To get the best out of your call centre, you need to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and when to make a change.
Conducting audits on a regular basis will allow you to examine the current state of your call centre and pinpoint areas for improvement.
To help you guarantee an effective audit, we’ve identified six key areas to focus on during the process.
What Is a Call Centre Audit?
An audit is a way to measure your overall performance and determine whether or not your call centre is performing to the best of its ability.
A typical contact centre audit will assess processes, workflows, procedures, and guidelines to give a full overview of how effectively the centre is running and what gaps may exist.
At its most basic, a call centre audit is an opportunity to learn what you do well and what you could do better.
You carry out the audit, implement necessary changes, and repeat the process to determine the relative success or failure of these changes.
Audits can also be more specific, focusing on one team, department, or area. For example, a regulatory compliance audit may be useful if you’re concerned about mitigating risk in your organization.
Why Should You Conduct a Call Centre Audit?
Using the information you’ve gathered during an audit, you can determine how to enhance performance in areas like revenue generation, agent engagement, operational costs, and more. This will allow you to make the most efficient use of your resources and get more out of your workforce.
The results of an audit can also be the spark needed to move your organization forward. Concrete data can support a new strategy and innovation, helping to make the business case for change in your call centre.
Most importantly, after an effective audit, you will know exactly where your organization stands in terms of its long-term goals.
What Should You Include in a Call Centre Audit?
The key to a successful audit is planning. Pick areas to focus on, understand your goals, and establish a timeline for completion.
While priorities and needs would differ for each call centre, there are six areas you can’t ignore when conducting your audit.
Call Centre Performance
The first thing you need to evaluate during a call centre audit is your adherence to the set KPIs. Evaluating metrics like calls per agent, cost per call, and average handle time can give an excellent insight into the operational efficiency of your call centre. Using these KPIs, you can determine potential changes that could boost performance.
For example, if the calls per agent value is too high, you might consider hiring more staff. Similarly, if the average handle time is too long, you can look into offering extra training.
Agent Performance
A contact centre’s success depends heavily on its agents’ performance. If your team is inefficient or disengaged, it will impact everything from customer experience to revenue generation.
By evaluating metrics like first call resolution and call handling time, you can determine whether or not your agents are adhering to their schedule and meeting targets.
Poor FCR scores, for example, could indicate anything from a lack of emotional intelligence to weak scripting. An audit will highlight these agent shortcomings, so you can take steps to fix them.
Internal Processes
Effective internal processes facilitate strong agent performance. A messy workflow and weak policies can lead to confusion for both agents and supervisors.
In such a fast-paced industry, having a structure is key. An audit will expose any flaws, allowing you to refine processes like hiring, agent onboarding, call escalation, and more.
For example, if your scripts are ambiguous, unfit for purpose, or too restrictive, the audit will highlight these issues so you can address them.
Call Centre Culture
Company culture is about your organization’s ethos—the shared values and behaviors that form the basis of your working environment.
An audit will allow you to assess this culture. Is everyone aligned in pursuit of your goal? Do your leaders embody the culture and mission? Is there an issue with work-life balance, risking agent burnout? The answers to these questions will inform the future direction of your company.
A strong culture allows for better communication, easier decision-making, and a more effective workflow, all of which are important drivers of agent productivity and retention.
Customer Experience
With 86 percent of customers ready to jump ship to a competitor after just two poor experiences, getting your CX right is vital.
An audit is a way to assess the state of your customer experience through metrics like CSAT, NPS, and customer effort score.
By combining the results, you can assess customer sentiment and, if necessary, drill down into different areas to see what needs improvement.
For example, a poor customer effort score could indicate the need for additional training or improving call processing. Whatever the issue, the audit will bring it to light and help identify potential solutions.
Compliance
PCI compliance fines can reach up to $100,000 per month until the issue is resolved. With non-compliance coming at a high cost, you must use your audit to evaluate regulatory adherence and identify opportunities to improve consumer protection and data security.
Make sure your agents are adhering to all applicable policies, both internal and those enforced by third parties.
If any call centre compliance issues do arise, the audit will help you find the source, whether it’s a policy error, poor use of automation, or an agent failing to adhere to the rules.
Best Practices for Conducting a Call Centre Audit
Now that you know what areas to cover in your call centre audit, it’s time to look at the best practices for conducting it to ensure the optimal use of resources.
Clearly Define Call Centre Audit Guidelines
Like everything else in the call centre industry, an audit needs clear guidelines to succeed. Define your goals in advance, detail the procedure and criteria for the audit, identify key stakeholders, and establish a timeline for completion.
All of this information must be documented and distributed to the relevant parties to ensure transparency and alignment around the core objectives.
Assign an Auditor
Assigning the right auditor is an important part of the process. While you can select one of your team members for the role, most call centre audits are carried out by a neutral third party. An external auditor is likely to have broader relevant experience and be more objective.
They may also have knowledge about similar organizations, providing them with a good reference point and the ability to draw comparisons.
Run Audits Regularly
An audit isn’t a one-time occurrence. To get the most out of the process, you have to run it on a regular basis. This way, you can continuously refine the process to improve standards in the long run.
Communicate Results to the Leadership Team
The assessment stage is just one part of the overall auditing process. After this, you must share the results with your leadership team and other key stakeholders.
The collaborative approach allows for a more objective review of the results and helps garner support for any changes you may wish to implement following the audit.
Make sure that the information you share is specific and relevant, with clear recommendations linked to defined outcomes.
Determine a Plan of Action
As we’ve alluded to already, planning is pivotal to the success of a call centre audit. This doesn’t just mean planning for the audit itself—it means preparing follow-up actions for after you’ve completed the audit.
Simply running the audit as a box-ticking exercise isn’t enough. Acting on the results is the most important part of the process.
You need to outline the issues arising from the audit, rank them in terms of priority, and assign specific actions to tackle them.
Remember that no two audits are the same, so a plan that works for your last audit may not work as well for the next one.
Leverage the Right Software and Tools
Data from your CRM or quality assurance platform can be extremely helpful in the auditing process. For example, if your audit is focused primarily on agent performance and finding out what you could do to enhance call centre productivity, you could use the data from scorecard evaluations to build an assessment and deliver recommendations in that area.
Final Thoughts
Carrying out a call centre audit will help you determine the current state of your centre’s performance and identify areas for improvement.
By doing this, you can deliver data-driven recommendations to leadership with defined actions and specific outcomes.
To ensure an effective audit, you must cover key areas like agent performance, culture, customer experience, and compliance.
Furthermore, you should adhere to best practices with a clearly-defined audit plan for both the process itself and the actions you will take afterward.
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. Find out more about Scorebuddy
Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.
Author: Scorebuddy
Published On: 17th Mar 2023
Read more about - Guest Blogs, Scorebuddy
