Call Quality Monitoring Dos and Don'ts

Customer experience is a huge factor in bringing consumers back into the fold as repeat customers. A major facet of a customer’s experience is the customer service exchanges they have with your company’s representatives. Any employee that a customer talks to is the face of your business during that interaction. If your employees are interacting with a high volume of customers on the phone, it’s important to make sure those contacts are both positive for the customer and aligned with your business objectives. Quality monitoring plays an important role in the performance improvement process to make sure both needs are met. It may sound as easy as simply listening to calls and telling people what to change, but great quality monitoring is a much more nuanced endeavor. Let’s explore some DOs and DON’Ts to make your process as effective as possible.

DON’T: Use the same generic form for all channels and programs

While it may be easy to come up with a list of basic phone behaviors to apply across the board, each program and channel likely involves different customer expectations, business objectives, and measures of success. Using the same monitoring form for everything limits your ability to gain valuable insight on the specific requirements of each.

DO: Constantly reevaluate your forms

Business objectives and needs shift quickly. A monitoring form should always reflect your goals, and should be thought of as a “work in progress” always being adapted to meet the current needs. Doing so allows you to find the actionable opportunities that make the biggest impact on current objectives.

DON’T: Think of technology as a panacea

Having the best quality monitoring technology can certainly help improve quality in your contact center. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as installing and waiting for results. Technology is a tool, and is most effective when utilized by a team of trained quality analysts at the helm. Invest in the training and professional development of those using your technology solution if you want to get the best results.

DO: Aggregate, track, and share results

While you can move the needle by simply listening to individuals and fixing their issues one by one, it’s much harder that way. Great quality management programs compile results at the agent, team, and location levels to track growing trends and gain additional insights. Finding trends at the team and location level lets you provide targeted group training to create larger performance impacts. Sharing this information with project managers, supervisors, and trainers helps everyone stay on the same page and identify larger opportunities for improvement.

DON’T: Let your quality team become the “Call Cops”

Focusing narrowly on taking punitive and corrective actions harms the synergy of the quality and operations groups. Agents will dread getting monitoring results and it fosters a “What did I do wrong now?” attitude that impedes getting buy-in during coaching sessions. Don’t just tell agents about their calls, have a conversation about them. Letting agents listen and score their calls before talking about them, involving them in calibrations, and listening to top performers helps create a collaborative feeling that improves coaching effectiveness.

DO: Hold recurring calibration sessions

When given a simple task, members of a group will often go about that task differently. This is especially true when you tell them to measure subjective qualities like empathy. Calibration with all the stakeholders helps ensure that monitoring and scoring is done consistently. It’s also a great time to evaluate the form itself, discuss any shifting objectives, and discover trends that might come up.

DON’T: Rely on small samples of your call volume

New technologies like speech analytics can be used to analyze 100% of your customer interactions to ensure important issues don’t fall through the cracks. You can find calls by keywords to monitor calls for specific issues, discover trends and recurring issues, measure call drivers, and give your training team insight on what to cover.

DO: Use what works best for you

I mentioned that every contact center has different goals and objectives that define “success.” Implement the processes that have the most meaningful impact on your center. Don’t be afraid to kick other practices to the curb if they aren’t relevant or helpful to you. There is no right way for everyone and there are plenty of creative implementations that can be tweaked to best fit your own needs.