The contact center is the most direct link to your customers. It’s responsible for driving customer experiences and providing a touchpoint for customers throughout their journey. Every interaction with a customer is a chance to provide satisfaction, generate loyalty, increase sales, and build your brand. But that’s only if you have a way to measure and improve how you interact.
Too many call centers are quick to state that customer experience is the number one brand differentiator while missing the tools needed to prioritize it. Instead, they rely on outdated methodologies (excel spreadsheets) or limited assessments (CSAT) to make decisions. Without the detailed insight that can be analyzed, interpreted, and shared, actions taken might not align with the steps needed.
That’s why you need call center quality monitoring scorecards.
Scorecards are how your call center can monitor the customer experience through every interaction and at every touchpoint. After defining a clear set of agent performance metrics and goals, scorecards rely on agent self-evaluation to grade their performance efforts. It’s all about helping your agents better understand how they perform, where they can improve, and how their performance impacts the company’s overall goals.
And because scorecards are focused on the agent, they work for every channel—phone, email, chat, social media, complaint tickets, etc. This means you can measure, track, train, and develop better customer experiences across the board. And you can do this for any quality standards necessary to your business and your customers, including empathy, compliance, brand experience, customer satisfaction, productivity, employee attitude, customer perception, and outcomes.
So, what’s the difference between a call center quality monitoring scorecard and a simple call audit form? The level of detail provided, the availability of dashboards for reporting, getting both managers and agents involved, and the ability to track performance on every channel - omnichannel.
With old-school call audit forms created in excel, your information and options are limited. Most of the time, you’re only tracking simple yes or no responses, and the feedback isn’t easily compared or reviewed. Managers generally fill out these forms and only for a few randomly selected calls. It’s a manual process that provides a partial picture, at best, and only of phone calls.
With call center quality monitoring scorecards, you can monitor 100% of customer interactions day-in and day-out. That’s because scorecards give your agents an active role in the QA process. They’re in charge of analyzing their performance after every customer interaction (based on a predefined grading rubric) to see if they meet quality standards.
Whatever elements you want to measure can be included in your scorecards:
It’s entirely customizable for only those elements you find most essential to your success and every channel—IM, email, social media, complaints, chat, etc. It can be anything you want—highly holistic or distinctly quantitative.
Scorecards are essential to agent performance because the process involves your agents through self-evaluation, opening the door to two-way communication and improved performance. With self-scoring, agents are taught to review their behavior, empowering them to improve proactively and continuously. And this results in agents who:
When both agents and managers can review agent performance, it opens up communication. Not only do agents receive insight into their performance, but they gain a critical understanding of what they do well and how they can improve. And by highlighting both the negatives and positives, your agents are incentivized to make lasting change.
That’s just the start of the many benefits of call center quality monitoring scorecards. They are genuinely designed to help you take the customer experience and call center performance into your own hands.
When agents are allowed to be part of the solution through QA scorecards, they feel more validated, have a larger sense of ownership, and are more engaged in their jobs. What happens is that you have greater employee satisfaction, meaning your agents are:
As you review 100% of agent interactions using scorecards, you’ll notice agent performance trends and increased customer satisfaction. This will help you uncover knowledge gaps within your call center to provide high-quality training and agent development.
Using scorecards, your management team can work alongside your agents to set training goals and milestones. And because scorecards can be highly specific, so can training. You can focus your efforts on each agent’s particular strengths and weaknesses—based on gap analysis—so training time is spent productively.
CSAT and Net Promoter Scores® help understand customer satisfaction, but they only tell you one side of the story. A customer can be dissatisfied even if your agent did everything correctly, or a customer could end up happy or neutral even as things went badly. You need scorecards to close the gap between what your CSAT says and your contact center's performance.
With scorecards, you can track critical customer service insights such as time spent, the appearance of satisfaction, timeliness of service, quality of the interaction, and service cost. This will help you align your customers’ needs and wants with the experience provided. You’ll also understand how well your agents are serving your customers when it comes to everything from sales to productivity, empathy, problem-solving, and more.
You may think your contact center performs optimally, but the only proper way to know is to implement call center quality monitoring scorecards. This invaluable tool takes you beyond a simple call audit form to measure critical issues directly connected and responsible for customer experience, your inbound, and multi-channel agents. Scorecards are a rich source of data that reveals the root causes of poor service and provide an ideal dashboard to track, train and develop your agents.
It’s all about gaining the ability to develop tangible strategies to improve customer satisfaction and employee engagement. With scorecards, you’ll have the data you need to go in-depth into agent performance to make adjustments focused on your bottom line.
