Delivering exceptional service is the backbone of any successful contact center. After all, every interaction counts towards customer satisfaction scores and, ultimately, your bottom line. But how do you ensure consistent service standards?
By following call center quality monitoring best practices you’ll be able to develop a repeatable framework for careful, regular review and analysis of your call center’s performance, so you can:
Pair these techniques with the right quality assurance (QA) software and you’ll lay the foundation for exceptional CX, using concrete data to determine whether or not you’re meeting your goals, following correct processes, remaining compliant, and achieving business aims.
In this article, we’ll explore what call center quality monitoring really means, followed by 6 best practices you should be using to help you get more from your agents—and make a lasting impression that drives customer loyalty and retention.
Call quality monitoring is more than just recording and evaluating random calls. To effectively measure quality, you'll want to strategically monitor and analyze customer service interactions and review for both efficiency and effectiveness.
Remember, your day-to-day goal is to convert every caller into a satisfied customer. And while customer satisfaction can look different depending on the contact center, there are a few typical elements in the anatomy of a high-quality customer service call:
On top of these common elements, research shows that:
How well all of the above items work together determines the quality of each call. The customer should always walk away feeling positive. They should leave with a clear solution, know how to avoid the same issue in the future, and have no further questions. Easy, right?
It’s clear that contact centers must dive deep into calls to gain detailed insights that can be analyzed, interpreted, shared, and acted upon. Only then can CX become a competitive differentiator and a real driver for your wider business success.
Let's take a look at the 6 steps it takes to set up effective call quality monitoring in your contact center.
To begin monitoring interaction quality, you'll need to develop a call center quality assurance team. This team—typically made up of call center managers, supervisors, and high-performing agents—must thoroughly understand your brand of customer service.
The QA team will use insights about your company and your ideal customer experience to set up every aspect of the quality assurance process, including your call quality standards, which brings us to…
Your quality standards are how you judge the success (or failure) of every call. Without standards, you won't know whether you’re hitting or missing your targets. The key is to break down your customer service into a set of behaviors, rules, and goals that every interaction should meet.
You might look at customer sentiment post-transaction, employee engagement, and product/service efficacy. Your quality standards should also include:
Business standards that establish a documented approach to call QA and ensure higher performance. Questions to answer include:
Customer standards measure how well the agent understood the caller’s problem and provided a solution. Questions to answer include:
Process standards that review what happens after every interaction. Questions to answer include:
Compliance standards outline the rules and regulations necessary to legally remain open for business. Questions to answer include:
There are a ton of key performance indicators (KPIs) that factor into the efficiency and success of your call center and can be essential for quality monitoring best practices. Here are some of the most common (and vital) ones you should be aware of:
Your average handle time is a measure of the average amount of time your agents spend to resolve service calls. It includes time spent on hold, delays, transfers, and follow-up actions.
For best results, combine AHT scores with your customer satisfaction scores to more accurately determine what average length is most effective for delivering top-notch service.
Example: If 10 minutes is considered the average handle time to completely satisfy a customer, a call that’s only two minutes long may raise a red flag.
NPS should be at the heart of your contact center QA strategy. It measures how likely consumers are to recommend a brand to their family and friends.
Example: After an interaction, you send a simple post-call survey that asks how likely they are to recommend your product or services on a scale from 1 to 10.
Customers love to have their questions answered the first time around. The lower your first call resolution rate (FCR), the more productive your call center is. The result: higher satisfaction levels.
Example: Out of 10 customers who call your contact center, 8 have their issues resolved without having to call back for additional help. More customers reaching out after the first call indicates issues in your processes, or agents who lack the knowledge or tools to assist them.
While NPS shows how likely your consumers are to promote your products, CSAT shows how happy they are with the service they received.
Example: Use a short survey that simply asks how satisfied they were, ranging from “Very unsatisfied” to “Very satisfied”, giving you an idea of how the customer experience is from their perspective.
There are many quality monitoring solutions suitable for contact center QA. Here are a few tools that can help you get the most out of your call quality monitoring program:
Other tools you should consider using include QA business intelligence and reporting software, call center scripts, self-help knowledge bases, and predictive analytics. Each of these tools is designed to improve the customer experience, enhance productivity, and increase profitability.
Now, it’s time to analyze the data from your contact center's interactions.
Assess performance against your standards and KPIs, then make appropriate adjustments to agent behaviors as needed. Just be sure your quality standards align with your company’s priorities so you can focus on the behaviors that are essential to success.
Your QA team can help identify recurring problems or behaviors that have emerged across multiple call center agents. For example, you might notice creep up on hold times, or various product issues that require the same problem resolution.
Whatever the issue, it’s essential to determine the real driver behind recurring problems and make appropriate adjustments based on the most relevant issue—not just the most obvious.
Example: Instead of telling your agents that they need to pick up phone calls faster, after review, you might discover that hold time is increasing because your new product demands more support. If so, you could invest in added self-service tools to support your team's efforts.
Important Note: Focus on both the negatives and positives of each of your agents during the call QA review process. It’s this balance of their strengths and weaknesses that will help you make necessary improvements and lasting change in your contact center.
As you continue with your quality monitoring, you’ll notice trends emerging in agent performance and related patterns in customer satisfaction. These valuable insights can help you identify knowledge gaps so you can provide high-quality training and agent development.
After all, quality monitoring without actioning your insights to improve customer satisfaction is useless. Your call quality monitoring program should include tools to help manage, track, and achieve training goals, such as a call center learning management system (LMS).
An LMS is an all-in-one training solution that makes it easy to offer advanced learning and development for the specific training needs revealed in the QA process. It can help you:
Done correctly, call quality monitoring provides your team with detailed insights about both agents and customers. These insights help you optimize your contact center's ROI by finding and fixing broken processes, revealing areas for improvement, and enabling data-backed management decisions regarding customer service.
And the results of successful call quality monitoring best practices and exceptional customer experiences speak for themselves:
Your customers are the driving force behind your business, and ensuring your interactions are pleasant and effective has a huge impact. It goes beyond just listening to calls and using basic QA methods; you need to follow call center quality monitoring best practices.
By building a core QA team, setting call quality standards, tracking KPIs, and using the right tools, you’ll be set for success. Then, you can analyze that data and use it to improve your agent training (and the customer experience).
With these practices in place, you’ll see a big improvement in how your customers are feeling—and even a healthier bottom line.
As a leading quality management solution, Scorebuddy gives you a platform with deep, insightful analytics, AI-powered 100% interaction coverage, personalized agent dashboards, and more.
Book a demo, let us know your needs, and we’ll get you the tools you want.
