How AI is powering a frictionless future in retail CX
The retail climate for 2025 is a bit uneasy. But AI is helping retailers create more fluid, personalized experiences. Learn how AI is reshaping both t...
Many business process outsourcing (BPO) firms hope to capitalize on technical innovations like AI to drive value for their clients. However, many miss the opportunity to leverage AI-based conversation intelligence to improve their quality assurance (QA) efforts. Today, QA is a highly manual process, conducted by randomly sampling customer calls. Typical QA analysts often only listen to 3 to 5 random calls per agent, per month — less than 1% of overall interactions. What about the other 99% of customer interactions?
By augmenting human efforts with conversation intelligence, BPOs can analyze 100% of omnichannel customer interactions — not just calls. Let’s explore how automating at least some aspects of QA improves agent performance across a global portfolio of clients, while driving new revenue opportunities in the process.
Whitepaper
The BPO Automation Imperative
Learn why quality assurance (QA) should serve as the baseline for BPOs’ client services.
Automating QA to improve agent performance
In the journey toward automated QA, BPOs should strive towards automating step by step — achieving quick wins, measuring success, and expanding from there. In doing so, BPOs can celebrate success and build enthusiasm around the QA program. In addition, teams can use the data from conversation intelligence to give agents support and prevent exploitation from abusive customers.
Conversation intelligence can be a powerful tool to help BPOs baseline quality through scorecards, which measure compliance and process adherence. From there, supervisors can gain data-driven coaching insights specific to each agent, focused on improving performance and reinforcing positive behaviors. This type of direct feedback leads to measurable improvements.
Agents can also use conversation intelligence systems to self-coach and self-improve, saving time and improving quality in the process. Real-time alerts can guide agents through complex situations, avoiding escalations and improving KPIs such as average handle times (AHTs).
Leveraging AI-based insights on the customer journey
Beyond QA, BPOs can leverage customer journey data to drive additional value for clients, and in turn drive more revenue. When BPOs are using conversation intelligence to guide their quality program, they can also gain insights into every customer interaction across every channel. This information can provide important signals about their opinion of the organization in calls to the contact center as well as email, chat, social media, websites, and SMS interactions.
Using customer journey analytics, BPOs can analyze and score these conversations to better understand customers’ opinions and how they feel about each step of the journey. From there, BPOs can make changes that drive efficiency in their own workflows, or recommend changes to directly improve client business outcomes.
Improving generative AI outputs
Are generative AI applications like ChatGPT ready to field real-world customer interactions? That’s the question many BPOs are asking as they look to improve the quality of their self-service offerings and digital channels. Conversation intelligence can be used to improve the quality of AI-generated conversations, not just agent conversations. That’s just one more way that BPOs can improve quality while driving efficiency, contributing to the bottom line.
