How to Relieve the Pain of Your Quality Program: A NICE Podcast

Shawn Smith, a system analyst at nonprofit health care company Cambia Health Solutions, works mainly with customer service teams. When he stepped into his role more than two years ago, Cambia’s quality evaluations were completed via a recording application and then documented in Word, Excel and OneNote. The organization’s quality program became an immediate focus for Smith, he said.

“We needed to institute a more structured process for quality,” said Smith, who was a recent guest on NICE’s CX Pulse podcast.

Cambia’s existing approach didn’t lend itself to systemic reporting, trending, or providing meaningful feedback to agents.  The nonprofit needed to up its quality management game and move to a platform that offered a standardized, holistic approach. Smith said the company’s major pain point was consistency in the quality program and documenting of results.

“We needed everybody documenting and evaluating on the same platform,” he said.

Leveraging NICE Quality Central, Cambia began crafting a new, more efficient quality program. Cambia evaluated where it wanted to go with its quality program, starting with a clean slate and revisiting every part of its previous approach. Smith said the company considered what questions should be on the evaluation template, what the frequency of evaluations should be and how many should be done per agent.

“We discussed it all—everything was on the table,” he said.

After creating a roadmap, Cambia started the building process, including templates designed to facilitate consistent tracking in the quality program. Cambia's next major step was an internal communications campaign to educate agents about the change, emphasizing the goal of improving internal processes, training and ultimately the customer experience. Helping agents understand the “why” of the new approach was key to getting buy-in from both evaluators and agents, Smith said.

With a new, holistic quality program in place, agents now receive consistent and meaningful feedback each week; evaluators, for their part, have a more efficient way to complete evaluations and give important feedback. Overall, the quality program is creating and reinforcing the idea of continual improvement across the organization.

“Our organization as a whole now has a mechanism to define what works well and set best practices while also acknowledging and addressing areas for improvement,” Smith said.

Smith said the next step is to partner with workforce management to ensure that agents have time each week to review evaluations.

“We want to get to the point where quality review is on an agent’s schedule and part of the overall quality process,” he said.

Listen to the full interview with Smith on the CX Pulse podcast.