Monitoring call center quality assurance is an essential part of running a successful call center. A call center quality assurance solution gives managers the flexibility and range to review, analyze and understand their call center operations, conduct quality monitoring, improve their effectiveness and identify areas where agents can improve.
Why do you need a call center quality assurance solution?
Quality assurance monitoring provides the data to measure whether the call center is meeting goals, following correct processes, remaining compliant and achieving defined outcomes. Contact Center QA enables managers to improve customer satisfaction and employee productivity by monitoring and tracking call center activity.
Call centers are at the forefront of efforts by businesses to service and retain customers. In a recent survey, 73% of business leaders drew a direct link between their customer service and business performance. The consequences of poor service were stark with 61% of customers prepared to switch to a competitor after one bad experience, a figure that rose to 76% after two negative experiences.
Companies can combat this threat with analytics. Every interaction with a customer produces data that can be analyzed and used to alter behavior to help secure the relationship. Call center performance data can provide insights to strengthen customer relationships and develop retention strategies.
QA in the call center is a major component in managing customer expectations and loyalty, as well as the overall health of the business.
Why You Should Choose a Quality Assurance Solution as Part of your Contact Center Management
The call center is critical for customer relationships in most businesses and those relationships can be strengthened by the behavior and performance of call center agents. Most people judge a business by the interactions they have with the contact center so companies must implement rigorous quality monitoring for long-term customer loyalty.
The future of the business may rest on the effectiveness of that quality monitoring, especially when it comes to harvesting insights that can improve overall call center performance.
To deliver consistent quality customer experiences, businesses need to:
- Set quality goals for the call center
- Create a quality monitoring scorecard
- Set pertinent parameters for scorecard development
- Train managers and agents
- Analyze calls for customer experience input
- Monitor quality scorecards for relevant adjustments
Spreadsheets are not up to the job
Call center managers that rely on outdated methods of reporting can find their progress frustrated because it is hard to get clear reports if information is derived from several sources and entered manually. The margin for error can be significant and damaging to the business.
Spreadsheets cannot guarantee effective QA for several reasons:
- They are slow
- It is almost impossible to forecast with them
- They rely on built-in calculators to alter content with little to no flexibility
- It is difficult to manage multiple versions of the call center quality assurance form template
- They don’t monitor employees effectively
- There’s too much potential for lost, corrupted, or incomplete data and reporting
- Sharing and collaborating is difficult and time consuming because data is not centrally stored for easy access
Scorecards eliminate the need for manual spreadsheets. By using scorecards to gauge agent performance, call centers can improve agent skills and increase customer satisfaction.
Scorecards contain all the metrics for agent performance in one place and managers can use them to make changes to boost customer satisfaction and revenue for the business, resulting in happier agents and better customer interactions.
Built-in QA versus purpose-built QA
Scorecards are only as good as the system that creates them. With many call center systems, the QA module can often appear close to an afterthought or a tick box exercise. For many businesses, QA may not be a top priority when it comes to purchasing a call center system but it can have a profound effect on customer and agent retention. It is worth ensuring the QA solution lives up to the task.
Many built-in QA systems provide only limited scorecard creation options with very basic answer choices, outcomes and feedback that could be limited to a range of 1 to 5 or only 3 stars. Basic scorecards can only capture limited data which restricts the reporting capability of the system. If you only have basic data and feedback, you will have limited insights from which to make decisions about agent performance and engagement.
The level of detail you can capture and the ability to report on that detail is important when it comes to helping agent engagement and retaining agents. Limited feedback makes it harder to provide the best direction and coaching for agents. Poorly coached agents can have a detrimental effect on Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) ratings, affecting the company’s bottom line. Agents can become disillusioned and leave. Losing staff is an expensive process and they can be hard to replace.
These limitations can be exacerbated as your company grows. Purpose-built QA is far less likely to be subject to the same restrictions and limitations of a built-in system. Call centers can get more from purpose-built QA systems by creating more complex scorecards that will provide much better feedback to agents. Call center managers can:
- Save time on evaluation
- Reduce the time taken to compile reports
- Deliver meaningful and insightful results to agents
- Provide a method for agents to challenge those results
- Empower agents
- Improve staff retention
- Save time on meetings.
Get More From Your Contact Center
It is difficult to get the best out of call center systems without an effective and focused QA solution. Purpose-built call center management solutions like Scorebuddy help empower managers and agents to provide better service than built-in systems or spreadsheets.
Learn more about Call Center Quality Assurance. Download our eBook.