11 Top Ways to Improve Call Centre Quality Assurance

Dick Bourke of Scorebuddy shares 11 key insights into how you can improve your contact centre’s quality program.

When it comes to improving Call Centre Quality Assurance (QA), the central issue for most organisations isn’t why it needs to be a focus.

It’s well known that the phone is considered the most frustrating customer service channel by US internet users, and it’s equally well known that 40% of consumers have abandoned a company for one of their competitors due to subpar customer service.

As a result, understanding why organisations need to focus on QA in call centres isn’t a point that provokes much debate.

Instead, what organisations should be focusing on is improving and maintaining a quality customer service for their QA in call centres.

What Is QA in the Call Centre?

Investing in an automated call centre quality assurance solution is a good start, but like any business solution, it needs to be used carefully in order to produce the best results.

Call Centre Managers today understand the importance of continuously monitoring and improving their call centre quality assurance, especially since their performance is significantly based on QA metrics.

However, for many, once a QA solution is in place, it remains a static process which is seldom reviewed and/or assessed for improvement. Call centre QA must be seen as a dynamic and ever-evolving process to ensure success.

This means having a plan for how to improve call centre quality assurance that takes everything into consideration – from the starting point to the metrics being tracked, the calls being monitored, and the way your agents are involved in the process.

By doing so, you’ll be able to reap the biggest benefits for customer experience, customer loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line.

11 Best Practices to Improve Call Centre QA

Here are 11 tips to keep in mind when companies want to improve call centre quality assurance.

1. Find Out Where the Organisation Stands

To know their starting point, organisations need to take a look at what customers think about their call centre interactions, and how their call centre stacks up against competitors of a similar size.

Organisations should consider putting a short survey at the end of a call centre interaction to give customers the chance to rank their customer service experience. Whether this survey is incentivised or not is up to the individual organisation.

This gives organisations easy access to customer feedback without requiring widespread call monitoring (more on call monitoring in a bit).

Organisations should also consider using external benchmarking to determine how their agent performance compares to other call centres. External benchmarking is sometimes best accomplished by a third party quality assurance consultant who can remain impartial and objective.

2. Decide What Needs to Be Improved and How Improvement Will Be Measured

The metrics that can be measured using a call centre quality assurance solution number in the hundreds, and it can be tempting to want to measure anything and everything simply because it’s possible.

This is not effective.

Instead, organisations need to focus in on the business processes and customer service improvements needed to improve call centre QA based on the information gleaned from customer feedback and external benchmarking.

Then, select relevant KPIs and set reasonable, dynamic goals and work towards them using the insights provided by the quality assurance tool.

3. Monitoring Calls Efficiently and Effectively

A major part of any quality assurance program or solution is call monitoring.

Much like the data that can potentially be captured by a quality assurance solution, it’s easy to go overboard on call monitoring and get so bogged down with listening in that the point of monitoring – which would be giving managers the insights they need to best coach their frontline agents, driving quantifiable improvements – is lost.

The difference between muddled monitoring and clear actionable insights can lie in just a couple of key points, however.

4. Listen to Calls That Rank as Outliers

With the number of calls coming in to the average centre, the idea of listening to each one either live or recorded is impossible. Instead, an organisation should focus on the calls that stray the furthest from average in any direction.

This includes calls that went very well, very poorly, were quite short or quite long, and involved multiple transfers or multiple contacts from the customer.

The successful calls can serve as training tools for other agents on how to improve the call centre experience, while the unsuccessful ones can help tailor very necessary coaching.

5. Listen to the Entire Call

While it could very well be a single sentence that is the cause of an issue on a call, or even a matter of mere seconds in a ten-minute interaction, it’s only fair to agents that a call be evaluated after it is listened to in its entirety.

Bits and pieces being taken out of context to serve as examples of wrongdoing will undermine confidence in the process.

6. Handling the Humans

When call centre quality assurance isn’t carefully handled, organisations run a real risk that frontline agents are going to be resentful and distrustful of the entire operation.

But call centre quality assurance shouldn’t exist in a vacuum; it should complement training and coaching processes while giving agents control over their own performance (including their earning potential and bonuses).

As long as that’s made clear, quality assurance – and the steps taken by managers to improve call centre quality assurance – should be welcomed by all.

7. Hire the Right People and Train Them Well

Perhaps it goes without saying, but a big part of call centre success is having the right people on the team. That means managers who excel at coaching, and frontline agents that are willing and eager to learn and improve for the sake of their careers and the sake of the company.

The agent training process should also be robust and include real-life examples of both excellent and not-so-excellent interactions.

Training should also focus on high-yield behaviors like script adherence, net promoter score technique, and same result in lower average handling time. These behaviors should be further reinforced by regular coaching or feedback sessions.

8. Provide Top-Notch Scripts

Your agents need to be given all available tools for customer interaction success, and that begins with the scripts they are trained to work from.

Significant time and money should be spent on developing scripts as well as tweaking them as calls are monitored and issues become evident.

9. Involve Frontline Agents in QA

Nothing is going to make improving the call centre’s quality assurance feel like a top-down micromanaging system like suddenly springing it on employees, or using an existing system without ever acknowledging its purposes.

Taking the time to inform agents about quality assurance will go a long way towards helping them embrace it instead of fear it, as will showing them how it can give them control over their own performance through tools like real-time analytics and performance benchmarking available on their personal dashboards.

10. Focus on the Positive as Well as the Negative

If agents only ever hear corrective feedback thanks to quality assurance, there will be a sense of dread attached to the entire process.

With the actionable insights provided by a quality assurance solution as well as the additional assistance provided by a quality assurance manager, if applicable, managers should have more time to reward agents for good performance as well as temper corrective feedback with an accompanying focus on an agent’s positives.

11. Give Agents the Opportunity to Dispute Their Evaluations

Putting in a formal process in which agents can register their disagreement with an evaluation and receive a secondary evaluation from another individual has two main benefits:

The first is that it can remove conflict from the evaluation process if the agent knows they have a way to make their voice heard, and that action will be taken as a result.

The second is that it gives agents an increased sense of power in the face of a solution that could so easily be seen as an adversary otherwise.

Reigning It in for Call Centre Quality Assurance Guidelines

There are just some business solutions that are almost too powerful, and call centre quality assurance is firmly located in that category.

Dick Bourke

With so much data collected and so many insights possible, it’s easy for even leading organisations to get lost on their way to improved business processes and optimal customer service experience.

However, by keeping a clear focus when it comes to the data that’s collected and analysed, the calls that are monitored, and how agents are handled, organisations will be well on their way to having better quality assurance in their call centres. 

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

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About Scorebuddy

Scorebuddy is quality assurance solution for scoring customer service calls, emails and web chat. It is a dedicated, stand-alone staff scoring system based in the cloud, requiring no integration.

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Author: Scorebuddy