Once you determine that you need call center quality assurance software for the success of your call center, the selection process may get complicated. There are dozens upon dozens of QA-focused call center software solutions claiming to be the “perfect” software for you. And they all offer something different—something they say is exceptional.
So, how do you find the best call center quality management software for your business that’s on the cutting edge?
In this blog, we’ll talk about call center quality management software, why you need it, and the call center software features you need.
Call center quality management software is focused on improving the quality of the customer experience, including the quality of support for your product or service, agent performance, and contact center process effectiveness and efficiency. It can track a wide variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) to capture performance data and provide a framework for taking action. The QA software should be able to track everything from NPS ratings to customer surveys, productivity metrics, agent professionalism, problem resolution, and satisfaction.
And it should provide reports that allow you to dig deep into your contact center to:
Ultimately, the powerful analytics from your QA-focused contact center software should help you spot trends, reveal exceptions, and coach your agents.
When you purchase and implement call center software with quality management capabilities, you’ll increase efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately save money. That’s why 93% of contact centers agree that technology is essential for creating a better customer experience.
And when it comes to call center quality management software, there’s no more powerful tool in your arsenal. By assessing performance metrics daily, you can:
Without this insight, you could be one of the many U.S. companies contributing to a $62 billion a year loss due to poor customer service, which is a launch point for making a business case for QA-focused call center software.
The only question is, “What are the call center software features you need most for quality management?” There’s an extensive list of possibilities. These are the essential features:
You need omnichannel quality monitoring. If you offer omnichannel customer service (email, chat, Twitter, support tickets, etc.) provide omnichannel customer service (email, chat, Twitter, support tickets, etc.), you need omnichannel quality monitoring. Your customers use multiple channels to communicate with you, so your QA needs to cater to all the same channels. It must be simple to measure and monitor performance across all channels, and you should be able to compare channel performance at the click of a button.
Call center software that performs quality assurance (QA) in a silo is useless. It needs to be able to integrate with your other call center platforms—nicely and neatly. In particular, look for integrations with your most-used software.
You also need to be able to create and edit your QA scorecards quickly and easily. Your QA scorecards need to reflect your contact center representatives' interactions not six months ago. Although this is a fundamental call center software feature, many QA solutions require consultants to make changes or break historical reporting when amendments are made.
If your call center software solution makes it easy to edit or update QA scorecards, you should have no problem staying ahead of the game.
To get the complete QA picture, you need to combine your internal quality sentiment and your external customer sentiment in a single platform. With your CSAT and NPS scores beside your agent scores, you can better understand what’s going on and why.
Real-time results help you measure productivity, effectiveness, and customer experience at the moment, so you can continually improve. Immediate access to QA data and metrics is essential for marking meaningful changes to your customer service.
For call center quality management software to contribute to real change, users must be able to dissect the information they receive. There are two requirements: high-level logging of QA scores and detailed reports with the ability to drill up and down.
Your QA reports should range from the basic details of employee name, team, and assessment data to more advanced information about the type of interaction and sub-type. These detailed reports allow analysts to track performance and spot discrepancies, opportunities, and pitfalls. And when users can dive further into the data, they can get to the bottom of causation and knit together correlation where it exists.
To optimize the ROI of your call center quality management software, you need access to appropriate dashboards to benchmark call center performance. Much better than a spreadsheet, your dashboard should provide a quick summary of the strengths and weaknesses of your call center. And you should be able to customize the data to what is most important to you.
You need consistent QA data that can be used to highlight the variances between agents and supervisors. A built-in calibration feature should help you uncover critical differences between monitoring sessions to determine who is doing a good job and who isn’t. You can provide further training when needed and build trust and confidence in your quality monitoring process and software.
Over the last few years, the text has become an increasingly popular way for customers to reach out to contact centers. That’s why text analytics is more important than ever in your QA process. You need a way to review and monitor all written communication for real-time analysis of every interaction. You need to be able to analyze and detect recurring issues and provide guidance, coaching, and training as required.
While real-time insight is critical, so is a history of your quality monitoring. You need to be able to quickly retrieve past data and recordings for data mining and measuring agent/call center quality. The key is to access a time and date-stamped repository for ease of use.
Yes, email alert overload is frustrating. And no, we don't want to spend every working hour inside our inbox, but... If something essential warrants attention, there's no better option than an email alert.
Email alerts give you peace of mind that you aren't missing a beat when something critical happens. Just be sure that the call center software feature offers an array of configurable email alerts to keep you informed. At a minimum, we recommend using trigger alerts for critical failures and agents when they have new QA results.
The first step to effectively using your contact center software is access to early and regular learning development and training. Once you hire an agent or boot up the software, you should have access to a knowledge database and support team that will ensure you use the QA software as effectively as possible.
Remember, no QA software is perfect. There will be technical and usability issues that your team runs into. The key is to pay attention to any failures and then reach out to the support team with your feedback. They should be able to implement quick fixes, updates, and workarounds, so you can get back to focusing on customer service.
QA-focused call center software that provides easy-to-use self-help tools reduces the pressure on your agents and satisfies your needs. In this way, you don’t have to reach out and always wait for a solution to any problem. You can find the answer yourself through self-service.
Your call center quality management software should feature a user-friendly interface easy for anyone to pick up and understand. It should be easy to add and edit forms and scorecards, but it should also be simple to customize reports, add & remove users, and more.
QA software without a proven record of success is a risk too significant to take. Instead, you need to look at current and previous customer reviews to see if they rate it highly, how it worked, and if there’s anything they would improve.
We recommend checking out review sites such as Capterra, G2Advisor, and GetApp, finding out what people think about the platform before signing on the bottom line.
Surprisingly, transparency isn't always a high priority for QA, but it should be. If you’re looking at reports and don't understand something or you have a question, you need to be able to delve further into the results to understand the “why.” You need to know what lies behind each line on the graph.
Transparency in contact center QA software allows you to understand what you’re looking at and empowers your call center to validate or discredit the information you are presented with. This is highly valuable if, for example, you want to assess the staff carrying out evaluations. It would help if you didn’t have to take their word for face value. You need to see for yourself what they assessed and how they assessed it.
A key feature of customer service is whether or not your QA-focused call center software solution continually provides updates and innovations. The technology should be keeping track of trends and then releasing helpful new features and updates to keep you on the cutting edge and getting the biggest bang for your buck.
The call center quality management software solution should meet customer privacy and data safety standards. It should be a secure system that meets the highest information security standards to prevent breaches and protect your customers.
Your call center quality management software should enable you to track and report related regulatory compliance issues and incidents. And it should also help monitor compliance within your call center as part of agent behavior. Look for a QA solution that can provide:
With remote-based call centers on the rise, it’s never been more critical to have cloud-based call center software for quality management that works no matter your geographical borders or time zones.
Artificial intelligence should be integrated into your software to automate basic tasks and complement the work of your human agents. For example, a call center QA software AI feature could automate the sharing of pre-recorded messages through chatbots. Or it might automate the call recording process or use conversational AI to automatically process and route customers to the best agent for their concerns.
The goal with AI is to save your agents as much time and energy as possible.
Business process outsourcing (BPO) can be demanding. You need contact center software for quality assurance that offers an end-to-end solution, all on a single platform. It should be able to scale to meet your needs and augment your staffing resources with technology that makes your job easier.
If your IT team needs to set aside days or weeks to implement a new QA-focused call center software solution, it’s probably not a good choice. Instead, look for call center quality management software that’s easy to implement and customize for your needs.
Look elsewhere if you can’t quickly calibrate the QA tool to meet your requirements.
Cost should NOT be your main sticking point, but it is essential. Every software solution has its unique pricing scheme, so be sk for hidden fees such as maintenance, professional services, reporting, training, and setup. You should also check for an additional setup charge that may surprise you.
The more you know about your monthly payment before signing up, the better. Then you can budget accordingly.
Lastly, please don’t sign up for a new call center quality management software without first giving it a test drive. Find a call center software solution that offers a free trial for at least seven days to test out all the features and capabilities before you start paying money.
The more you know before choosing the right call center quality management software for your team, the better. The 25 call center software features we identified above should give you an excellent place to start when choosing your solution.
With call center quality management software, you can evaluate every agent and every channel: phone calls, emails, chat, social media responses, complaint handling, and more. The idea is to give you a complete picture of your contact center outcomes so you can maintain quality standards, adhere to compliance, and boost the customer experience.
Analyzing your data can help you get behind the information and identify the root cause.
