Call centers play a crucial role in providing a great customer experience. As the frontline of communications with your customers, poor quality from your call center can also result in a poor customer experience.
That’s why it’s important to practice effective call center quality monitoring to ensure things are always running smoothly on the back-end of your business.
But how do you do that?
In this article, we’re going to show you exactly that. We will get into what quality monitoring is and how to measure it, as well as the 5 best effective call center quality monitoring practices you should follow.
Read on to learn more.
What Is Quality Monitoring in a Call Center?
Quality monitoring for call centers is basically analyzing the customer experience of your clients when they call your company. In the past, this used to just mean picking out random calls, listening to them, and analyzing them. But nowadays, things are a bit more complicated and quality monitoring requires a whole lot of skill and analysis.
Modern quality monitoring for call centers involves picking the right customer service to analyze. And from there, you try to find the best way to objectively measure the efficacy of the calls at converting callers to satisfied customers.
The thing about quality monitoring is that a high-quality call looks different at every call center. Since these centers handle different clients, they are also aiming for different goals.
However, most call centers make sure to account for the tone of voice, average handle time, speaking speed, and a bunch of other key factors in satisfying customers.
Call quality has been slowly improving for most call centers because of these monitoring techniques. You can see that in Hubspot’s 2020 report where they report that:
- There’s been a 4% increase in businesses monitoring call quality.
- 67% of companies reported growth after collecting customer feedback.
- 17% of customer service teams wish to implement customer feedback programs.
- About 52% of call centers monitor online reviews to assess customer satisfaction.
How Do You Measure Quality in a Call Center?
The reason effective call center quality monitoring is tough is because it can be pretty hard to objectively measure the quality of calls. Since the customer experience is subjective and anything can happen on a call, it can be hard to assign specific metrics to different situations.
With that in mind, there are more than a few different quality indicators that you can use for calls. These include both qualitative and quantitative data that when combined, can help you produce accurate analysis.
The best way you can monitor quality at a call center is by asking yourself, “what makes a good call?”. From there, you will be able to figure out the qualities that will allow a high conversion rate and satisfaction rating.
Another thing to consider is the type of call center you’re monitoring. Remember, there are different types of call centers that all prioritize different things.
With that said, some of the common things that teams consider when monitoring quality at a call center include:
- Average handle time.
- Tone of voice.
- The rapport between agent and customer.
- Language used.
- Waiting times.
- The right questioning techniques.
- Listening skills.
Depending on your call center, you may have to consider a variety of different metrics. This is completely fine since it’s always important to monitor the characteristics that affect the quality of calls at your call center.
5 Best Practices for Effective Call Center Quality Monitoring
So, now that you know about call center quality monitoring, you may be wondering how to do it for your business.
Luckily, the entire process is fairly easy, especially when you apply the best practices.
To help you out, here’s a quick list of the 5 best practices of effective call center quality monitoring that you can use for your company:
1) Develop a Team
The first thing you need to focus on is your team. You need proper quality monitoring equipped for the job. Typically, teams are composed of managers, supervisors, and high-performing agents. These are people who know and understand what makes a good call and can help you set up the Q&A process as well as the company standards to follow.
2) Set Standards and KPIs
You need to find solid metrics upon which you can measure the quality of your call center. To do this, you will need to set up a meeting with your team to figure out key metrics, company standards, and KPIs that the company needs to reach.
There are many KPIs relevant to call centers like transfer rate, first-call resolution, and more. Figuring out a solid set of standards and KPIs gives agents something to try and attain, which makes it easier to manage and control the quality of the company.
When it comes to company standards and KPIs, there are a few different areas to consider. Remember, you need to set company or business standards, customer standards, process standards, compliance standards, and more.
It’s important to choose KPIs that are relevant to your business. And the reason you need qualified individuals on your team is to make sure you set the right standards and follow the right KPIs.
3) Use Technology to Your Advantage
Nowadays, it’s much easier to monitor the quality of calls. With all these techniques and tools available to us, it’s important to utilize them as much as possible. That way, you can create a solid process for monitoring the quality of your company and steps you can take to improve that.
There are many different monitoring tools available to call centers today. And one of the most important is call recording software. These programs allow you to record a number of full calls a day.
From there, you can select the right ones to analyze and compare against your company’s standards. You may also use speech analytics software, text analytics, and other modern tools to monitor as many aspects of the call as possible.
That way, you get a solid view of how your agents perform calls and how effective they are at pleasing customers.
4) Analyze the Data
The tools are used to record data. However, it’s up to you and your team to interpret that data.
You can view the data as raw materials that you need to process into actual problems and solutions. The data is something you can use to figure out the areas of improvement in your company and the steps you can take to improve customer satisfaction ratings for your company.
For example, the data can show you recurring problems and behaviors that lead to low customer satisfaction. So, you can use that to inform agents of these behaviors and encourage them to avoid them.
5) Quality Starts with Training
If you really want high-quality calls, you need effective agents. And don’t worry, good call center agents aren’t born, they are made. So, whenever you bring in new and promising recruits into the company, you need to make sure to give them the proper training.
One of the most important things that quality monitoring can do for you is show you where you are lacking in the training process.
It will show you lapses in your agent’s skills that are present throughout the whole company. And aside from correcting these practices with your current employees, you can also prevent them from developing through proper training.
This will allow you to focus on other problems and aspects that get in the way of high customer satisfaction ratings.
Effective Call Center Quality Monitoring Makes Your Business Thrive
Making sure that your agents are able to provide customers with a productive and quality experience is key in helping your business grow. If you can show clients that your agents are trained to handle multiple situations and get the most out of them, you will definitely attract more clients.
With that said, call center quality monitoring is tough. You need a lot of time, tools, and resources to do the job. But that’s where we can come in to help. At ULTATEL, we offer cloud call center management: a remote and convenient service for anyone looking to grow their call center business. To find out more about our cloud contact center solutions, please get in touch with us.
