The Importance of Quality Assurance in Business

October 23, 2023

The Importance of Quality Assurance in Business

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, ensuring the highest level of product and service quality is not just a goal but a necessity for success. 

Quality assurance has emerged as an indispensable tool for businesses across industries, offering a systematic and proactive approach to identifying, addressing, and preventing issues that can compromise quality. 

Quality assurance software can be used by any industry that has an interaction with customers or clients, such as call centers and customer service departments.

This article delves into the reasons businesses use quality assurance software, highlighting its vital role in maintaining customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and overall brand reputation. 

Before diving into anything, let’s first look at the most common scenarios of quality assurance in business.

Customer Service

QA in customer service ensures that all calls are answered correctly and handled efficiently in real-time. In addition, it ensures that employees follow company policies when interacting with customers.

Call Centers 

Call center quality assurance ensures that incoming phone lines are working properly. It also maintains agent performance in how they engage clients. 

Agent performance monitored through QA is the foundation of great contact center performance.

Audit 

Quality assurance in audit firms helps verify the accuracy of data fed into systems. 

For example, if you have a system that records information about your sales transactions, it’s critical that this information is accurate. If not, then there could be serious consequences like losing money or getting sued.

A Closer Look at Quality Assurance in Contact Centers

As mentioned above, as long as you are within an industry where there is a focus on customer service, customer experience, or anything related to customer interaction, quality assurance programs (also known as quality control) become a very essential tool.

Ideally, QA becomes more effective with greater amounts of call center agents. Medium-sized call centers usually employ between 15 and 50 agents and often offer more complex products and services. 

Large call centers typically have over 100 agents on staff. They also tend to provide higher levels of support than smaller call centers do and therefore have greater quality requirements to fulfill.

Industries Using Call Center Quality Assurance

Any business handling customer interactions through calls can use contact center QA to maintain operational efficiency. 

Some industries, like manufacturing, may have a separate type of quality assurance that’s more tailored to assembly and production lines. 

This list includes only those industries that we’ve found through our own research and clientele, but there really is no limit since a majority of successful companies have call centers.

• Healthcare: Medicare agencies, hospitals, patient care, pharmacies.
• Education: Universities, colleges, learning centers, tutoring centers, IT student support.
• Financial Services: Banking, credit union, accounting firm, debt conciliation.
• Home services: Plumbing, installation, electrical, landscaping, junk removal.
• Automotive: Dealerships, car rental companies, maintenance, appointment booking
• Entertainment: Streaming services, cable providers, sports leagues
• Retail: eCommerce, fashion, electronics.

Why Would a Business Want to Use Quality Assurance?

There are many reasons companies choose to implement a call center quality assurance program. Some of these include:

Ensures Accuracy & Reliability

When using quality assurance systems, you’re able to verify that everything being done is correct, especially through precise artificial intelligence.

It also ensures reliability because nothing will ever happen without proper testing first.

Improves Customer Satisfaction 

If you provide excellent customer service, chances are good that your customers will return again and again, boosting customer loyalty.

However, if something goes wrong during one of your interactions, it makes sense to make things right so that you won’t lose future business.

Reduces Costs

It costs more than just time to train new hires. Training them well takes time and effort. But, once trained, it only requires minimal maintenance.

Agent productivity can be met through the real-time solutions quality assurance offers during phone call interactions.

Maintains Agent Engagement 

The best way to keep a call center agent engaged is by providing opportunities for growth and development.

Within the quality assurance process, you’ll find ways to improve agent skills and knowledge while keeping them motivated to meet business goals.

What Are Some Quality Assurance Programs Examples?

Examples of quality assurance in a call center are many and varied. Here are just a few examples from different industries.

The Healthcare Industry

In healthcare, one of the biggest challenges facing providers today is how they will manage rising costs while maintaining high standards of care.

One way to address these issues is to use technology to improve efficiency and reduce errors.

A good example of this would be implementing voice recognition software in order to automate certain processes. Another option is to implement automated testing tools like QA.

By doing so, you’ll be able to test new features before they’re implemented, which helps prevent costly mistakes.

The Financial Services Industry

One of the most common complaints among customers who deal with financial institutions is poor customer service.

Many people feel frustrated and angry after being treated poorly by representatives at banks, credit unions, insurance agencies, mortgage brokers, and payday lenders.

To avoid future frustrations, it’s best for a call center manager to implement a quality assurance software program to provide a better quality of service.

The goal here is to make sure all employees understand what policies apply when dealing with clients and follow them diligently.

It can help to train everyone involved in handling calls, including account managers, loan officers and collection specialists, because each call center agent has a unique set of responsibilities.

The Education Industry

University call centers play a vital role in providing students with information about courses, admissions, scholarships, campus life, student organizations, career opportunities, and much more.

However, if not properly managed, university call centers may become ineffective due to low employee morale, lack of training, and other factors.

In addition, universities must ensure that every aspect of their operations runs smoothly, especially during peak times such as finals week.Therefore, it makes sense to invest time and money into a QA software solution that ensures the quality process goes according to plan.

How Can I Implement Quality Assurance in My Business?

Within your contact center environment, there are several ways to incorporate quality assurance software into your business model.

For instance, some companies choose to outsource their entire operation to an external provider.

This allows them to focus on running their core businesses without having to worry about managing day-to-day activities and internal processes. Other options include using cloud computing or virtualization technologies.

These allow you to run multiple applications within a single server, making it easier to scale up or down depending on demand.

Finally, many vendors offer turnkey solutions that integrate various aspects of your company’s workflow together.

With these types of systems, you don’t have to do any programming yourself; instead, you simply configure settings based on your needs. However, many recent innovations in the contact center quality assurance space are driven by artificial intelligence (AI). To ensure your success in taking advantage of AI, make sure that your solution provider has a strong process and resources available to assist your organization through implementation and is there for the long term providing support.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Control in Business

Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) in business represent two distinct yet interconnected approaches to maintaining product or service quality.

QA is a proactive, process-oriented strategy that centers on preventing defects from arising by establishing rigorous standards and quality management systems.

In contrast, QC is a reactive, product-oriented approach that involves the inspection and testing of the final output to identify and rectify any deviations from established quality standards just before delivery or during production.

Outsource Quality Assurance for Business to Call Criteria

All in all, quality assurance and quality control software can benefit various industries. It provides the ability to track performance metrics, identify problems before they occur, and implement fixes quickly when necessary.

Build a strong internal team with broad skills across quality assurance software, hardware, processes and criteria and then commit to supporting that internal capability fo rthe long term. Or consider working wiht an organizaiotn like Call Criteria that brings the expertise, hardware, software, processes and people needed for a world calss quality assurance solution.A strong quality assurance solution can provide real value to your organization, so make sure you take advantage of this opportunity! If you are interested in learning about the quality assuranc solutions from Call Criteria, contact us today for a free evalution and a demo of our solution!