In a call center, quality assurance (QA) is the practice of regularly reviewing the standards and processes for delivering the best customer outcomes and measuring the performance of agents, processes, and the call center against those standards. Call center quality assurance processes also ensure that agents and centers comply with various regulatory requirements.
Why is call center quality assurance important?
Quality assurance practices help call centers continuously improve performance, provide customers with better service, and enhance the training and coaching opportunities offered to agents. Ultimately, quality assurance helps call centers boost efficiency and improve experiences in ways that increase profitability.
What are the benefits of call center quality assurance?
Quality assurance practices help call centers continually refine and improve processes to enhance customer satisfaction. Specific benefits include:
- Better customer experiences. By monitoring KPIs around wait times, call handling, call routing, and call resolution, quality assurance processes help call centers to focus on and deliver superior customer experiences.
- Improved agent training. Quality assurance helps call centers to build stronger training frameworks and continuously refine procedures that improve agent knowledge, performance, and efficiency.
- Enhanced operational performance. A focus on measuring the quality of specific processes helps call centers target areas of inefficiency and continuously improve processes and performance.
- Lower costs. Greater efficiency and improved processes inevitably result in reduced expenses.
What are the challenges of call center quality assurance?
The biggest challenge of call center quality assurance is capturing accurate and comprehensive data for QA metrics. Traditionally, QA teams collect data by listening to or reading a transcript of interactions between agents and customers to produce a manual quality score. While this approach offers some value, it can analyze only a fraction of the total customer interactions each day, making it difficult to accurately identify performance trends or offer specific feedback to individual agents.
What are important call center QA metrics?
Some of the most important call center QA metrics include:
- Average speed of answering (ASA): the average time it takes to answer an incoming call.
- Average handle time (AHT): the average time required to successfully complete a call, including talk time, old-time and post-call work.
- First call resolution (FCR): the percentage of calls that can be resolved on the customer’s initial contact.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): the degree to which a customer is satisfied with their contact center interactions.
- Net promoter score (NPS): the likelihood that a customer will recommend the business or its contact center to others.
- Customer effort score (CES): the amount of effort that customers feel they had to make to resolve their issue or reach their goal.
How can we improve QA in the call center?
Call center managers can improve QA by using technologies like conversation intelligence that automate QA functions and makes it possible to automatically capture and analyze 100% of customer conversations across all channels.
How does conversation intelligence help enhance call center quality assurance?
Conversation intelligence combines speech and text analytics to automate the process of reviewing interactions between agents and customers. Using natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning technologies, conversation intelligence can capture, transcribe, analyze, and assign a quality score for every interaction with customers across any channel. Conversation intelligence platforms can determine the meaning of a speaker’s words as well as the emotion behind their behavior, providing deeper insight into an agent’s performance and customer’s needs and mindset. By automating QA review and analyzing 100% of interactions, conversation intelligence solutions provide a comprehensive view of the quality of processes throughout the call center and areas where improvement is necessary.
How can CallMiner Eureka improve call center QA?
CallMiner Eureka is the industry’s most comprehensive conversation intelligence platform for analyzing omnichannel interactions at scale. By revealing meaningful insight from every customer conversation, CallMiner helps uncover performance quality management gaps to drive improvement. With CallMiner Eureka, call centers can gain insight into and monitor the quality of every conversation to understand agent behavior, ensure adherence to best practices, identify opportunities for improvement, and demonstrate regulatory compliance. By monitoring conversations in real time, Eureka offers in-the-moment guidance to support agents in overcoming knowledge gaps and resolving calls more quickly and effectively. Individual dashboards show agents where they can improve, while supervisor dashboards allow managers to view individual or team trends. By automating QA with CallMiner, managers can identify trends, pinpoint coaching opportunities, uncover compliance initiatives, and improve quality at scale.
