How To Complete Call Centre Quality Monitoring

Call centre quality monitoring is key to ensuring that you consistently deliver a high level of service and maintain call centre agent/adviser standards. Achieving this on a small scale or for a short period of time can be relatively easy. However, delivering a quality service at scale and consistently is a much greater challenge and one that necessitates a specific focus on quality monitoring in every aspect of your call centre operations. The benefits are clear: the more effective your quality monitoring is, the higher your quality of service will be. Businesses that deliver high quality service to customers, tend to have more satisfied customers, which leads to continuing loyalty and the increased sales and profitability that result from this. Completing quality monitoring at scale can be a challenge and it is one reason why many growing and established businesses choose to outsource customer service to a professional call centre partner like Impact.

At Impact, we strive to deliver world-class service on behalf of our clients with a combination of our trained and skilled call centre agents and AI technology. We recognise the importance of continuous improvement in all areas of our call centre, not least our agents. We commit significant resources and provide support that helps them continuously improve their skills and knowledge, so they are best placed to deliver world-class service in every interaction. Although it is important to be familiar with the benefits of quality monitoring, the greatest challenge is how to successfully complete it at scale. In this article, we explore how to implement quality monitoring successfully so it can support the consistent delivery of world-class service.

Implementing Call Centre Quality Monitoring

This can help your business to transform the quality of service that it delivers to clients and maintain this high standard across a high volume of interactions. Adopting an extensive quality monitoring programme is the most effective and proven way to achieve and maintain a quality service delivery within your call centre. Whichever areas within quality monitoring that you decide to focus on, significant progress can be made when they are underpinned by a clear and effective quality monitoring strategy.

By maintaining high quality service throughout all areas of your call centre, the collective impact of this on service delivery can be truly transformative. Consider what the results of consistently delivering world-class service could be: even a relatively small improvement could deliver exceptional results in terms of customer satisfaction, loyalty, sales and even profitability.

If your call centre is in-house call centre or an outsourced call centre, making quality monitoring a key priority could yield exceptional results and help you deliver a world-class customer experience. We explore how defining your quality standards, choosing a monitoring method, creating a quality scorecard and focusing on tracking & analysis can help your business.

Define Your Quality Standards

Clearly defining your quality standards is the critical first step in the quality monitoring process. Once you have defined your standards in a measurable way, it is easy to track and monitor progress and take corrective action should your quality deviate from the defined standards. In practical terms, this often involves setting a number of objectives, each with their own set of indicators that assist with the grading of performance against each one.

The standards and objectives can then be set for each call centre agent to help guide them to deliver the desired level of quality. Agents should be informed how they are graded and supported to help achieve the required standard. This support can include further training and coaching in order to enhance their skills. When setting the quality objectives and associated indicators, it is always best to minimise subjectiveness and aim for what can be easily measured as either completed, not completed or not applicable to the interaction. This helps to avoid subjective scoring, which can complicate the measurement process.

While the precise objectives and indicators will vary from business to business depending on priorities, there are a number of common standards that are worth considering. The greeting or introduction during an interaction is an important starting point, especially as it has the potential to set the tone of the entire interaction. If an agent can deliver a high-quality greeting, the rest of the interaction is much more likely to be positive. In addition to this, there are a number of other objectives and indicators that can be worth measuring, including soft skills (empathy and listening), problem solving, product knowledge, compliance requirements and checking to see if a customer has any other issues to discuss.

At Impact Call Centre, we have developed a proven process for defining, measuring and analysing progress made against quality standards. This is fully integrated into our systems and calculates each agent’s scoring against given objectives and indicators. Data is collected and accessed by our experienced management team. In order to deliver the highest possible quality standards for every client, we set individual objectives and indicators. This helps us to maintain a clear focus on every client’s business objectives and priorities as part of our quality standard. Why not contact us and discuss how we can help you define and maintain quality standards for your customers? Simply complete our enquiry form or call us on 01794 230 230.

Choose A Monitoring Method

As soon as quality standards have been defined, it is essential that you choose relevant monitoring methods to help ensure that these are maintained at scale and over a long period of time. Effective quality monitoring methods include side by side monitoring, recorded monitoring, screen monitoring and web/email monitoring. And now, AI tools are available that will transcribe and monitor calls in real time, which is an exciting new development in this arena. Some monitoring methods are naturally more suited to certain communication channels than others and the exact choice varies depending on your business and its objectives.

At Impact, we are now actively implementing AI based real-time call quality monitoring so that we can increase quality whilst potentially driving down cost. The new solutions that are becoming increasingly popular are now starting to be seen in some of the more forward-looking contact centres.  This exciting change means that it’s now possible to cost effectively quality check 100% of consumer and customer interactions where previously, this has been cost prohibitive.

Previously, side by side monitoring involved an agent/advisor being joined in a call by a coach, who will listen to the call and grade it live against the defined quality standards. This is a great way to gain feedback and useful insights in a timely manner, without waiting for calls to be graded as part of a larger batch by a coach. If there is a pressing quality issue or concern, side by side monitoring can be a great way to address it quickly and restore quality standards. It is, however, quite resource intensive and requires a coach to be available for specific calls.

Web/email monitoring involves a coach reviewing either a live customer interaction or historical one in text form. This will then be graded by a coach in a similar way to the side by side and recorded monitoring methods, taking account of how well quality standards have been met. This monitoring method is particularly important in that it encompasses a great range of channels and enables contact monitoring rather than just call monitoring. As a greater number of customers continue to use web and email as communication channels, this form of monitoring plays an ever-greater role in monitoring interactions in a typical contact centre.

At Impact, we have a unique capability when it comes to call monitoring, as we are not only able to monitor calls by duration, but we can also monitor calls based on the call type. Our systems are able to sort calls by call outcomes and sub-outcomes, which makes it easier to gain insights on a particular area of customer service such as retention or troubleshooting for example. This focused approach to call monitoring further increases our effectiveness as a call centre and helps us to deliver world-class service to some of the UK’s leading brands.

Create A Quality Scorecard

Creating a quality scorecard is a great way to gain easy visibility of the progress made in maintaining quality standards across the range of set objectives and indicators. It gives an at-a-glance view of quality levels and is usually most effective with a monthly data view. In many cases, having a scorecard for each agent and the business overall is an effective way to measure progress as it allows the data to be filtered and reviewed.

In order to maintain an effective quality scorecard, calibration sessions are critical. They help to reduce subjectivity in terms of measuring progress against quality standards by establishing exactly what excellence looks like for each objective. These sessions involve both managers and coaches and ensure that standards are uniformly established across all areas of the call centre. In addition to the calibration sessions, it is critical that feedback is then given on the results shown in the quality scorecard. This involves regularly reviewing/monitoring interactions throughout the month and providing feedback either on a monthly basis or, if it is more critical, as soon as possible after it is received. The most significant benefit of this more timely feedback is the ability to then quickly address critical quality issues before their impact worsens, often to the detriment of wider quality standards in a call centre.

Constructive feedback can be effectively delivered to agents by email, face to face or even via call centre systems, which can be accessed from anywhere. At Impact, we have our own dedicated feedback module, which has been integrated into our own systems. This allows our agents to easily access feedback, even in granular detail in regard to individual objectives and their associated indicators. This helps our agents quickly identify areas for improvement and act on them.

Focus On Tracking & Analytics

Focusing on tracking and analytics is critical to maintaining an effective quality monitoring programme. By tracking quality levels over time, for both teams of agents and individual agents, it is possible to gain valuable insights that can make a real difference. The aim of quality monitoring is to help and support every agent to get to the highest level. Contact centre coaches play a key role in this by consistently tracking how well agents are performing against quality standards and monitoring any trends that emerge from the data. Once trends are identified, they can be used to drive quality improvements across the call centre.

Call centre quality monitoring is not just about identifying where there are issues. It is also concerned with identifying what is working well and making the most of this. Where effective practices are identified and it is transferrable to other agents, it can become best practice and be used to improve quality levels among all agents. It is also important that effective practices are rewarded and recognised with both financial and non-financial incentives. Financial incentives for providing quality, world-class service can be particularly effective, as can non-financial incentives such as “call handler of the month” or “client champion”, which provide additional recognition and potential rewards to top performers.

A culture of continuous improvement is established when quality is successfully tracked and analysed. This will then support improvements to customer satisfaction and the delivery of world-class service, which will delight customers.