Are You Losing Customers Without Knowing It? The Hidden Costs of Poor QA
In the increasingly important world of customer service, quality assurance (QA) often takes a backseat to the urgency of addressing customer inquiries and resolving issues.
However, neglecting QA can have detrimental consequences that reverberate throughout your business, potentially leading to lost customers and revenue.
In this post, we examine the importance of QA, the benefits it delivers when done right, common pitfalls faced by contact centers, and how leveraging AI can revolutionize the QA process and help your business soar to new heights.
Why does QA matter?
Quality assurance serves as the cornerstone of any successful customer service operation. It ensures consistency, accuracy, and efficiency in interactions between agents and customers.
By meticulously evaluating interactions, QA identifies areas for improvement, mitigates risks, and fosters a culture of continuous enhancement. Over time, this adds up to customer satisfaction gains — and a healthier bottom line.
When contact centers are able to review every call agents handle, it’s that much easier to ensure each agent is maintaining compliance with internal company scripts and relevant regulatory requirements.
At the same time, QA also helps organizations enforce consistent quality across various contact centers — something that’s particularly helpful for organizations that rely on several contact centers distributed across geographies or outsource some or all of their contact center operations.
What are the benefits of good QA?
Organizations that optimize their approach to QA and prioritize it across every agent interaction enjoy several transformative benefits, which we’ll examine in this section.
Improved CX
By maintaining high-quality standards, businesses can deliver exceptional customer experiences consistently. This is a big deal since satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal and advocate for your brand. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, improving the customer experience “even by a sliver” can translate into tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue.
Enhanced agent performance
QA provides valuable feedback to agents, helping them refine their skills, address weaknesses, and excel in their roles. This leads to higher employee morale and productivity. It also meets employee expectations, since workers today want professional development opportunities.
Higher first-call resolution rates
Effective QA processes streamline issue resolution, empowering agents to resolve customer inquiries accurately and promptly on the first attempt. This reduces operational costs, enhances customer satisfaction, improves customer retention, and even makes agents happier.
Increased compliance
Regulatory compliance is paramount in many industries, and QA ensures that agents adhere to prescribed guidelines and regulations, minimizing the risk of penalties or legal repercussions (e.g., for violating HIPAA, PCI, or GDPR). In addition to avoiding fines and other penalties, maintaining compliance also keeps customers happy; nobody likes a business that mishandles their personal data.
Data-driven insights for continuous improvements
By analyzing QA data, businesses gain actionable insights into customer trends, agent performance metrics, and operational inefficiencies. This enables informed decision-making and facilitates ongoing enhancements to processes and strategies — helping instill a culture of continuous improvement.
Why many contact centers fail at QA
Despite recognizing the importance of QA, many contact centers struggle to implement effective QA practices. In large part, this is due to the fact that they are still approaching QA the old-fashioned way or are relying on outdated tools.
For example, many contact centers still use manual processes for QA. Even in the best case scenario, contact center managers can only conduct QA on 5% of calls, leading to many poor interactions going unresolved.
Lacking visibility into a whopping 95% of interactions, organizations that use manual QA systems simply can’t see the big picture. While they do get some insights, they’re unable to capture the full spectrum of customer experiences and may overlook critical issues or patterns.
As a result, they could be losing customers without even realizing it!
Additionally, manual QA processes are also error-prone. When organizations rely on manual evaluation methods, they open the door for human error and inconsistency. On top of this, manual QA processes are time-consuming and resource-intensive, limiting scalability and efficiency.
Optimizing QA with AI
To overcome the limitations of manual QA and enhance efficiency and accuracy, contact centers are increasingly turning to AI-driven solutions.
Leveraging AI technologies, such as generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning, revolutionizes the QA process.
Automated evaluation
AI-powered QA platforms can analyze large volumes of interactions rapidly and accurately, eliminating the need for manual review. By automating mundane tasks, AI frees up valuable time for QA analysts to focus on strategic initiatives and qualitative analysis.
Sentiment analysis
Leading AI-powered QA solutions can discern the sentiment and tone of customer interactions, providing deeper insights into customer satisfaction levels, pain points, and emerging trends. This enables contact centers to proactively address issues and tailor responses to individual customer needs, with full understanding of nuance.
Scalability
AI-driven QA solutions are highly scalable, capable of handling large volumes of interactions without sacrificing quality or efficiency. As contact center operations expand or evolve, AI adapts seamlessly to accommodate changing needs and demands.
Continuous learning and improvement
Machine learning algorithms learn and adapt over time, refining their evaluation criteria based on feedback and data. This iterative process facilitates continuous improvement, ensuring that QA practices remain relevant and effective in dynamic environments.
Predictive analytics
By analyzing historical data and patterns, AI can predict potential issues or bottlenecks before they escalate, enabling proactive intervention and risk mitigation. This proactive approach minimizes disruptions and enhances overall operational resilience.
Compliance made easy
Leading AI-powered QA solutions enable you to analyze 100% of calls and even monitor calls in real time for voice and text-based compliance violations — like harassment, raised voices, and risky behavior. By implementing the right solution, you can proactively avoid regulatory fines and penalties by monitoring each call and promptly addressing any compliance breaches.
Plus, the right solution enables you to automatically redact sensitive information (e.g., personally identifiable information) while keeping the conversation’s overall context intact. As a result, your contact center is less likely to mishandle customer information — something your customers will no doubt appreciate.
Delight your customers & protect your bottom line with QA-GPT!
When it boils down to it, quality assurance is not merely a checkbox on a list of operational tasks but a critical component of delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving business success.
By embracing QA-GPT, contact centers can unlock untapped potential, optimize performance, and stay ahead in today's competitive landscape.
QA-GPT from LevelAI is an industry-first generative large language model (LLM) that evaluates every conversation across every customer channel — customizable to your business’ unique standards. Trained on your contact center data and continuously improving after each call, QA-GPT evaluates every conversation against custom scorecards, with near-human accuracy, auto-generating clear evidence for every score.
It’s the easiest way to make sure that your agents are giving your customers the best service possible — and much more effective than ChatGPT.
Don't let poor QA practices undermine your business. When you’re ready to see what the future of QA looks like, request a demo of LevelAI’s QA-GPT.
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