There has been a considerable move in manufacturing from telephony-based contact center support towards a digital-first model.

Quality Management (QM) is as important on the frontline as it is on the shop floor. Quality management is key to creating engaging customer experiences that keep contact center and customer-facing employees informed and engaged. Goodwill and positive feelings spread throughout improvements in your agents’ performance are passed on to your customers.

Industry research by ContactBabel shows that just over 50% of customers contacting manufacturers choose the telephone as their preferred communication channel. The research also shows a 5% year-on-year reduction in those preferring email. As customers move away from telephone and email towards digital channels (with social media showing the biggest increase in popularity rising from 2% in 2021 to 10% in 2022), manufacturers face the challenge of how to maintain quality control and consistent customer experiences across these different channels.

Without the right tools in place quality management can be a time-consuming, complex and unreliable process.

Quality management for coaching

When employees are handling customer orders across all channels of communication—voice, SMS, web and chat—effective quality management makes it easy to deliver great coaching and achieve the best possible customer outcomes.

When that coaching is actionable and personalized, you can elevate customer engagement to new levels and deliver operational efficiencies. Supervisors can use automation and collaboration tools to share best practices and streamline the evaluation workflow. Interactions with agents and teams can be reviewed, evaluated, searched and shared to provide timely feedback for continuous performance improvement.

To effectively engage agents and help them improve their performance, quality management and coaching must be personalized to each individual employee. 8x8 Quality Management monitors activity and empowers team leaders and supervisors to search and filter by media type and identify examples of best practices, and with proper personal goals in place alongside targeted and contextual coaching, agent engagement and retention are increased.

8x8 Quality Management tools drive agent engagement and deliver targeted, collaborative coaching for a hybrid work environment. The tools:

  • Capture and easily search 100% of interactions for greater customer experiences across voice and digital
  • Empower supervisors with an easy-to-use interface and a powerful quality management toolbox
  • Evaluate compliance, behaviours and proficiency to minimize risk and increase revenue
  • Improve customer experiences with tailored coaching at scale
  • Enable consistency and transparency across your contact centres
  • Cultivate a consistent approach

Effective workforce management

Contact centers within the manufacturing industry tend to handle more calls than average and have shorter call times, indicating that many of the enquiries are of the same nature, such as checking on order status. Couple this with the fact that the industry has longer than average answer times and it is no surprise that AI and web chat sit alongside workforce management tools (WFM) in the recent Contact Babel report as the technologies expected to show the largest adoption in call centers across the manufacturing sector by 2026.

Quality management and effective workforce management tools when used together provide contact center leaders with the essential information needed to easily ensure the right number of effectively trained staff are available, in the right places, to deliver the best possible employee and customer experiences, always.

8x8 workforce management uses multiple algorithms to accurately forecast volume across all interaction channels.

  • Create schedules based on criteria defined by the business to ensure performance and agent expectations are aligned
  • Monitor and track schedule adherence with automated alerts and dashboards to quickly draw attention to outliers or performance concerns
  • Optimize staffing. Predict demand and staff accordingly across all of your contact channels
  • Gain a clear and trusted forecast to ensure correct staffing without wasted labor
  • Spend less time scheduling. Automatically generate schedules based on arrival patterns, and focus more time managing agents
  • Minimize administrative effort to generate accurate forecasts and optimal schedules

When asked by Metrigy which KPIs (key performance indicators) were most used to measure success, coming second behind customer satisfactionat 42.6% was First Call Resolution at 38.5%. When customers reach out to your contact center, they are looking for a resolution to whatever their issue is, the first time, every time.

Putting people at the heart of the production process

Even in manufacturing organizations where profit is largely driven by materials, plant and processes, people are at the heart of everything. They negotiate deals with suppliers, arrange shipments of goods both in and out, ensure compliance and oversee health and safety, they talk to customers, troubleshoot problems and raise security concerns. In short, not much happens without people being able to communicate effectively with each other. It’s why applying quality management and workforce management tools to communications in the contact center makes all the difference.

Next steps

Download our ebook to discover manufacturers boost productivity and improve customer experiences with 8x8 or contact our sales team https://www.8x8.com/solutions/manufacturing