Teleperformance UK wins Infinity CCS’s Contact Centre QA competition for innovative social media solution
Teleperformance UK, part of the global Teleperformance Group, is delighted to announce it has won the Infinity CCS “Be The Best” Contact Centre QA Competition.
The competition – designed to recognise excellence and innovation in contact centre QA – was judged by three prominent figures from the contact centre industry: Jonty Pearce of callcentrehelper.com, Ann-Marie Stagg from the CCMA (Call Centre Management Association), and Carl Adkins, Founder of Infinity CCS.
Teleperformance UK’s CTO, James Timms, was presented with the prize – a Merida pro road racing bike worth £1,500 – by Carl Adkins during a short ceremony at the company’s Bristol contact centre. James indicated that the prize will be raffled off for charity.
Alistair Niederer, CEO of Teleperformance UK and South Africa, welcomed the announcement, saying: “Teleperformance has made QA an absolute priority for a number of years, and we have taken a great many steps to put in place robust processes on which all our clients rely. Winning Infinity CCS’s QA competition is a further validation, from well-known contact centre figures, that we are leading the field in this area.”
Teleperformance UK’s winning entry caught the judges’ attention because it was innovative, hi-tech and focused on multi-channel, particularly social media, which is becoming ever more important in modern contact centres.
James Timms commented: “Social media is great for connecting with customers in new ways and for providing timely and proactive customer service, but there are potential pitfalls. As any number of high profile companies have found out to their cost, social media conversations are public and all it takes to get bad press is for a single agent to make one misjudged comment.”
Teleperformance UK’s solution was to design a tool which allowed agents to interact directly with customers on Facebook and Twitter, but which also had built into it from day one a system of checks and balances. It brings Teleperformance UK’s clients all the benefits of social media interaction – immediacy, speed and efficiency – while eliminating, as far as possible, the pitfalls.
James continued: “This is accomplished by ensuring all comments are moderated before being released. This not only eliminates obvious errors and inappropriate responses, it also ensures consistency of style and content. To instigate a cycle of continuous performance improvement we also built in audit trails of all interactions, enabling QA staff and supervisors to give feedback to agents.”
In addition to the bike, Teleperformance UK will receive up to £20,000 of Infinity CCS’s specialist QA software for contact centres. Infinity Quality allows QA staff and supervisors to easily set up scorecards to check calls and other interactions more quickly and more consistently. In addition the software outputs detailed reports which flag up issues of non-compliance and provide immediate feedback to individual agents, team leaders and department managers.
Carl Adkins, one of the judges and founder of Infinity CCS, believes QA will only become more important as contact centres continue to expand their fields of operation across more and more channels. He said: “Agents now do so much more than answer or make calls. They interact over multiple channels, sometimes carrying out multiple conversations at once. They have to quickly sort through vast amounts of information and disseminate it efficiently. And they have to do all this while following processes which can be, particularly in regulated industries, labyrinthine in their complexity. Without watertight QA procedures, which feedback to agents to improve performance, no company has a hope of maintaining the high standards demanded by customers today.”
“This is why we decided to run the Be The Best competition; to recognise companies that put QA at the heart of their business. All the entries we received did that, and it was a close-run thing. In the end we plumped for Teleperformance UK because they are leading the way in developing expanded QA processes which meet the requirements of the contact centre’s expanded role in facilitating sales, marketing and customer service over multiple channels.”
Anne-Marie Stagg, Chair of the CCMA and a fellow judge, commented: “What impressed us the most was Teleperformance UK’s farsightedness in building these QA checks into their social media management system right from the get-go. They clearly ‘get’ social media and understand their clients’ objectives in using it.”
Jonty Pearce of callcentrehelper.com, who was also on the judging panel, said: “Social media is becoming increasingly important within the contact centre. Not only does it allow agents to provide customer service in new ways, it also enables them to support viral marketing campaigns and improve customer loyalty by being proactive. Teleperformance were recognised for their Social Media Toolkit.”
Please contact julia.gibbs@teleperformance.com on 0782 795 2710 for further information.
Teleperformance, the worldwide leader in outsourced multichannel customer experience management, serves companies around the world with customer care, technical support, customer acquisition and debt collection programmes. The Group operates more than 100,000 computerised workstations, with 138,000 employees across more than 270 contact centres in 46 countries. It manages programmes in more than 66 languages and dialects on behalf of major international companies operating in a wide variety of industries.
In the UK, Teleperformance has around 8000 people in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Clients include major organisations across the public and private sector.
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