ATIO quality measurement assures the heartbeat of call centres
11 September 2006

In today's competitive business environment ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction is crucial to client retention strategies. Clients are the most important asset of any enterprise and should therefore be nurtured and offered excellent quality of service at each point of contact within an organisation. A contact centre is one channel that could be utilised to communicate with clients and the industry demand for an above-average customer experience is particularly strong where this channel is concerned.

"A client remembers only great or less than average service", says Almarie Leimecke, director of customer services at ATIO Corporation's Cape Town office.

She went on to say that, "A bad experience with a contact centre may drive a client to a competitor. It costs several times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer and therefore it makes business sense for contact centres to ensure interactions are of a high quality. A client keeps a business alive, so it becomes the responsibility of the contact centre to keep client services alive."

One means of ensuring high service levels in a contact centre is to quality assure contact centre operations. ATIO has developed a unique rating tool called EVALUATION, which objectively measures customer satisfaction within a contact centre environment. EVALUATION is designed as a tool to assist a company to improve its contact centre's quality of service by means of independent evaluation.

"We measure the heartbeat of the contact centre through assessing how satisfied the client actually was with the services delivered today! EVALUATION is a real-time measurement of a contact centre's health," said Leimecke.

An EVALUATION assessment is conducted by a "mystery shopper" who phones in to a contact centre and experiences the contact centre as any customer would do. The tool rates the contact centre against a set of objective criteria: technology efficiency (placed on hold, intelligent voice response (IVR) prompts as well as multimedia interactions), call agent efficiency (call control and first-time call resolution) and an assessment of an agent's politeness and voice clarity, attitude, product knowledge, and service skills. All reporting is from the perspective of the entire "client experience" during a contact centre interaction.

"The metric provides an objective measurement on which to base agent evaluations allowing managers to reward good agents for their support of company goals. It also points out individual training needs for agents," said Leimecke.

The service also enables a contact centre to benchmark its service provision against its competitors and points to areas where client services can be improved. This is best achieved by evaluating the client service by means of independent evaluators.

According to Leimecke, a Namibian contact centre client has seen marked improvements in its client service following daily quality assessments using ATIO's outsourced service quality metrics.

"ATIO's EVALUATION tool enables a contact centre to have a first hand view of the actual quality of service delivered, and enables managers to put in place strategies that could ensure greater customer loyalty and reduce potential customer churn. This will result in improving the bottom line profitability," said Leimecke.