Quality Monitoring Insights Make your Contact Center a Profit Center

Is your pharmaceutical call center a profit center? Unless the center is making outbound sales calls or filling orders from distributors, it is probably thought of only as a cost center. That’s not the worst thing in the world.  With perhaps just a couple of exceptions, call center leaders would rather be thought of as a profit contributor and not solely as a cost contributor.

Utilizing Customer Insights

One of the ways we have seen call center leaders in our industry reverse the cost/profit mindset of the non-call center, accounting types is to utilize something everyone in the company wants, but few outside of the call center have – Customer Insights. These are extremely valuable, and can be used to help elevate the value and image of the call center.

Call center agents engage in hundreds, if not thousands, of critical customer interactions each month. What happens during those precious moments of truth should not remain confined in a customer relationship management system. The information, or rather the insights, should be packaged up and shared with others in the organization. Insights drive decisions that drive behavior.

The even better news is that most pharma call centers have already gathered and processed the insights from at least a sampling of customer interactions. Call centers do so as part their quality monitoring (QM) function. Call center thought leaders have known that the insights gained from listening in on customer/agent interactions does more than just help agents, these insights help the entire call center, and when used effectively, help the entire company.

Example of Quality Monitoring Insights

Here’s a simple example of quality monitoring insights in action.

Situation:

The QM team has been monitoring a call center patient support program for a key company brand with fairly steady results for more than 18 months. Brand marketers introduced a new call center script based on a new program feature. Monitoring specialists immediately began hearing patient confusion and calls ending with dissatisfied customers and frustrated agents.

Action: 

The QM team collates monitoring results across all agents working on the program. The drop-off in customer satisfaction is easily identifiable on QM trend reports. The root cause analysis begins – was it a bad script, poor training, faulty new program element, or just a string of bad luck.

Outcome:

Most often, poor customer results from an otherwise highly functioning call center are rarely the agents’ fault. The gathering, analyzing, and reporting of customer insights by the QM team to the brand group showed that a flawed script was the culprit.  A quick refinement to the script resulted in the program getting back on track.

This is just a simple example of how using the insights that already exist in the QM function can ramp up the value of the call center. Executives who understand the value of the insights from the call center turn the phrase “I understand we have to have it” to “I understand, and we have to have it.”

Let us know about your experiences with using QM insights to help elevate the value of your center in the eyes of your internal colleagues.