Gerry Johnsen, Product Manager Quality Management , Calabrio Software You Asked How can I ensure quality customer interactions across virtual contact center teams?

Once agents, supervisors and managers are dispersed across an enterprise traditional quality management techniques become difficult to adequately adapt and scale. As a result, quality management in a virtual environment requires a new approach that keeps everyone connected to the organization. This requires precise planning and design, from both location-to-location and-person-to-person perspectives.

For contact center supervisors, virtualization necessitates a management framework to monitor, coach and train teams. A full-featured supervisor cockpit is essential in the virtual customer interaction environment. This cockpit, which offers a "bird's eye view" into contact center operations, provides immediate access to key supervisory tools, including real-time reports of customer contact center metrics, as well as call monitoring and recording technology.

To ensure quality in a virtual world, supervisors require the following functionality:

· Real-time reports of key contact center metrics

· Alerts when events occur that exceed defined thresholds

· Ability to monitor and record agent calls

· Real-time agent status (logged in/out, available, talking) and the ability to remotely change agent status

· Real-time chat capabilities for questioning and coaching

· Intervention tools (barge in/intercept) for assisting agents in meeting customer needs and call center objectives

· Ability to push valuable information to agents during training or live call sessions

· On-demand agent re-skilling, whichgives mangers the power to respond to changing environments and reassign contact center resources where and when they are needed

In conclusion, reporting, monitoring, recording and coaching tools enable agents and supervisors to collaborate and solve customer problems instantly when they are not co-located. These capabilities will increase operating efficiency in a virtual environment and ensure quality customer interactions for optimal contact center performance.

Gerry Johnsen is the product manager for Quality Management at Calabrio Software, a provider of customer interaction, workforce optimization and business management software for transformational business improvements in productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction. He can be reached at gerry.johnsen@calabrio.com. Calabrio Software