7 Step Guide to Monitoring Call Quality

Posted on

Are you are not getting results from your call center? Here is a seven-step guide you can use to monitor and improve your call quality.

Do you remember the last time you called a customer service desk? Do you recall hearing a brief message that went something like “This call will be recorded for quality assurance” before the call started? Most likely you would have gone past this message, not thinking too much about it.

So, why do companies monitor and record the random phone calls that take place between customer service reps and customers? What are the actions that a company should take based on the conversations it observes? Let us find out the answer to these questions and explore why call quality is critical to customer service call centers.

Understanding call quality

Call quality is used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of conversations that happen between customers and customer service representatives. High-quality calls should be timely, professional, polite and should be able to resolve the problem at hand. The customer, when they exit the call should feel like they have had a positive experience, while getting a clear solution to their issue and understanding how to prevent a similar issue from reoccurring.

What is call center quality assurance?

The process of observing and evaluating customer service calls is known as call center quality assurance. Call center quality assurance is used to test for a wide variety of factors like the attitude of an employee, the level of customer satisfaction, employee attitude and more. The process of quality assurance ensures that every customer is treated with respect and offered a positive, timely and competent customer experience.

Quality assurance can be used to optimize the financial return of a call center. If a customer service representative is too slow or gets distracted frequently, the company can lose money that is spent on employees who are not doing their job. If customer service representatives offer negative experiences, it can lead to customer churn and even result in the loss of potential buyers. Your customer service agents communicate directly with customers. It is these interactions that bring in new leads and increase the value of a customer.

If you are not getting results from your call center, here is a seven-step guide you can use to monitor and improve your call quality.

7 steps to monitor call quality

  1. Put together a team to monitor call quality
    Start by choosing people who are the most qualified to measure call quality. You could even choose from your internal team. Make sure to include senior agents or customer service managers who have an in-depth understanding about call quality. These resources should know about your company and have experience working with your customers. As an option, you can also hire a third-party team to take care of your call center quality assurance. This way, you will get access to trained professionals who will be able to your call center’s quality. An offshore team can also offer you with an unbiased analysis.
  2. Create scorecards
    With a team in place, get them to develop scorecards that highlight the factors that agents will be evaluated on. You can for example, test for how long a call lasts, how well the agents listened to the customer’s problem or how the agent was able to manage a customer who was upset. Another way is to involve your agents in the quality assurance process. This way, they can understand what they are being scored on and can get prepared to meet the benchmarks.
  3. Differentiate quality monitoring on the types of calls
    While some customer service calls are proactive, like the ones made by agents to promote a new service/product, there are other types of calls that are reactive like the support calls that are initiated by the customer. There are cases where the customer would have a simple problem and is happy to work with your team. At other times, customers can be frustrated and may not give your agent a chance to salvage the issue. This is why one quality assurance scorecard will not be able to accurately measure every type of customer call. Make sure to create different scorecards for different types of calls.
  4. Appreciate successful behaviors
    When trying to monitor for quality assurance, it becomes easy to get caught up in the shortcomings and mistakes of customer calls. This is important to mention to your agents when you provide them with feedback. Try not to focus only on the negatives. Also focus on the positives, so that your agents are aware of their strengths as well as of areas that need improvement. Balancing out the bad with the good is the best way to reward agents and offer them with opportunities to improve at the same time
  5. Save phone calls to use as examples
    Some phone calls are perfect. Your agent is able to tick all the required boxes and leaves your customer feeling happy. Save such calls to show to other call center agents as their part of quality assurance training. Make a note of the choices taken by the representative and how these choices helped develop a positive experience for your customer. At times, seeing a real-life example of high-quality customer service call can help your employees get a better grasp on what is being expected from them.
  6. Improve your processes, not only your employees
    It is critical for your quality assurance team to understand that not every shortcoming is the fault of a customer service representative. Sometimes, if you see a recurring problem that emerges across multiple agents, it could mean that your internal processes also need to be revamped. For instance, you may want to reduce the time a customer is put on hold. You could also invest on customer service tools, so that you can automate your support processes and increase the overall efficiency of your team.
  7. Carry out in-person interviews
    When you have finished with call monitoring, offer your feedback to your representatives on what you have observed and how you have scored them. Your agents should be able to comprehend and implement your feedback. Meet in-person with your employees to discuss their performance. Emails or online reviews can be missed, misinterpreted or require further explanation. In an in-person setting, agents will be more comfortable to open up to your feedback.

Find out how Outsource2india can assist you with call quality monitoring support.

Did you like reading this post? Did you find the information useful? Let us know your feedback by leaving a comment in the box below. We, at Outsource2india love to hear from you!

Interested to know more?

The following two tabs change content below.

Editor

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*


eight + six =