It’s well known that the phone is one of the most frustrating customer service channels for US internet users. 47% of consumers have abandoned a company for one of their competitors due to subpar customer service.
These stats prove understanding why organizations need to focus on QA in call centers isn’t a point that provokes much debate. Instead, organizations should focus on improving and maintaining quality customer service for their QA in call centers.
Investing in an automated call center quality assurance solution is a good start, but like any business solution, it needs to be used carefully to produce the best results.
Call Center Managers understand the importance of continuously monitoring and improving their call center quality assurance, especially since their performance is significantly based on quality assurance metrics.
However, once a quality assurance solution is in place, it typically remains a static process that is seldom reviewed and/or assessed for improvement. Call center quality assurance must be seen as a dynamic and ever-evolving process to ensure success.
This means having a plan for how to improve call center quality assurance is key - from the starting point to the metrics being tracked, the calls being monitored, and the way your agents are involved in the process.
By doing so, you'll be able to reap the biggest benefits for customer experience, customer loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line.
Are you ready to get started? Here are 11 tips to keep in mind when companies want to improve call center quality assurance.
To know their starting point, organizations need to take a look at what customers think about their call center interactions, and how their call center stacks up against competitors of a similar size.
Organizations should consider adding a short survey at the end of each call center interaction to give customers the chance to rank their customer service experience. Whether this survey is incentivized or not is up to the individual organization.
This gives organizations easy access to customer feedback without requiring widespread call monitoring (more on-call monitoring in a bit).
Organizations should also consider using external benchmarking to determine how their agent's performance compares to other call centers. External benchmarking is sometimes best accomplished by a third-party quality assurance consultant who can remain impartial and objective.
The metrics can be measured using a call center quality assurance solution number in the hundreds. It is tempting to want to measure anything and everything simply because it’s possible. But this is not effective.
Instead, organizations need to focus on the business processes and customer service improvements needed to improve call center quality assurance based on the information gleaned from customer feedback and external benchmarking, then select relevant KPIs and set reasonable, dynamic goals, and work towards them using the insights provided by the quality assurance tool.
A major part of any quality assurance program or solution is call monitoring.
Much like the data that can potentially be captured by a quality assurance solution, it’s easy to go overboard on-call monitoring and get so bogged down with listening that the point of monitoring – giving managers the insights they need to coach their agents – is lost. Understanding the difference between muddled monitoring and clear actionable insights is key.
With the number of calls coming into the average center, the idea of listening to each one either live or recorded is impossible. Instead, an organization should focus on the calls that stray the furthest from average in any direction.
This includes calls that went very well, very poorly, were quite short or quite long, and involved multiple transfers or multiple contacts from the customer.
Successful calls can serve as training tools for other agents on how to improve the call center experience, while the unsuccessful ones can tailor very necessary coaching.
While a single sentence could be the catalyst for an issue on a call, it’s only fair to agents that a call is evaluated after it is listened to in its entirety.
Bits and pieces being taken out of context to serve as examples of wrongdoing will undermine confidence in the process.
When call center quality assurance isn’t carefully handled, organizations risk that those frontline agents are going to be resentful and distrustful of the entire operation.
But call center quality assurance shouldn’t exist in a vacuum; it should complement training and coaching processes while giving agents control over their performance (including their earning potential and bonuses). As long as that’s made clear, quality assurance - and the steps taken by managers to improve call center quality assurance - should be welcomed by all.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but a big part of call center success is having the right people on the team. That means managers who excel at coaching, and frontline agents that are willing and eager to learn and improve for the sake of their careers and the sake of the company.
The agent training process should also be robust and include real-life examples of both excellent and not-so-excellent interactions.
Training should also focus on high-yield behaviors like script adherence, net promoter score technique, and the same result in lower average handling time. These behaviors should be further reinforced by regular coaching or feedback sessions.
Your agents need to be given all available tools for customer interaction success, and that begins with the scripts they are trained to work from. Significant time and money should be spent on developing scripts as well as tweaking them as calls are monitored and issues become evident.
Nothing is going to make improving the call center's quality assurance feel like a top-down micromanaging system like suddenly springing it on employees or using an existing system without ever acknowledging its purposes.
Taking the time to inform agents about quality assurance goes a long way in helping them embrace instead of fear it. Showing them how QA can give them control over their performance through tools like real-time analytics and performance benchmarking on their dashboards is a great way to keep agents informed and inspired.
If agents only ever hear corrective feedback thanks to quality assurance, there will be a sense of dread attached to the entire process.
With the actionable insights provided by a quality assurance solution as well as the additional assistance provided by a quality assurance manager, if applicable, managers should have more time to reward agents for good performance as well as temper corrective feedback with an accompanying focus on an agent’s positives.
Putting in a formal process in which agents can register their disagreement with an evaluation and receive a second evaluation from another individual has two main benefits:
A) The first is that it can remove conflict from the evaluation process if the agent knows they have a way to make their voice heard, and that action will be taken as a result.
B) The second is that it gives agents an increased sense of power in the face of a solution that could so easily be seen as an adversary otherwise.
There are just some business solutions that are almost too powerful, and call center quality assurance is firmly located in that category.
With so much data collected and so many insights possible, it’s easy for even leading organizations to get lost on their way to improved business processes and optimal customer service experience.
However, by keeping a clear focus when it comes to the data that’s collected and analyzed, the calls that are monitored, and how agents are handled, organizations will be well on their way to having better quality assurance in their call centers.
Looking for a more comprehensive guide on how to improve call center quality assurance? Check out our step-by-step guide to defining, measuring, and improving call center QA.
