How Quality Assurance Impacts Call Centre KPIs

Dick Bourke of Scorebuddy discusses the importance of call centre quality assurance (QA) and its impact on key performance indicators (KPIs).

QA is a process that measures call centre and individual agent performance. Your QA metrics represent the various facts and data you use to determine how well you are meeting performance objectives. Refining your call centre QA process is crucial to improving the customer experience (CX).

Importance of QA and Scorecards

With the right QA metrics and reporting in place, you can improve agent performance, boost operational efficiency, and create a CX that translates into loyal customers.

Consumers have more choice than ever before when it comes to doing business with your company. If you don’t deliver a positive CX in your call centre, they will take their business elsewhere. QA metrics allow you to focus on your effectiveness in acquiring new customers in addition to solidifying your existing customer base.

A well-rounded QA process helps you:

• Measure your ability to achieve your objectives
• Provide quality feedback on agent behaviour
• Increase employee engagement and satisfaction
• Maintain regulatory compliance

A quality assurance scorecard measures the quality of service you provide to your customers. It features a list of 10 to 20 questions that are weighted differently according to their priority. Creating a QA scorecard involves identifying the needs of your business and your customers.

These questions will define what the ideal customer interaction looks like, both from a customer perspective and an agent perspective.

For example, your customers’ expectations regarding interaction with your call centre will likely be outlined by asking:

• Does the agent listen to what I’m saying?
• Did the agent empathise with my enquiry?
• Did the agent solve my problem?
• Does the call centre appreciate my business?

Your call centre’s expectations regarding the interaction will be outlined by asking:

• Did the agent build rapport with the caller?
• How quickly was the agent able to resolve the enquiry?
• Did the agent follow all policies and procedures?
• Did the agent uphold regulatory compliance?
• Did the agent input quality notes of the call and complete all after-call work (ACW)?

Measuring KPIs to Improve QA

There are several call centre KPIs you can measure to improve your quality assurance process. First, however, you must have a well-defined purpose for your QA programme.

Ideally, your purpose will look something like: “Our QA programme strives to constantly improve the customer experience and enhance the performance management of agents.”

Once you have created a purpose and definition of quality, you can then align your QA metrics with your goals. Three KPIs to measure in your QA programme include Average Handle Time (AHT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and First Call Resolution (FCR).

Average Handling Time (AHT)

The AHT metric measures how long it takes your agents to handle a call. Many call centres fall victim to believing the lower the AHT, the better. But this isn’t always the case. Just because agents are handling calls swiftly, this doesn’t always translate into a positive CX, especially when the customers’ enquiries are not being resolved. The goal is to pair a low AHT with a positive CX.

When measuring agent-specific AHT, look at their customer satisfaction scores as well. You may find those with the highest customer satisfaction scores don’t have the lowest AHTs.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

Who doesn’t love having a question answered the first time around? Your customers are busy people. They don’t have time to keep making calls to your call centre. This is why the FCR metric means so much to QA. It is both customer- and agent-centric. The more calls your agents can resolve the first time around, the more customers they can attend to. When callers have their enquiries resolved in the first call, this leads to higher satisfaction levels.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS should be at the heart of your QA strategies. It measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to their family, friends, and colleagues.

NPS takes into consideration the entire CX. FCR and AHT play a large role in the NPSs your customers give. If you want to improve NPS and CX using QA, you should:

• Track every touchpoint with the customer (this includes all interactions across all channels)
• Encourage agent self-awareness
• Monitor all NPS scores and provide feedback when necessary

Give Agents the Right Tools

Your agents need access to tools that streamline processes and are designed to improve CX. Providing them with an intuitive, easy-to-use agent and customer collaboration portal that simplifies the handling of calls is key to improving agent performance.

The key to QA is to understand that transparency inspires engagement. Providing agents with a dashboard that shows their own quality scores through useful quality monitoring will improve their performance awareness.

Dick Bourke

Having your agents work from a dashboard that gives them complete oversight of customer interactions will provide a big picture view of each caller’s inquiry. This will improve FCR, AHT, and NPS.

Providing this type of dashboard starts with designing a thorough QA programme. As you outline your goals, you can choose a dashboard that aligns with your unique QA objectives.

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

For more information about Scorebuddy - visit the Scorebuddy Website

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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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