Top 10 Tips for Monitoring Call Center Quality

Using one of the best Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers can help you manage your call center more efficiently, but there are still steps you need to take to keep your call center running smoothly. In this article, we’ll take you through 10 tips for effective call center quality monitoring.

1. Set Your Goals for Call Center Quality Management

Be clear about why you want to monitor your customer care phone calls. Unless you set specific goals, you won’t understand if you are making any progress.

By setting goals, you can focus on collecting appropriate data and avoid getting distracted by unnecessary information.

Asking the following questions will help you set clear goals for your call center quality management:

• How many phone calls will you monitor?

• Why will you monitor your call center quality?

• How often will you monitor the calls?

• How will you monitor the customer calls?

• Will you track any specific information?

Once you know your goals, you can proceed efficiently with your call center quality monitoring.

2. Identify the KPIs to Measure During a Customer Call 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) assess the quality standards of your calls. Without KPIs, you won’t know whether you are effectively solving your customers’ issues.

To understand how successful your agents are at resolving customer issues, set some benchmarks that every customer interaction should meet. For instance, you can monitor average time in queue, resolution time, and percentage of calls answered per agent within a set amount of time.

To track how well your call center agents identify and solve customer problems, you can check:

• Whether the agent acknowledged the customer's problem

• The kind of experience your agent provided your customer with

• If the agent was empathetic and listened patiently

• The average time of resolution

• Whether the problem was resolved in the first call

You should also make sure your agents are following all business procedures by checking:

• If the call got transferred to the right agent with relevant skills and experience

• If the calling software functioned without any glitches

• If the agent could identify the customer, especially if they were a regular client

• If the agent collected feedback from the customer after the call

3. Invest in Your Employees

Your call center agents form the backbone of your customer service. Since a call center offers a voice-to-voice interaction between your employees and customers, your employees’ efficiency determines customer satisfaction.

Invest in improving your employees’ soft skills, such as their communication skills, empathy, and emotional intelligence. This will help your agents to successfully understand and resolve customer problems.

Your employees have to handle numerous calls in a day, so it’s natural for them to get stressed. Call center agents experience high levels of emotional exhaustion because they sometimes have to deal with rough customers. Moreover, their calls are constantly being monitored, which adds to the pressure.

Ensure you give your call center team some recreational breaks so that their stress doesn’t affect customer interactions. For example, you can allow them time to meditate during their shifts, which can help reduce their stress and boost their productivity.

4. Use Tools to Analyze and Improve 

Everyone makes mistakes, so it’s important that you use the right tools for the smooth monitoring of your call center quality. This can save you precious time and energy and help improve the quality of your service.

Here are some tools we recommend using:

Call Recording Software 

Recording customer calls is a legal requirement for most companies, but it is also essential for quality and training purposes. Call recording software helps you securely record all your calls. 

You can play back and analyze the calls to understand your customer experiences, which will help you provide better services in the future.

Text Analytics 

Text analytics tools help you analyze text conversations to understand customer sentiments and emotions. You can also extract crucial customer information from real-time text conversations such as trends regarding a specific product or service.

QA Scorecards 

QA scorecards provide a marking rubric for all your calls. A call center quality assurance agent can grade all your customer interactions based on the KPIs you previously established. 

These scorecards can provide insight into whether your call center agents are giving your customers a meaningful experience or if they are falling short.

VoIP Software

VoIP software like Grasshopper enables you to make business calls without a regular phone line. It’s completely done through the cloud. Cloud-based VoIP software makes it much less likely that calls will be dropped, which can also enhance your customer experience.

5. Make a Script for Your Calls 

Imagine different agents providing different solutions for customers with the same problem. Wouldn’t that be confusing? Creating a script will enable you to provide a uniform experience to your customers. Plus, it will also help your call center agents stay focused.

A script provides a framework to start the calls and build up from there. It will also help you detect problems more easily so you can implement the necessary changes to improve your customer experience.

6. Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback can be a gold mine for your call center. It will provide valuable insights into the needs and preferences of your customers.

You can create a customer feedback form and make it available to your customers by uploading it to your website or sending it to each customer after their call.

Don’t ask too many questions that require long answers. Your customers might never fill out the form in that case. Make your questions objective and to the point. That will also make it easier for you to assess the customer experience.

Pro tip: You can offer an incentive to your customers for filling out the feedback form! Offering a gift card or a discount on their next purchase can entice them to complete it soon after the call is done.

7. Analyze the Data Collected

Now that you have collected all the data, put it to good use. Analyzing the data will tell you what’s going wrong and what needs to be changed.

Assess agent performance according to your KPIs and quality standards. Evaluate both the positive and negative behavior of your agents on every call. You can then ask them to make necessary adjustments.

Then, engage your QA team to identify the recurring problems. For instance, you may have noticed that some agents are taking longer than others to resolve an issue. Try to get to the root cause. The introduction of a new product or service might be causing the delay.

Once you identify the problem, focus on solving it. Don’t blame your agents for delays. Rather see if they need any assistance. You can provide them with automation tools, for example, that can improve their efficiency and also improve customer experience. VoIP systems like Vonage integrate with third-party applications to help streamline communications and internal processes.

8. Let the Agents Focus on One Thing at a Time 

It’s possible that some of your agents will have more than one area of weakness. If this is the case, identify one area that you want them to focus on improving first and give them time to work on it. This could prevent scenarios where their performance decreases because they’re getting overwhelmed by trying to fix too many things at once.

This approach would enable your agents to proactively work on improving their weakest area, boosting the performance of the entire team while still impressing your customers.

9. Involve Your Agents in the Quality Management Process

Remember that your agents are “on the ground,” interacting with customers daily. Asking your agents to prepare a checklist of things to monitor on calls is a great way to involve them in the process and boost their morale. Plus, they will also be eager to implement the changes and make improvements.

You can also empower your agents to draw their own conclusions while monitoring the calls. That will encourage them to reflect on their performance, get a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and make necessary improvements.

Don’t forget to ask your call center agents for suggestions on improvements, too. For instance, they might need some new software or tools for improved workflow, but they won’t tell you unless you ask.

10. Use Different QA Forms for Different Types of Calls 

Your call center handles different types of calls every day. But you shouldn’t use the same QA form for your outbound sales calls and support calls, for example. Customers may have been highly satisfied with your sales staff during an outbound call, but they may not be impressed with your support staff if they run into issues with your product.

Using the same QA form for both teams wouldn't give you accurate insights into what they’re each doing right and wrong. Ideally, you’d want to use different metrics to measure their performance. Make sure your QA forms are applicable to specific teams and not just assessing your agents based on generic metrics that may not provide you with actionable insights.

Monitor Your Call Center Quality to Get Happy Customers

Effective call center management is not a challenge if you have your goals and KPIs predefined. The key is to strike a balance between employee and customer satisfaction. After all, a happy employee will be more willing to deliver exceptional customer service.