Most call centers will monitor quality in subtle ways during calls with clients. If you have heard the pre-recorded messages that most call centers state prior to each call, “For quality and training purposes..” then you know what we are talking about. Call quality and call center quality monitoring are things that need to be at the top of all call center lists. Unfortunately, sometimes this isn’t the case, and more steps need to be taken in order to ensure all customers are taken care of.
For some call centers, it’s not enough to simply monitor calls and take small steps toward quality assurance. It’s how calls are reviewed and the actions taken on each issue that companies need to look at and decide on.
What is Call Quality?
Are you wondering how efficient and effective your agents are at answering customer inquiries? This is the basis of call quality monitoring. As a business manager, you need to look at the necessary elements we are about to list.
- The average wait times.
- Proper tone of voice that agents are using when speaking to customers.
- Appropriate speaking speeds of agents.
- The correct language that customers are using.
- Effective questioning and open-ended questions when answering questions and getting information.
- Good rapport between agents and the customers they are speaking to.
- The demonstrated intelligence and emotional skills that agents are portraying when assisting customers.
- The amount of help that agents offer customers to solve their issues.
All these elements listed above will determine if a call is a high quality one or not. If each customer hangs up feeling positive and cared for, then the call will be beneficial and can result in a good reputation for your call center. The customer should have a clear solution, ideas of how to avoid this in the future, and have no further questions.
What is Call Quality Monitoring?
In order to measure call quality, you need to monitor and analyze all customer service interactions. By truly scrutinizing your agents and your call centers operations, you will be able to ensure that your team can successfully listen and evaluate calls, emails, messages, and social media complaints. All that matters is customer satisfaction after each call.
If call center quality monitoring is done correctly then your team will be provided with all the data needed to improve theory efforts and methods. The ultimate goal for quality assurance monitoring is that agents will be able to find broken processes, reveal areas of improvement, develop new and beneficial methods, and directly influence customer service. Call center monitoring is essential if you wish to create a consistent and helpful customer experience along with a high-performance workforce.
7 Steps to Effective Quality Monitoring for your Call Center
- Developing a Dedicated Quality Assurance Team- This is the first step because it’s important for all call centers to nail down. A team such as this will typically be made up of call center managers, supervisors, and call center agents. All these parties must fully understand each company’s goals and missions in order to deliver quality services to customers. Each team member listed must fully know the company well, and most importantly they must know how your business desires its customer experience to be like so that setting up a common ground is easy.
- Setting Your Company’s Quality Standards- Quality standards will be the way you can judge the success or failure of every customer interaction. Without these standards in place, your quality assurance team won’t know whether they are hitting or missing the mark. By having quality standards that break down each customer service interaction into a set of behaviors, rules, and goals, it will make it even easier to determine the success levels of your agents. This step is more about determining various elements of every customer interaction that will result in exceptional customer experiences. An example of a few quality standards might be brand experience, effective problem solving, employee attitude, and competency. It’s important to remember that these standards should not only be applied to phone calls but for email inquiries, messages, and social media interactions.
- Creating Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecards and Sheets- For those that are serious about monitoring call center quality standards, scorecards are a very common practice to utilize. A QA scorecard can be used to grade calls, emails, chats, messages, and social media interactions. This scoreboard will be a list of requirements and standards that your center must uphold during every customer call to achieve success. Building a scorecard isn’t hard, but it must stem from your quality standards that were established.
- Evaluating the Scorecards and Providing Feedback for Each Agent- After creating scorecards and monitoring all forms of agent communication, your agents need to be notified of their feedback. While evaluating each interaction, following the standards set must be the most important. By focusing on the negatives and positives of each agent will be the most beneficial. This way, you will be able to see the strengths and weaknesses that are helpful and hurtful for each agent interaction.
- Focusing on the Processes and Employees- While providing feedback to each agent, your quality assurance will be boosted in turn. By fixing employee mistakes, you will be able to revamp the customer satisfaction process and create a ripple effect throughout all agents. Call center monitoring will be best to deal with recurring issues and behaviors among all agents. It’s essential to determine the reason behind problems that are popping up, and make the adjustments appropriate to fix them.
- Look at Call Center Compliance- Maintaining compliance within your call center might be difficult if you have a large global presence. For example, if your business has to uphold specific standards for one office location, your other centers need to do so as well. By keeping all standards the same, will be easier to evaluate and improve on in the future.
- Consider all KPIs- There are three important KPIs that will be in your call centers best interest to focus on.
- Average Handle Time- The simplest definition of this term would be the time it takes for agents to handle each call. This metric will not be able to solely be used to determine call quality assurance, because each call is different. Instead, all KPIs must be looked at in conjunction with this, because that’s the easiest way to determine call center success.
- Net Promoter Score- NPS should be the heart of your call center because it measures how likely your customers are to recommend your center’s services to others.
- First Call Resolution- This touches on how many calls a customer needs to make to your center for all questions to be answered. If their questions are answered the first time around, satisfaction levels rise.
The Importance of Call Center Monitoring
Call center monitoring is important for more than just transforming customer service experiences, but also is beneficial for the overall call center. In order to create a successful call center monitoring program, the quality assurance department must develop positive relationships with all agents. By doing so, every member of your team will be ensured a good working environment and standards that will help all parts of the business.