Quality management in the contact center: the future is hybrid!

Why “Hybrid” and not fully automated?

One of the main limitations of automated quality management is that speech analysis does not “understand” what is being said. It can tell if agents are saying certain phrases, it can detect how the agent and customer are feeling, but it can’t tell you if the agent is giving the customer the right information. Only a human can do that.

No contact center manager would agree to an agent being disciplined on the sole recommendation of a machine without manually checking the call to make sure.

This is where the “hybrid” comes into play.

Humans check the automated system.

One way to do this is through calibration. A human team of evaluators will select several calls to listen to. Some of them will have high scores and will be considered “good” calls. Some will have “average” calls, and some will be identified as poor quality calls.

Human evaluators listen to these calls. If they find errors where the machine found none, it may mean that the automated process settings need to be updated. If they find the machine is scoring too hard, they may need to adjust the settings and scoring.

When agents do not meet the required criteria, they will need to receive feedback from a human, who can assure the agent that they have verified the results. Agents are unlikely to accept and agree with corrective feedback from a machine.