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23 Best Practices for Call Center Quality Assurance
by Kent Mao | Published On July 5, 2024
Follow these QA best practices to enhance your call center and improve customer satisfaction.
Quality assurance (QA) in call centers is crucial for ensuring that customer expectations are being met on a consistent basis.
By using strategies such as call monitoring and recording, feedback mechanisms, and automated scorecards, call centers can maintain complete visibility into all interactions. This helps ensure they’re handling each call with precision, efficiency, and professionalism.
Today, the rise of artificial intelligence and automation has led to the development of advanced quality assurance tools that can offer call centers access to even deeper insights and more efficient QA methods.
Read on to learn 23 tips and best practices for optimizing the quality assurance of your call center.
1. Define clear QA standards
The first and most important step in optimizing your call center quality assurance strategy is setting clear standards for what “quality” means to your organization.
Define the specific criteria you’ll be evaluating to ensure you adhere to customer expectations. For example, ask yourself:
- How long should a customer wait on hold?
- What level of availability are you offering (such as 24/7 customer service)?
- How long should it take for employees to answer calls?
- What’s your ideal first call resolution rate?
- Do you have any service level agreements (SLAs) to adhere to?
Companies should evaluate feedback from their customers as a place to start. You can also use external benchmarking to determine how the performance of your call center compares to others.
2. Map the customer journey
An effective strategy for quality assurance involves constantly evaluating and optimizing every touchpoint in the customer journey. This means you need a clear map to help you understand all points where customers interact with your call center, including IVR menus, hold times, agent interactions, and follow-up processes. Don’t forget to consider different customer segments and how their journeys might differ.
When mapping the customer journey, evaluate the main friction points that your customers may face at each touchpoint and what their primary goals might be when contacting your team.
3. Identify key metrics to monitor
There are a wide range of metrics that you can choose to monitor as part of your QA process. But it’s important to first take some time to evaluate and decide which metrics are most valuable to your organization. That way you can avoid spending too much time sorting through data, or accidentally focusing on the wrong insights.
Common KPI metrics for quality assurance include:
- First call resolution rate
- Average call duration
- Average handle time
- Call transfer rate
- Call abandonment rate
- Call quality score
- Agent script adherence
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
Choose your key metrics based on the specific goals you want to achieve. For instance, if your goal is to improve relationships with customers and increase retention rates, you should monitor metrics such as call quality score and customer satisfaction score.
4. Emphasize employee training
Often, the quality of a customer service call will depend heavily on how well your agents are equipped to handle each interaction. Agents need the right knowledge and skills to resolve problems quickly, empathize with customers, and utilize technology when necessary.
It’s important to implement a comprehensive agent training program based on the standards you’ve set for your quality assurance strategy. The training you give your employees should start during the onboarding phase and continue throughout their career. The best call center training programs include a blend of online courses, mentorship programs, coaching, and in-person training sessions.
5. Ensure internal resources are easily accessible
Employees will struggle to handle calls quickly and effectively if they don’t have the right resources at their fingertips. That’s why it’s important to make sure the software your agents use when handling calls provides quick access to all the resources they need.
Depending on what call center software you use, these resources could include call scripts, standard operating procedures, sentiment analysis tools, and even agent assist chatbots.
It also helps to ensure your contact center tools are integrated with the other resources your employees use to serve customers, such as your CRM software.
6. Use call recording
Call recording is a powerful tool for quality assurance in call centers. Recording calls and reviewing them is an excellent way to ensure your agents are adhering to compliance guidelines and internal QA standards.
Call recordings can also be used in employee training initiatives to provide new agents with real-life examples of good and bad interactions. Plus, some advanced AI tools can analyze your call recordings automatically and at scale, which can help reveal hidden patterns and insights.
7. Leverage real-time monitoring
Real-time monitoring tools provide instant insights into QA metrics, ensuring agents and supervisors can proactively improve customer experiences.
Real-time monitoring tools also allow companies to implement automated notifications. This helps ensure business leaders are made aware of potential problems before they have a chance to damage your brand’s reputation.
For example, call centers can monitor when metrics are approaching critical thresholds, allowing supervisors to jump into a call and rectify an issue when necessary or allocate resources appropriately.
8. Implement QA scorecards
Many call centers use scorecards to measure and improve the performance of each employee. These cards offer insights into the unique performance metrics of each staff member, monitoring things like first-call resolution rate, customer feedback scores, and more.
With scorecards, call center leaders can pinpoint specific areas of improvement for their staff, which helps to personalize feedback and training sessions. Additionally, scorecards can give individual employees a way of tracking and monitoring their performance over time.
Some advanced QA tools can automatically generate scorecards for agents instead of having supervisors manually fill them out.
9. Automate QA workflows
Call centers often struggle to optimize their QA strategies because manually reviewing metrics, creating scorecards, and recording data takes too much time. Fortunately, with the right technology, you can now automate many essential QA processes.
Companies can leverage automation tools and AI to automate agent scoring, allowing for more consistent and accurate insights into agent performance. You can also use automation tools for data collection, call recording, call transcription, call summarization, and even sentiment analysis.
10. Conduct regular QA audits
Quality assurance audits are essential for consistently reviewing and enhancing your QA methods and strategy. During an audit, you can evaluate everything from the metrics you’re monitoring to the software you’re using.
Most call centers can benefit from scheduling a quality assurance audit every six months to a year. Make sure you use your audit to re-evaluate your current standards, SLAs, agent performance, and technology, so you can identify areas for strategic improvement.
11. Provide employees with quality feedback
Feedback is a critical tool for improving the performance of your call center agents. Sharing constructive feedback with your employees helps them to understand exactly what they need to change, improve, or continue doing to meet your company’s expectations.
Unfortunately, many companies fail to give their teams feedback that is timely, constructive and actionable. Try to make sure supervisors set aside time to deliver feedback to employees based on their performance metrics and challenges. Remember to provide feedback that is focused on specific events and behaviours rather than generalities.
12. Incorporate AI tools
AI has the potential to enhance many call center processes, from self-service chatbots and intelligent call routing to improving workforce management and data collection. For example, incorporating AI into your quality assurance strategy can help you draw more insights from both live calls and recordings.
Companies can use AI-powered speech analytics tools to evaluate customer sentiment in real time and provide employees with suggestions on how to enhance satisfaction rates. You can also use AI tools to monitor how well agents adhere to scripts and compliance standards.
AI tools can even provide real-time feedback to agents during calls, offering suggestions for improving customer interactions based on predefined criteria and past data.
13. Take an omnichannel approach
Customers aren’t just reaching out over the phone these days. They’re connecting with sales and customer service teams through messaging tools, social media apps, emails, and more. If you want to upgrade your call center QA strategy, you need to ensure that you’re providing excellent service across every channel.
It’s important to also leverage software that allows you to record conversations and monitor interactions in real time across every channel. Leading software vendors are now offering omnichannel solutions that can integrate conversation data from multiple platforms and store it in one shared database.
When assessing your performance metrics, you can use this combined data for a more holistic view of your customer experience strategy.
14. Gather customer feedback
Call center quality management tools are excellent for giving you clear, quantitative insights into your team’s performance. For example, these tools can help you track KPIs like average handling times and wait times. However, it often helps to build on this hard data with genuine customer feedback.
Regularly sharing surveys with your customers will allow you to gather deeper insights into how they feel about your company. Consider using post-call surveys and customer feedback forms to monitor things like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer effort scores (CES).
These surveys may be conducted following a call, through email, or even by automated IVR systems.
15. Encourage self-assessment
Managers and supervisors shouldn’t be the only people in a call center who can track agent performance. Ensuring your employees have access to real-time dashboards and personalized metrics can help encourage consistent self-improvement. Many software solutions will allow agents to view their own performance data on a personal dashboard without seeing their teammates' metrics.
You can also encourage team members to regularly assess their own performance by identifying their strengths and weaknesses and setting goals for professional growth. Finally, don’t forget to ask them to share their thoughts about where they can improve during performance reviews.
16. Implement peer reviews
Feedback is crucial to improving agent performance and overall quality of service. However, it can be difficult for call center managers to deliver feedback consistently, particularly when they manage a larger team. Peer reviews are a great solution to this problem. By allowing team members to comment on a colleague’s performance, you can help improve the feedback cycle in many ways.
For example, peer reviews can provide different viewpoints and insights that might not be visible to supervisors, leading to a more comprehensive evaluation. Peer reviews can also help reduce biases that may exist in manager-only reviews. Feedback between colleagues can also boost engagement and help foster a collaborative work environment.
You can start by encouraging team members to congratulate their colleagues when they reach important targets or share suggestions on how they can overcome common challenges.
17. Motivate agents with rewards and recognition
Acknowledging and rewarding your agents for a job well done can help drive motivation and engagement among your team. Studies consistently show that rewarding your team members – whether it’s with praise or incentives – increases productivity and fosters loyalty.
Experiment with different ways to show your team members that you appreciate their hard work. You could issue broadcasts commending your top-performing team members, share their success stories on a company network, and even reward staff with paid time off and other benefits.
18. Analyze QA data and trends
Having a well-thought-out strategy for quality assurance is essential for ensuring you continuously satisfy, convert, and retain customers. But it’s just as important to be constantly updating your QA strategy based on the data you collect.
You can analyze historical data to pinpoint trends that affect your quality assurance metrics. For instance, you might discover that customer satisfaction scores drop on days when you have fewer employees available to handle incoming calls or when inexperienced agents are given complex cases to deal with. Identifying these friction points will help you optimize your future QA strategy.
19. Perform root cause analysis
Performing a root cause analysis (RCA) can help pinpoint the fundamental problems causing customers to repeatedly contact your call center. RCA is a systematic approach that involves looking below the surface of a problem to uncover the core reasons behind it.
By understanding and resolving the underlying issues that lead to customer complaints, call centers can improve service quality and prevent recurring issues. Ultimately, RCA can help reduce the volume of repeat calls and lead to an overall better customer experience.
20. Ensure regulatory compliance
While the main focus of call center quality assurance is on improving customer experiences and enhancing employee performance, you should also be paying close attention to compliance. Making sure your employees adhere to scripts and follow the right processes when dealing with sensitive information will help to protect you from regulatory fines and reputational damage.
Ensuring compliance is now much easier with the rise of AI technology. Nowadays, there are a variety of AI-powered tools that can monitor instances of non-compliance in real time and automatically alert supervisors when necessary.
21. Don’t forget about internal feedback
Just as your customers can give you valuable feedback that can enhance your call center’s quality assurance process, your employees can offer useful insights as well. For example, your agents can be a great source of feedback on conversation quality and may be able to identify issues much faster than customers.
Your agents can also offer feedback on your call center’s technology, which can help you decide which tools to invest in for the future.
22. Implement gamification
Keeping employees engaged and motivated can be difficult, particularly in an environment as stressful as a call center. Luckily, there are a wide range of gamification tools for call centers available today. These tools create a game-like environment by incorporating leaderboards, points, badges, and challenges to effectively motivate and engage agents in the workplace.
Outside of these tools, simple gamification strategies, such as creating a leaderboard for top-performing employees, can get your team members excited about hitting benchmarks.
An effective gamification strategy should also incorporate rewards and incentives. For example, you can award successful team members with points for achieving specific goals, which they can trade in for rewards such as gift cards, extra time off, or cash bonuses.
23. Choose the right software
Last but not least, make sure you’re using the right call center software to power your quality assurance strategy. A highly customizable and data-driven solution, like ComputerTalk’s ice Contact Center, will give you a comprehensive view of your entire call center and how it performs, both historically and in real-time.
With the right call center technology, you’ll be able to maintain an accurate view of essential KPIs, automate various QA workflows, and even simplify tasks like creating employee scorecards.
Enhance Your Quality Assurance with ComputerTalk
A comprehensive approach to quality assurance is essential for any call center. Investing in the right QA strategy strengthens customer relationships and enhances your reputation, resulting in higher retention and conversion rates.
A robust QA strategy can help with everything from improving resource allocation to enhancing agent performance and productivity.
Contact us today to find out how our software can help you master quality assurance in your call center.
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