When you’re relentless about your vision, celebrate every victory along the way.
Today is dedicated to doing just that, shedding light on what gives us light and what continues to fuel our lifelong commitment to our vision.
As a leading independent BPO player, Euroanswer has built its internal policies and procedures by following the requirements of the ISO Quality Management System. The Service Delivery processes are united under the Euroanswer SD Best Business Practices Catalogue, while the records are centralized under project dedicated SharePoint sites, following a standard structure.
The company has a strong Continuous Improvement process, based on the Lean framework. Effectiveness is ensured by performing Root Cause Analysis, followed by setting Corrective/Preventative actions which are supervised by the QA Department until resolution.
Madina Japin, our Quality Assurance Manager, had the chance to observe internally Euroanswer’s processes for over 10 years now, initially as an agent, and later on as a Quality Assurance executive. She has accumulated relevant experience in team management and in the Quality Assurance field during several years spent within the IT support field.
Based on her project coordination role, we invited her to share some valuable insights with us.
What is the role of the Quality Manager in Euroanswer and how does it relate to the company’s mission and strategy?
I was very happy to join Euroanswer as a Quality Manager. For the first stage, the company was expecting from this role to take the lead of the existing Quality Assurance Analysts and to extend the QA department to cover all the accounts – from the smallest to the biggest. Harmoniously assembling all the aspects of the business to attain a unified team working on a standard process was quite a complex task: 3 different locations (that became 4 in the meanwhile), numerous cultures, different approaches on the quality assurance process inside different projects.
What helped a lot was the cohesion of the teams, the fact that they were already working cross-sites and the colleagues were advising one another under the project’s umbrella, disregarding the location.
1st Stage
During the first stage, we established our Best Business Practices so we can have a baseline – an easy-to-follow recipe to be shared with and followed by all the stakeholders – and which would also keep this necessary unity within the company, all around our sites.
2nd Stage
The second stage was easier – keeping the continuity – easy with the help of the Delivery teams and with the self-consciousness and dedication of the QAs. Keeping the enthusiasm all along this path is quite effortless, because the company allows, and not only allows, but is encouraging initiative and continuous improvement, which “in field” equals having the chance to see your own suggestions implemented.
3rd Stage
The highest level of this role’s complexity was fully revealed within the third department’s growth phase, when reviewing the Quality Management System in place and when actually started working on its development to incorporate the new requirements of ISO9001:2015 vs ISO9001:2008 and the new business challenges.
The Quality Manager role in Euroanswer is now very complex, our organization is growing and the effect is that although, long ago, we have started from looking at Quality strictly related to the evaluation of the interaction of the agent with the end-user, now the responsibilities of this role are extended, in the light of the Quality Management System implementation.
Why was it important, in your opinion, to obtain the ISO:9001 certification?
The ISO:9001 standard enables the companies to bring key business processes to light and represent them in a way that is clearly understood by everyone in the company. The standard gives the recommendations for the organization to be able to identify, define, control, and improve the core activities and functions and to create the proper amount of documentation: not excessive paperwork, still sufficient to keep under control important procedures and recordings.
Holding the certificate demonstrates that our Quality Management System is successfully combining all the mandatory requirements of the standard and also guarantees that our company will follow an ascending path on improving our internal processes, under the annual supervision of the certification body representative.
How was the process deployed?
The external audit took 3 days only for one location and it was done in 2 phases – a day was dedicated to the initial assessment and the next 2 days were dedicated to the detailed check of the processes and procedures, including interviews with representatives of all the departments and with different positions.
What are the company’s objectives quality wise on a short and middle term?
Establishing quality objectives was one of the first and very important steps when implementing the QMS. Monitoring the quality objectives will ensure at a company level the necessary focus and direction, but at the same time our permanent concern is the Customer Satisfaction and we are planning to continue to offer exceptional customer experience for each and every support interaction, to all our customers.
We strongly believe that a thorough analysis of our processes and of the manner in which they interrelate leads to more consistent, predictable results and represents the core for our Continuous Improvement strategy.
