4 tips to consider for your quality call monitoring

Updated May 31, 2022

In today’s customer-driven marketing landscape, quality call monitoring is critical to maximizing agent performance and ensuring a positive customer experience. However, Frost & Sullivan research reveals that 60% of repeat calls are process or training-driven, meaning business processes are not in place to meet customer needs and agents have not been given the training required to meet customer expectations. Putting first call resolution best practices in place will help ensure customer satisfaction.

Two-thirds of organizations surveyed in a Ventana Research study view access to real-time agent metrics as an important capability, Forrester notes that only 31% closely monitor the quality of interactions with target customers.

For contact centers, the message is clear: Companies need to closely monitor the interactions between agents and customers to deliver insight into critical business issues and unlock opportunities to improve the customer experience and revenue outcomes.

Here are 4 tips to consider for your quality call monitoring:

1. Out with the old, in with the new

Traditional quality assurance (QA) programs, while able to provide some insight into agent performance, are based on a random selection of calls, which makes it virtually impossible for managers to get a true sense of why customers are calling or how each individual agent is performing. With real-time call monitoring, on the other hand, managers can monitor and analyze 100% of calls, making it easy to identify problems within agent teams, maintain quality standards and compliance, and improve both call center performance and the overall customer experience.

2. Act, not react

While a speech analytics solution gives a contact center practically unlimited access to how an operation runs and every agent performs, it’s important to turn that data into action. By monitoring every interaction, speech analytics gives enterprises the ability to act, as opposed to react, when their customer experience is on the line…provided they are actually paying attention to what the data is telling them and not just collecting it for posterity.

3. Quality people for quality monitoring

Call Centre Helper points out that quality evaluation is only as effective as the person doing the evaluating. In other words, by dedicating a specific individual or staff to call monitoring and analysis, contact centers can free up supervisors to focus on other critical tasks such as agent coaching. “Supervisors are there to manage the floor and plan campaigns, not to monitor quality,” says Call Centre Helper. “By giving that role to a dedicated individual or team, you leave your operational staff free to manage.”

4. Support the team: These days, with real-time call monitoring in place, managers are alerted to customer service issues as they occur, as opposed to discovering them after the call has ended. Insights delivered via quality monitoring, including language and acoustic characteristics, escalation attempts, churn language, compliance scripts, high emotion, etc., can help managers determine which agents are performing well versus those who may need additional coaching. However, this is not a one-off solution. Because even the most skilled agents need encouragement and support, it’s important to grow and manage the team by offering ongoing training opportunities.

Final Thoughts

Years ago, companies relied on manual review of calls to analyze agent interactions with customers in the call center. However, contact center technology has evolved considerably over the last 30 years. Today, leading companies leverage such technologies as real-time call monitoring and speech analytics to automatically monitor and score 100% of their contacts, providing agents and managers with much more timely and accurate performance feedback that ultimately results in an improved customer experience.