3 Ways to Improve Your Call Center Monitoring Practices

Call center monitoring is one of the most effective ways call centers can improve their customer service; it gives managers the opportunity to watch (or rather listen) to their agents in action.

By monitoring what agents say during interactions, managers can easily identify problems within their teams, maintain quality standards and compliance, improve the customer satisfaction and experience, and improve overall call center performance. However, listening in on a few calls here and there isn’t going to do any good for your agents, your customers, or your call center at large.

Here are three ways you can improve your call center management and center monitoring practices:

1. Analyze 100% of calls.

Let’s say call center managers were able to manually review 5 random calls per agent each month for call center quality assurance and training purposes. Depending on the call volume that means only a few percent of calls are actually used for coaching and training, which is nowhere near a statistically significant sample size.

How can a manager effectively use call center monitoring when they don’t have trust-worthy data to pull actionable insights from?

Call quality monitoring is all about changing agent behavior and managers need to understand how agents act day-in and day-out, not just basing their entire review and training plan on 1 or 2 calls. Instead of manually reviewing a small sample of calls, managers can improve call center monitoring with a speech analytics solution where 100% of calls are automatically recorded AND calls are monitored in real-time to yield key performance indicators.

Now you are getting a 360 degree view with this call center monitoring software and can trust your action items are based on sound data, not just casual observations.

2. Align your customer’s needs with your own business objectives.

Make sure your call center quality monitoring goals accurately represent your customers’ expectations and aren’t just about what numbers you wish to see from your agents. If you’re not monitoring for and measuring what customers’ value then you’re just wasting your time and tasking your contact center agents to hit certain goals that could actually undermine the customer experience.

For instance, Average Handling Time (AHT) is a commonly reviewed metric because the faster an agent wraps up an interaction the faster they can move onto the next call, thereby shortening call wait times. But just because an agent gets through their calls quickly that doesn’t mean they are getting through them effectively. An agent primarily obsessed with speed might not fully resolve the issue, prompting the customer to call back or try another service channel if their customer expectations have not been met. Vice versa, an agent might spend 10 hours on the line with one customer but that doesn’t automatically mean they are a terrible employee even though they failed to meet your call center’s AHT goals.

Improving your agents’ first call resolution rate (FCR) and tracking that metric is a way of measuring your employees’ efficiency and driving customer satisfaction.

It’s important to remember that you can’t evaluate agent performance in a vacuum.

3. Involve agents when developing the scorecards/evaluation forms used during the quality monitoring process.

When your whole team understands what you’re looking for during the quality monitoring process you have a much better chance of adjusting behavior as people are aware of how their personal agent performance is being evaluated.

For instance, define what constitutes a “quality” interaction and the subcategories that are being scored.

• How important is script adherence?
• How important is handling time?
• Will agents be judged on how well they handle escalating phone calls with frustrated customers?

Providing examples that demonstrate the excellent, average and or poor quality of the behaviors being measured gives your agents a solid base to work from and outlines expectations of performance. And since you are now analyzing 100% of calls with quality monitoring software, they know that each interaction has to be the best it can. They can’t just phone it in (pardon the pun) most days and put on their best behavior when they know they are being monitored.

Having a call center monitoring procedure in place is half the battle, but if you want to get real actionable insights and make real performance changes it’s imperative that call centers focus on improving their monitoring practices as much as they can. The more trustworthy data you can collect the more positive impact you can have.