Quality Assurance plays a central role in Ignition’s operations. It’s a function we take extremely seriously. Our percentage of calls assessed is maintained at a level at least 10% higher than the industry standard. When assessing calls, our Quality Assurance Assessors make sure our employees are abiding by the rules, not misleading customers and not putting our clients or Ignition at risk.
Because we treat quality so seriously at Ignition and because every stakeholder in the business, no matter which department, understands how critical it is, a sales call can be listened to up to 10 times, by the quality team, the team leader, the campaign manager, perhaps a customer care expert.
But Quality Assurance plays a far bigger role in Ignition’s business operations than many realise. Here are five ways that QA keeps Ignition delivering outstanding service to our clients:
1. Gain insight
Our QA Assessors don’t just check that the quality of a call is high enough, tick a box and move on. What they do is gain insight into patterns, they gather data and compile statistics. For example, they may see that a particular campaign is not reaching the required level of sales, so then we can look into why that is happening. Are the sales experts not being given the tools they need, or does the process used on that campaign need to be re-evaluated? The use of insight isn’t limited to call centre experts though, and is disseminated to other parts of the business for multiple uses.
2. Training and education
QA Assessors are able to give feedback to training departments on both individual performance as well as campaign performance. Areas are identified where there are gaps in performance and knowledge, and these are then addressed in bespoke training for an individual or team.
3. Improving customer experience
A good customer experience increases sales, revenue and retentions, and our QA allows us to monitor and measure how well our sales experts are delivering on CX. With our high rate of QA, we are able to monitor a high number of customer interactions, gathering data on CX and then using it to focus on both strengths and weaknesses in training and execution.
4. Compliance
Sales and CX experts are required to adhere to certain regulations to protect their customers, which in turn protects both the call centre companies and the brands they represent. Failure to adhere to this required regulation can result in fines or loss of business as well as reputational damage. QA assessors monitor calls with this as a primary concern, ensuring that compliance guidelines are being met and that systems are in place to deal with any lapse in standards. Again, this allows us to act proactively and feeds back to training and avoiding potential problems.
5. The human touch
While Ignition is a highly technological company that uses AI and data analysis in virtually every aspect of our business, we never forget that we are a people-first organisation. This applies both to our own employees as well as the customers on the other end of the line – people must be treated with respect and politeness, and our QA Assessors are able to ascertain whether that is happening on the contact centre floors.
Our Quality Assurance Assessors play such an important role that it is hard to overstate their value to Ignition. They enable us to maintain an accurate overall grasp on the running of the call centre floors, maintain the high levels of customer service that we are known to deliver, ensure we are compliant at all times to both regulations and client stipulations, and force us to constantly evolve into a better company with better sales and customer service experts. Â
Karuna Rathnasamy is Head: Operational Risk and Compliance for Ignition Group.
