Call Quality Monitoring Guide

The age-old adage ‘customer is king’ has stood the test of time because treating the customer as a king has always produced favorable results. Keeping this in mind, it has become very important for contact centers to provide quality service to their customers. One thing that is imperative in this quest for quality service is Call Quality Monitoring. In recent times it has become necessary for every call center to spend time devising a good call monitoring process. 

So, how exactly does one define call quality, and what is call quality monitoring? 

Defining call quality 

For a customer to be satisfied with the quality of service he/she has received from the call center, the following measures can be kept in check - 

  1. Ensuring that the welcome message in the IVR isn’t boring or repetitive. 

  2. Providing a short wait time before connecting to the agent.

  3. Routing the caller to the best possible agent who possesses the right skills required to handle the customer query. 

  4. Resolving the customer grievance in as little time as possible. 

  5. Not boring the customer with repetitive questions, the answers to which could have been easily available to the agent through other channels. (Such as call pop)

  6. Ensuring that the agents possess the following skills - good listening, moderating tone of voice, rapport building, patience, and emotional intelligence skills. 


All these points working together in conjugation would make up for call quality. A good quality call would ensure that the customer’s queries were duly resolved and the customer has gained clarity regarding his/her issues.


What is call quality monitoring? 


Moving on, we need to establish what is call quality monitoring and what methods are needed to assess quality monitoring. 

Call quality monitoring requires monitoring the incoming customer calls through various methods such as recording, observing, and analyzing. This involves executives across all levels of management spending some time listening in on the conversations of the agents with the customers, either live or as a recording. Some important terms here include - 


  • Call recording - Recording the agent’s conversation with the customer, with due knowledge of the customer. 


  • Call Barging - Call barging is when a manager or a senior can barge in on an ongoing call between an agent and a customer. This could be to give the agent a direction with the customer call and help him/her navigate the conversation. It could also be when the manager feels that there is something that the agent is missing in his conversation and needs to be addressed. This acts as a learning for the agent.


Methods for call quality monitoring 


One of the methods of monitoring call quality is creating and keeping track using a scorecard.

A scorecard is a quality assurance measure. With the scorecard, one would be able to keep track of an agent’s performance across many areas of operation. You can create a scorecard tailored to your contact center’s preference and for the areas which you want to have assessed.

 A scorecard will help you get a comprehensive overview of an agent’s call with the customer.   

Different departments may make use of different criteria in a scorecard. Some common criteria include - 


  • Greeting - If the agent followed the greeting script, manner of speaking, if they informed the caller about call recording, thanked the customer for calling, etc.

  • Account Verification - If the agent reconfirmed the customer’s information by asking appropriate questions. 

  • Problem Solving Skills - If the agent was able to identify relevant questions for the customer’s query and how well was he/she able to solve it. 

  • Adherence to Protocol - How well the agent is adhering to the call center’s established protocols. 

  • Script Compliance - Ability to adapt the call script and deviate from it when necessary

  • Closure and Follow up - If the agent follows the closing guidelines and how soon he/she follows up with the customer after the initial call. 


Call Quality Monitoring

The process for call quality monitoring would follow these steps – 

 

                                                 Creating a scorecard

                                                               ⬇

    Monitoring calls

                ⬇

                   Check if the call flow aligns with contact center protocols

                ⬇

     Analyze the data 

 

The scorecards can be attached to a quality dashboard where one would easily be able to access an agent’s performance. Access to this quality dashboard ideally should be given to both managers and agents. 

Giving access to the managers would help them keep a track of the agent’s performance and allow them to suggest training programs to agents accordingly. They would be able to point out areas of improvement, assign coaching if necessary, and give appropriate assessments of the agent’s behavior.

 

Giving access to the agents would help them keep themselves motivated and assess their performance against other agents. 

 
How to Improve Call Quality Monitoring?

How to improve call quality monitoring? 

 

  1. Clearly define your quality customer interactions

    Before monitoring and analyzing a call, you need to clearly define what constitutes a good quality customer call in your contact center. Only then can you hold calls against a set standard and see what areas need improvement.

     

You may put together a sample of calls that have performed well and analyze what constituted in it being successful.
Once these parameters are defined you can easily measure the standard of your calls and suggest improvements wherever necessary.

 

You can suggest methods such as training for agents, coaching initiatives, improved workforce scheduling, etc. 

 

  1. Pay attention to relevant KPIs

    KPIs (key performance indicators) are a great tool to measure performance and relevant KPIs can be used to monitor call quality. These KPI’s are –

     

  • AHT – The average handle time metric is an important call quality indicator. You can observe the AHT for the most successful calls and take note of it. Anything below or above the calculated threshold can be potentially problematic and appropriate interventions can be used to rectify them.
    It isn’t always the aim to keep the AHT as low as possible because calls wrapped up quickly don’t necessarily guarantee success. Sometimes AHT may be low because the caller got frustrated and abandoned the call. These situations need to be avoided and hence monitoring successful calls would help understand optimal AHT. 

  • FCR – First call Resolution is a highly desirable metric for all contact centers. All customers want their queries to be resolved as quickly as possible and with fewer follow-ups. A good FCR would undoubtedly result in high call quality. 

  • NPS – Net promoter score is the measure of how likely is a customer, to recommend your service to his/her friends and family. A good NPS would indicate good call quality.

     

  1. Monitor calls strategically

    To understand how to improve call quality you need to identify relevant calls 

            to monitor. Why is that? Certain calls are more important than others 

            and can offer greater insights. These calls include –
   

  • Calls from high-value prospects
  • Poor performing and high performing agent calls

  • Customers with negative and positive experiences 

Aside from these, you can also use different approaches to monitoring calls.

 

Approaches to call monitoring

 

  • Random sample call monitoring
    With random sampling, you may randomly select calls to monitor. This may not be the best way, because you would probably only get limited insights with this method. It would not be a good measure to tell you the overall state of your contact center. 

  • Targeted call monitoring
    Targeted call monitoring would include monitoring those calls with high value such as those belonging to high prospect callers, or calls where an agent is following up on a customer issue or calls related to cancellations, low survey scores, renewals, and more. 

  • Analytics-Driven call monitoring
    Analytics-driven call monitoring would help you get the best results with regards to which calls to monitor as it would use relevant data to point out which calls would have the greatest impact. This would mean you have to spend less time analyzing which calls to monitor and hence you can focus more of your energies on deciding ways to improve call quality. 

Benefits of Call Quality Monitoring

Benefits of call quality monitoring

 

In summary, we can identify the benefits of call quality monitoring as – 

 

  • Better customer service quality – Constant intervention to improve customer service through data points and agent communication will result in better customer service. As a result of improved customer service, customer retention would also increase.

  • Opportunity to train agents – Through call monitoring one may be able to point out an agent’s pain points and suggest ways to improve them through training or coaching methods. This would also help with the employee experience as he/she is provided a space where they can thrive. 

  • Identifying problem areas – Through monitoring methods, you may also identify areas that need improvement, be it on the agent’s side or operational difficulties. 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *