Study Shows Contact Center Monitoring Still Has Room for Improvement

Contact centers continue to be under increasing pressure to improve customer service deliverables, while also keeping costs under control. In order to achieve both, contact center leaders must be able to monitor all activities of the center. This enables managers to identify weak points and make improvements where necessary. Such monitoring also gives managers insight into consumer desires and training opportunities.

The most common type of interactions monitored in the contact center continues to be phone calls with live agents, according to ICMI’s 2007 Quality Monitoring Report. Of those contact centers that have a quality program in place, 95.8 percent of them monitor these contacts.

Despite this level of monitoring for live interactions, only one in four, or 25.8 percent of centers surveyed monitor customers’ interactions with the center’s IVR system. More than three quarters of centers handle customer e-mail transactions, while only about two thirds, or 64 percent actually monitor e-mail contacts. This is an improvement from 61 percent in ICMI’s 2004 monitoring study.

Although it is not as popular as other communication channels, Web chat is gaining in use among consumers. Both the use and the monitoring of chat transactions have increased since the 2004 study. 12.8 percent of 2007 respondents indicated that their center handles chat sessions, up from 8.7 percent in 2004. More than 70 percent of these centers monitor chat sessions, compared to just 54.5 percent in 2004.

The same cannot be said for those centers that offer Web self-service. Only 27.4 percent of those centers that offer such channels take the time to monitor customer’s self-service interactions.

Monitoring is done by a variety of individuals in the contact center. Supervisors were responsible for monitoring in 55 percent of centers surveyed. Quality assurance specialists handled this task in 48.1 percent of centers, team leaders in 44.7 percent and managers in 40.7 percent.

While monitoring is done for a variety of reasons, those citied most often included ensuring that quality standards are met for each call; measuring agent performance; evaluating the level of customer satisfaction; identifying customer needs and expectations; and identifying additional training needs for individual agents.

A combination of monitoring methods is used by 80.4 percent of centers. However, the most common method cited in the study is call recording, which is used in 81.9 percent of centers surveyed. Only 51.8 percent of respondents use automated monitoring technology, down from 58 percent in 2004.

Despite the popularity of monitoring in the contact center, only 55.8 percent of centers believe that their monitors are given the time and/or resources they need to lead an effective quality program. This is also a decline from 58.2 percent in 2004. In addition, barely half, or 52 percent of respondents reported that their center shares customer feedback with other departments within their enterprise.


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Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.