of mystery shoppers. Apart from sampling of cases captured in CRM; evaluation will also be based on post experience calls to the customer. Periodically, the evaluating officer has to adopt Management By Walking Around (MBWA) strategy. Slyly “eavesdropping” conversation with customer ,observing the serving officer body language and noting the tone. This is one space where full automation may never happen.
