In what is considered a first for the life assurance industry, Metropolitan, one of South Africa's leading financial services companies, has installed Agent Quality Managementsoftware to ensure that its call centre operations continue to provide the highest level of service to its customers.
Says Coenraad Schoeman, at Metropolitan's Cape Town headquarters, "To accurately gauge how well your call centre is running, you have to put yourself in your customers' shoes. Unfortunately, for a busy call centre, the task of manually assessing agents is difficult and time consuming. This was the situation at Metropolitan. Our call centre was a year old and expanding rapidly, and while we believed that it was operating effectively, we had no way of measuring exactly how effective our agents were and in what areas we could improve."
Grintek Telecom, distributor of the Thales Contact Solutions (formerly known as Racal Recorders) product range in South Africa supplied Metropolitan with Thales's Agent Quality Management suite (AQM), which, in conjunction with the call centre's voice recording system, allows for an accurate analysis of agent interaction with customers. Says Schoeman, "The AQM system is a valuable management tool which has enabled us to not only manage our customer contact resources better, but also reduced cost by improving our agent training programmes, as it highlights specific training requirements. This in turn has provided objective measurements for the agent in which customer satisfaction plays a large part. "
Adds Schoeman, "We settled for the Thales product for its customisability and user friendliness while providing a high level of control for both live and recorded inbound calls. Our agents are evaluated objectively and the quality of each call assessed while the supervisors no longer have to monitor live calls or manage paper-based marking sheets. Shortly after implementing the system we saw a marked improvement in the approach of agents towards their customers. The long-term benefits, of course, are agent morale, retention, and ultimately improved customer relationships, which, while difficult to quantify, play an important role in our business. Random feedback from customers indicates that they are satisfied with our customer contact centre."
The Thales Agent Quality Management system features customised on-line evaluation forms which allow the user to design forms according to the specific needs of the call centre and allows them to be tailored to specific call campaigns or agent groups. Calls can be replayed from within the agent assessment application and the user can apply a flexible marking method from simple YES and NO to linear marking from 0-100%. The application produces a complete set of management reports, which reflects such data as performance, comparisons and trends in the form of graphs, charts and numerical data. Historical data is also available in graphical format.
Says Juanita Diedericks of Grintek Telecom's Cape Town branch, "Grintek has an extensive track record in the call centre and customer contact industry. The Thales AQM suite provides our customers with the tools to manage their most important asset, their people, better. This, in addition, enhances service levels and provides them with greater control and management of their resources. Never before has agent effectiveness and quality of service been easier to achieve, or easier to manage."
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