The 5 Steps to Improve Your Call Quality Monitoring

How good the call made between a customer and your agent defines the success rate of a call center. The better the calls, the more efficient is your center. However to define how “good” or “ bad” these calls are, you need to have proper monitoring tools and benchmarks in place that defines said metrics in a productive manner. There are many tools available at your disposal that allows efficient monitoring. But as most other things in the world, call quality monitoring has lots of room for improvement.

Here we discuss the top 5 ways that you can use to improve the call quality monitoring in your call center for an enhanced and efficient workspace:

Step 1: Maintain an expert quality control team

Quality Monitoring is not something that can be done once in a blue moon. It is a continuous process that needs lots of expertise and dedication because the standards of the market grow daily and so should your company.

An efficient Quality Control (QC) team is able to measure the level of services offered by the call center on a regular basis. Any sudden changes in the market or client expectations can be accounted for and handled by these experts thus ensuring continual quality. Quality control guarantees that the calling agent has enough coaching and understanding that they can develop the needed skills to provide maximum customer satisfaction.

Step 2: Record all the calls and store them in a secured database

Each and every call made by your call center should be recorded and stored in a secured database on your internal servers. This has a two-fold effect. Firstly, this allows for reviewing all the calls to find out the shortcomings in each. Besides this, your QC team can identify good quality calls and showcase them to the other agents so that they can improve on their mistakes.

Feedback and key points can be stored and conveyed amongst the QC team in a more efficient manner so that the strategy for quality improvement is devised productively. It also enables better communication between the agent, quality controller and the campaign manner.

Step 3: Define what looks good and what does not

Monitoring whether your calls are of good quality or not is pointless unless you clearly illustrate what are the defining characteristics of a good call. Calling is a highly human interaction and involves two people talking to each other. No barriers, no intermediaries, no screens, no computers. Thus, what works well for one customer might not work at all for another one. However, depending on your industry there are some things that are essential in all calls.  You have to ensure that your agents are adhering to these standards all the time.

The best way to find out what parts of the interaction are beneficial and what’s not, is to sit down with the QC experts, review a bunch of your pre-recorded calls and individually identify all the good and bad parts of each call. Once you have gone through a substantial amount of calls, you will easily be able to identify a pattern that brings out both the positive and negative factors of a customer interaction. Then you can inform your agents about the same. This will ensure that your agents are adhering to a standardized routine.

Step 4: Create a well-defined scoring system

Once you have the metrics to define what makes a call good or bad the next step would be to create a scoring system to find out how an agent is performing. The QC team can create benchmarks and then measure the performance of each agent to find out if they are fulfilling them or not. The following key areas can be used when creating the scoring system:

1. Basic Information about the organization
2. Handling objectives
3. Leadership
4. Rapport
5. Call Handling
6. Closing
7. Active Listening
8. Empathy

A passing criterion of 75% should be set in the scoring system and any agent who fails to score that much should be reported to the team leaders. This allows team leads to easily identify the weak links amongst the agents. These poorly performing agents can be made to take additional coaching and development so that they can overcome their shortcomings.

Step 5: Strive for continuous improvement

Quality is a variable dimension. What looks good today might not do so tomorrow. Therefore, both the QC team as well as the agents should strive for a regularly updating not only their knowledge about the industry but also the changes in the customers’ expectations.

The advantages of adopting a continuous development policy benefit not only the company but the end customers as well. Your company can provide a high level of consistency in its call quality that boosts your overall productivity. Having your QC staff updated about the ever changing market, saving the call records, reviewing them and defining the quality metrics, creating a scoring system and coaching employees that fail to live up to the standards, everything should be done regularly.

Wrapping it up

Monitoring the call quality and working to make it better is not something that should be taken lightly. Continually improving how good the interaction between your customers and agents defines the success of your call center. Always remember, every call is important and so your agents should strive to make sure that every one of them is providing the best experience to everyone of your customers.