Roles and Responsibilities of Quality Analyst in BPO or Call center

The service industries have grown massively in the last two decades along with manufacturing industries. Any business can survive only when a customer comes back. Hence customer service has become key for any business to succeed, whether the business has their owned customer service or outsourced. This has resulted in growth for BPO/Call Center in countries like India and Philippines. Job opportunities in this sector have managed any other industries to date.
If you are working as a quality analyst or assurance for service industry for some time now or looking forward to a career in this role, then this article will provide a better understanding of this role. You might think some of the section is not relevant however, I strongly recommend you to go through each section to gain a clear understanding.

This article will focus on the below-mentioned aspect.

  • The need of Quality for BPO/Call Center
  • Evolution of Quality Management
  • 7 QC Tools
  • Functions & Tasks of a QA Team in the Call Center

The Need of Quality in BPO/Call Centers

Typical call centers deal with thousands of customer call on a daily basis. Providing quality service is paramount to customer satisfaction. Quality analysts ensure that agents provide quality service in line with organizational objectives.

Optimized quality assurance will increase agents’ efficiency through behavior modification, enhance the quality of service to customers and improve close rates. It is, therefore, important for BPO/Call Centers to have a plan for a quality assurance program, create a team of analysts and understand their roles and responsibilities.

Evolution of Quality Management

7 QC Tools

Flowcharts – A flowchart or process map identifies the sequence of activities or the flow of materials and information in a process

The benefit of Flowchart:

  • Shows unexpected complexity, problem areas, redundancy, unnecessary loops, and where simplification may be possible
  • Compares and contrasts actual versus ideal flow of a process.
  • Allows a team to reach agreement on process steps and identify activities that may impact performance
  • Serves as a training tool

Check sheets – Check sheets are special types of data collection forms in which the results may be interpreted on the form directly without additional processing.

The benefit of Check Sheets –

  • Creates easy-to-understand data
  • Builds, with each observation, a clearer picture of the facts.
  • Forces agreement on the definition of each condition or event of interest
  • Makes patterns in the data become obvious quickly.

Histograms – Identifies the frequency of quality defect occurrence and displays quality performance.

The benefit of Histogram –

  • Displays large amounts of data that are difficult to interpret in tabular form
  • Shows centering, variation, and shape.
  • Illustrates the underlying distribution of the data.
  • Provides useful information for predicting future performance.
  • Helps to answer “Is the process capable of meeting requirements?

Pareto charts – A Pareto diagram is a histogram of the data from the largest frequency to the smallest.

The Benefit of Pareto chart –

  • Helps a team focus on causes that have the greatest impact. Can be used to find when 80% of the problems may be attributed to 20% of the causes
  • Displays the relative importance of problems in a simple visual format.
  • Helps prevent “shifting the problem” where the solution removes some causes but worsens others.

Cause-and-effect diagrams or Fishbone Diagram – Systematically track backward to find a possible cause of a quality problem (or effect) and not the solution. It helps to generate ideas.

Methods for Generating Ideas – 

  • Brainstorming
  • Quality circles
  • Interviewing
  • Benchmarking
  • 5W2H

Scatter diagrams – It can uncover a relationship, starting with Fishbone
Control charts (SPC) on-line control – Control charts show the performance and the variation of a process or some quality or productivity indicator over time in a graphical fashion that is easy to understand and interpret. They also identify process changes and trends over time and show the effects of corrective actions

Functions & Tasks of a QA Team in the Call Center

Here are five essential functions and tasks of a quality assurance team or individual.

Develop or understand evaluation programs or Scorecard

QA evaluation program or scorecard is one of the key tools for transaction monitoring. It is a special kind of from designed to evaluate agents performance on the call and consists of multiple parameter and sub-parameter or checklist aligned with agents KPI or organizational performance metrics. This performance metrics often varies depending upon nature of the organization or process. However, It should unearth root- cause of problems, possible solutions and provide actionable insight for performance improvements.

Working in partnership with the operations leadership an evaluation form, along with the process of disseminating the information to ensure improvements, should be documented as part of an overall plan.

Most of you are former call center agents and you know what a quality call is. With this awareness and logical thinking, you will be able to develop evaluation program or scorecard. Best practice will be to conduct a brainstorming session with your team to develop the scorecard.

In most cases, you will not need to develop as it has been already developed and made available to you by the stakeholders. Here you must understand thoroughly with no exception. The best way to gain an understanding of the scorecard is by attending mock calibration session. Your active participation is key as this session are often part of your certification. We will be discussing calibration process in latter part of this section

Reporting

Reporting is the prime responsibility of a QA team. As a QA you are often asked to prepare multiple reports and analysis based on the audits performed by your team or any other available data. These reports are delivered to the stakeholder in the form of Microsoft Excel dashboard, PowerPoint or PDF.

Most often this responsibility lies with QA Supervisor or senior QAs’ however it’s important for all QAs’ to prepare reports as this helps them as individual to built their analytical skill.

An essential skill required for reporting is Excel. There are many tutorials available online for free and I will also be publicizing few in coming days.

Call Monitoring or Evaluation

The primary task of a QA in Call Center is call monitoring and sharing actionable insight. This is somewhat similar to “Inspection” that we discussed during the march of quality however not the same. The motto of inspection was to identify defect but call monitoring is not a fault finding mission. The purpose is to find the area of improvement aligned to key performance metrics. QA’s are often asked to perform a specific audit that is known as “Dip Check” when the target is to find the specific type of failure that is key to the business.

A QA will need to listen to call and fill up the evaluation from. This listening comes in the form of recorded calls, live calls, and side-by-side burning. For Call centers’ it is preferred that you listen to recorded calls to get optimum result.

Training and Coaching/Feedback

Training – Agents need to be trained on quality policies and procedures. This should start in agent training so that all new hires understand the expectations of a quality call. Your knowledge about evaluation from scorecard and expertise of being former call center agent will be key conduct this session.

Feedback – A single session with an individual agent conducted by the QA about the outcome of the call monitored or audit findings is called feedback session. There are many methods of feedback can be used depending upon the need of the session however some key aspect of any feedback session are mentioned below.

  • Actionable items discussed needs to be in complete agreement with the agent.
  • Actionable items chosen should be realistic and prioritized as per critical business need.
  • Actionable items should be limited to 1-3 and not more than that. Best practice to work on 1 item at a time.
  • Actionable item discussed needs to have a follow-up data and documented for further utilization.

The preferable feedback session is to be conducted in presence of the agent’s manager or supervisor.

Coaching is a close loop process and consists of multiple feedback session.