Experts Weigh In: What’s the Best Way to Improve Your Call Quality Monitoring?

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.”

 CRMXchange

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:

• Adherence to policy and procedure: This measures how well agents adhere to internal policies and procedures when handling phone, email, and chat/collaboration interactions or processing transactions. This category should also reflect how well agents manage all regulatory compliance disclosures.
• Customer satisfaction: Gauges customer reactions to processes and policies and identifies service barriers or limitations that create customer dissatisfaction. This category includes an assessment of the agent’s communication skills and professionalism. First call resolution (FCR) is another relevant factor in measuring customer satisfaction.
• Trends and opportunities: Identifies, measures, and tracks trends identified in the QM process to address training needs, areas for business process optimization, customer insights about product and services, missed sales, and retention or other revenue-generating opportunities.”

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.”

Call Centre Helper

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?

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