The evolving role of customer service representatives in today’s modern contact center
Learn more about how call centers have become omnichannel contact centers where customer needs are met through multiple channels, and AI-powered tools...
CallMiner's 2024 CX Landscape Report is here! |Download today
Solutions
Products
Customers
Resources
Company
April 09, 2020
When it comes to meeting the needs of today’s demanding customers, leading-edge companies are taking a proactive approach with their customer service. Statistics show the cost of bad customer service can be significant, making it critical for companies to tap into the voice of the customer and deliver on the promise of an exceptional customer experience.
Monitoring calls to gain valuable information about customers is one way to ensure that callers receive the best customer service possible.
But call monitoring is about more than just customer insights – it involves listening to agent interactions with customers and identifying opportunities for improvement within agent teams, maintaining quality standards and compliance, and working toward a more positive customer experience overall. To uncover some of the call quality monitoring best practices, we scoured the Internet for insights from leading contact center publications and industry experts. Take a look at the following tips:
Drive Quality Assurance
“As customers become more educated and informed, it’s becoming increasingly important to monitor and measure quality assurance in relation to the customer experience. Listening to the way the customer is greeted and parted with; finding out how the agent responds to the customer’s needs; and preventing duplicate records are three ways to oversee quality assurance.”
Conduct Quality Monitoring Review
“When conducting a QM review in the call center, the top three categories that are critical to capture and measure are:
Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting LLC
Create a Standard
“Monitoring will always remain a technical job to some extent, but when it comes right down to it, technology is only one side of the coin. Businesses need to have a strategy in place to successfully deploy and use technology, and there are few key items to keep in mind when establishing a monitoring strategy.
First, businesses need to establish metrics to ensure consistency and accuracy for reporting across all parts of the network. Executives must prioritize the agreed upon metrics so there is no disagreement later down the line. Once the metrics are finalized, establish a set of best practices that will serve as a guide for all company employees to follow. As technology changes, the best practices should be revisited to remain up to date. And, in case of emergency, having an appropriate plan in place to mitigate potential negative consequences is crucial.
Ultimately, having a monitoring plan, establishing key metrics, and pulling together a formal list of best practices prepares businesses for upticks in traffic and protects data against potential security breaches.”
Lusine Khachatryan, Data Informed
Establish a Link Between Quality Measures & Business Results
“Quality monitoring works best when it achieves a tangible link between quality measures and business results. This means measuring those aspects of an agent’s behavior that are likely to have the most positive outcomes, such as customers spending more (and more often), using the optimum channels for [the] business, becoming more loyal, and recommending [the company’s] products and services.
So before even getting to the technology, contact centers need to get some buy-in as to which outcomes will make the most difference for their business. They then need to build the evaluation forms that will let them score agent performance in ways that actually matter.”
Look for Continuous Improvement
“While some might see call monitoring as critical, it should not be used as a negative tactic to put pressure on call agents and trip them up. It is an integral part of the business and benefits not only the end customers but the clients as well. A key role of the QC team is to continuously develop agents through education and constant growth.
By striving to make continuous improvements, this can help [a] business to deliver a high level of consistency within each client’s campaign and to ensure that each agent in the contact center is delivering to their full potential.”
Brent Bischoff, Business Systems (UK) Ltd
Final Thoughts
Call center monitoring software is critical for uncovering actionable insights and making agent performance changes that can improve the customer experience. But call centers need to take it one step further and think about how they can improve on their call quality monitoring.
In today’s customer-centric landscape, it’s no longer a choice – it’s a necessity.
What tips or best practices would your organization recommend for improving call quality monitoring? What suggestions would you add to the list above?
©iStockphoto.com/jsmith
CallMiner is the global leader in conversation analytics to drive business performance improvement. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, CallMiner delivers the industry’s most comprehensive platform to analyze omnichannel customer interactions at scale, allowing organizations to interpret sentiment and identify patterns to reveal deep understanding from every conversation. By connecting the dots between insights and action, CallMiner enables companies to identify areas of opportunity to drive business improvement, growth and transformational change more effectively than ever before. CallMiner is trusted by the world’s leading organizations across retail, financial services, healthcare and insurance, travel and hospitality, and more.