Enghouse’s SmartQuality Agent Evaluation Scales Quality & Compliance

Enghouse’s AI-based Voice of the Customer technology has enjoyed great success as the agent’s secret augmentation, offering real-time coaching and information while they deal with customers.

Now, the new SmartQuality analytics platform extends the functionality to offer greatly enhanced call centre quality management, by automating key aspects of the agent evaluation process. Supporting call centre supervisors and agents at the same time by offering objective scoring across all multi-channel interactions, including voice, email and web-chat, it enables supervisors to focus directly on key coaching opportunities, as well as helping businesses to improve the identification of key customer insights.

The agent evaluation programme aggregates interaction data to enable comprehensive analysis of every conversation, on every channel – supporting business intelligence and direction at the macro perspective, as well as individual agent development.

At the one-to-one end, it means that agents can be evaluated fairly, on the totality of their work, and coached and supported appropriately. As product director Steve Nattress explained, this intelligent system can spot and flag liabilities at varying levels, from compliance breaches to account at risk:

“We [Enghouse] are not dictating what makes a good call – the client configures SmartQuality according to their own criteria and policies, to mirror and scale their evaluation process and scorecard – but without the human bias and noise, and addressing 100% of the interaction across all channels,” he explained.

“It helps the human supervisor identify specific coachable moments, to address individually, in a completely fair way.”

From Individual Improvement to Data-Driven Trend Identification

As well as supporting the skills development of each agent, the intelligence of the system can glean additional insights from the language and shape of each call, and recommend follow-up actions – looking at the data from a much larger perspective, and zeroing in on trends emerging.

“One of the key differentiators is the risk detection module in our AI engine,” Nattress continued. “This can identify churn risk in a call, where the customer is indicating an intent to take their business elsewhere.”

Because of the human nuances of language, this may not be explicitly threatened or stated during the call – but the sheer volume of voice-of-customer data the AI is ingesting means that pattern recognition is possible, and the interaction can be flagged.

This at-risk account can then be passed to the customer retention team for follow up – but as Nattress described, the bigger view can also shape contact centre management actions going forward:

“Maybe it identifies that there are more negative calls in the afternoon or evening, and you can analyse that against factors like response times. Perhaps customers have a different interpretation of an acceptable waiting time depending on the time of day, so you can run cross-analysis to understand the problem and its impact.” Simply bringing on a couple more call handlers during that time, when waiting is creating a negative perception, may reduce overall dissatisfaction.

This means the human supervisor can bring their experience and intuition to data visualisation and dig in to optimise the outcome. “The system can surface the trends, and help you interpret it, and identify the action to take.”

Reducing Churn on Both Sides

Ultimately, it’s this combination of ground-level attention to individual interactions, combined with the 50,000ft perspective, which makes Enghouse’ SmartQuality such a vital asset for contact centre management.

“Experienced agents are undergoing really high turnover right now, and it’s a tough job at the best of times,” Nattress reflected. “If they feel like they’re getting assessed fairly – instead of being victimised because of that one call that went wrong – they’re more likely to learn and improve, and feel like they’re being evaluated fairly alongside everyone else.”

Retaining customers, retaining agents – it all helps, in uncertain times. SmartQuality feels like an invaluable addition to any contact centre management system.

Maya Middlemiss

Enghouse’s SmartQuality Agent Evaluation Scales Quality & Compliance