New Tips and Advice for Call Quality Monitoring

Call quality monitoring is crucial for your contact center’s success. It’s the best way to ensure that quality standards are met, and your agents represent your business the best way possible. However, call quality monitoring isn’t a one-and-done thing.

If you truly want to do QA (quality assurance) right, you need to keep looking for the latest trends and best practices. Learn about call quality monitoring best practices to ensure your contact center’s success.

What Is Quality Monitoring in a Call Center?

Call quality monitoring in a contact center is the practice of recording and evaluating calls between agents and customers. Comparing these calls to set standards and KPI goals can reflect on the agent’s performance and the contact center’s functionality as a whole.

At Expivia, we listen to 100% of our calls. That’s the most reliable way to ensure the quality of each call meets our expectations.

What Is Call Quality?

Effective and efficient customer service calls drive the best customer experience and conversion. When you’re setting standards for your call quality, make sure you think about what makes the call good for the customer. 

The call element that lead to success are:

• Short wait times
• Proper tone of voice
• Skilled listening
• Appropriate speaking speed
• The right language
• Effective questioning, including the use of open, probing, and closed questions
• Good rapport
• Demonstrated emotional intelligence skills
• Well-managed customer expectations

If all of these elements successfully drive the conversation, the customer will hang up the phone feeling happy, heard, and satisfied.

11 Steps to Master Call Quality Monitoring

Whether you’re building a contact center or you’re running an established call center, you need call quality monitoring. Read these 10 useful steps to ensure that you’re doing QA right.

1. Invest in a Speech Analytics Software

Speech Analytics is an invaluable tool for call centers. You can use speech analytics to check more than just KPIs. You can also score the sentiment and tone of your agents.

Angry customers are an everyday occurrence to call center agents. However, the best reps can sway their emotions and create a better mood by the time the call ends. This is an invaluable skill and monitoring this kind of quality is crucial for your call center.

2. Set Up a QA Team

Every call center needs someone who checks the quality of the calls. Whether it’s a separate team or part of the management team’s job description depends on the size of your call center.

3. Set Call Quality Standards

Consider what parts of the call you value the most, and what KPIs you want your agents to focus on. Based on this, you need to set quality standards that you expect agents to follow.

You want to educate your associates on all of these. Train your reps on the proper opening and greeting. Tell them exactly how it should sound. Do the same thing for the verification.

Every segment is going to differ based on your company culture. It should all be trained, educated, and roleplayed. Keep in mind, it’s not just what your associates say, but how they say it.

It’s easier to set call quality standards if you divide the call into individual segments.

Each call should have an opening, greeting, some sort of customer verification, a time for listening to customer concerns, and then a resolution. Associates should include some sort of call to action, like a cross-sell or upsell, as well as any necessary disclosures before they close the call.

4. Create a Scorecard

Once you set call quality standards and you have a team to manage them, you need a way to track your reps’ performance. 

Score them on how they handle each segment of the call. That’s how you can easily identify what the pain points are, and where there’s room for improvement.

It’s also important to educate your associates on how your scoring system works. Have all your supervisors grade all your reps, so you can all get on the same page of what is a good score and a bad one.

5. Monitor the Quality of Live Calls

There is a minor debate in the call center on whether to use live calls or recorded calls when evaluating call center associates. In reality, these serve different purposes.

It’s easiest to compare these to coaching a sports team:

• Monitoring live calls help you win the game today
• Monitoring recorded calls help you have a great season

Call quality monitoring for live calls is great to keep track of the day-to-day functioning of the contact center. Correct issues on the fly and make sure the day stays on track. Speech analytics software that lets you monitor calls in real-time is especially useful.

6. Evaluate the Quality of Recorded Calls

You need a different mindset when you evaluate the quality of recorded calls. The goal here is to raise the overall quality of the program. Recorded calls can also help your training and let you notice customer trends.

Of course, you need to score your agents from your recorded calls. However, how you present your findings on their performance matters.

7. Make the Agent Part of the Evaluation

The best way to do call quality monitoring is to have the agent with you while you do it. You can even let the agent evaluate themselves. This is a great practice because this lets the agent learn the fastest.

You should also treat the agent with respect. You’re not a grade school teacher handing them a test. You’re a team member who’s trying to motivate your reps and teach them valuable lessons.

8. Identify the Pain Points

Whether you’re analyzing the performance of a single agent or the call center overall, you need to look for the weakness in quality standards.

If an agent consistently scores low on a certain part of the call, educate them again on that specific segment.

If all the agents have the same issue, there’s something wrong with your initial training.

9. Document the Results of Call Quality Monitoring

Data drives change in the QA process. As you complete the QA process regularly, you’ll notice the trends in both customer satisfaction and agent performance.

You can use this to enhance your quality standards and your work culture.

10. Use QA as a Management Teaching Tool

Quality assurance is more than just scoring reps and making sure they say “please” and “thank you” regularly. 

It’s a great way to introduce managerial concepts to agents who have ambitions to become supervisors and managers. Involving them in the QA process can let them enhance their skills and get familiar with the way you run your call center.

11. Commit to Regular Call Quality Monitoring

Call quality monitoring isn’t a once-in-a-blue-moon deal. You can’t occasionally put your “QA” hat on and give one-off feedback to your agents. You need to make it a regular habit.

We recommend committing to 3 scored calls/agent/week. This is a low enough number to not be overwhelming for you, but high enough to draw a reasonable conclusion about their performance.

Most importantly, make sure you treat your agents with respect and understanding when you monitor the quality of their calls. Make all criticism constructive, and never make personal comments on your agent’s performance.

That’s how you ensure your work culture values good work and loyalty.

Trust a Call Center That Prides Itself on Quality

The quality of your calls represents the work you do as an organization. That’s why you need to keep track of it well. However, handling all that data, evaluation, and feedback is an exhausting task. It can overwhelm the most well-organized manager.

At Expivia, we know how important high-quality standards are. And most importantly, we know how to ensure them. We developed a system that monitors our agents’ performance and provides them valuable feedback.

Contact us to find out more about how we work, and how an outsourced contact center can help keep up with high-quality customer service requirements.