With US companies losing more than $62 billion per year due to poor customer service, call center quality assurance is something you can’t ignore.
Quality assurance can transform your customer support performance and elevate customer satisfaction.
But what is call center quality assurance? And, how can you improve the quality of your call center operations? Let’s find out.
What is Call Center Quality Assurance?
Call center quality assurance improves the quality of the experience your agents are providing to your customers. It involves monitoring the agents’ calls and analyzing their quality for the customers’ requirements and expectations.
How to Measure The Quality of Your Call Center Operations?
You can specify quality metrics and KPIs depending on your needs and requirements. In general, most call centers use the following KPIs to measure quality.
- Quality scores
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- First Call Resolution (FCR)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
However, there are other metrics as well that are often ignored. These include Agent Satisfaction (ASAT), Service Level, and Average Time Handling (AHT). Analyze your organizational requirements before selecting the KPIs you want to use to measure your call center quality assurance.
Why is Call Center Quality Assurance Critical?
In a nutshell, assuring call center quality is all about preventing mistakes and improving customer experience. However, customer service involves other layers as well that need to be addressed.
Here’s why quality assurance is vital in a call center.
- Clarify Company Goals and Values
Your customer service team needs to understand their goal, what they are aiming to resolve, and what their customers expect from each interaction. If your agents don’t have a clear objective in mind, they might struggle to render consistent experience to the customers. An effective QA process allows you to clarify your department’s goals and values.
- Establish A Culture of Quality
Working in a call center can be demotivating – your agents can easily lose motivation. Yes, they’ll do what’s required of them, but they won’t go the extra mile to make the customers happy.
With a quality assurance process in place, you can develop a structure of healthy competition. By monitoring metrics, you can set goals and rewards, which would boost your agents to go above and beyond what’s expected of them.
- Identify Shortcomings In Customer Service
Occasional mishappenings in customer service can get overlooked. But if it’s happening more often, your customers will notice it. The QA process recognizes the flaws in your service.
By monitoring calls, analysts can point out areas that demand improvement. This is crucial because if your customers feel you’re not serving them well, they’ll undoubtedly start looking for more reliable options.
- Provides An Exceptional Customer Experience
Businesses that incorporate consumer feedback tend to provide the best customer experiences. If you’re not asking your callers for their opinions, you’ll make customer service more difficult.
Quality assurance ensures your service aligns with your customer expectations. By conducting regular customer surveys, you can get feedback and then use it to tailor your existing services.
Also, Read: How to Optimize the Efficiency of your Call Center
- Improve Customer Retention
If you don’t already know the importance of customer retention, existing customers make up to 60-70% of a company’s revenue. Contrarily, new customers account for only 5-20% of sales. Thus, retaining your customers is critical for the growth of your business.
Call center quality assurance allows you to measure agents’ performance and customers’ satisfaction. Using this data, you can develop a concrete understanding of what your customers want.
Call center agents need intense training at least twice a year. However, most training programs are more or less the same. They last for a day or two, and all agents receive the same coaching and materials. Most of these sessions are irrelevant to the agents.
Call center quality assurance allows you to evaluate the performance of each agent. You can use this performance data to upskill agents individually and help them overcome their shortcomings.
How to Assure Call Center Quality?
Now that you know why call center quality assurance is so critical to your business let’s discuss how you can improve the quality of your call center operations.
The first step is to formalize your QA process. Appoint a separate team and leader for QA. If the number of agents is high, you can also deploy a QA software to automate processes like call recording and performance alerts. Record and monitor calls and interactions of all agents to make informed conclusions.
- Internal and External Collaboration
Allow your agents to work openly and assess themselves and each other. Instead of sticking to one-way feedback, encourage feedback from multiple levels within an organization. Also, ask your clients and customers to review your services – show them that you care.
Live call monitoring allows you to identify the flaws in your service. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid successful calls. Interactions that went well can also be good learning for you and your agents.
- Look for Coaching Opportunities
Coaching your call center agents consistently is critical. When monitoring the performance of your agents, look for areas where they can improve. Then, conduct individual training sessions to help them overcome their hurdles.
Several countries have call center regulations. To improve the quality of your call center operations, adhere to local regulations. Secure data storage is another critical aspect of call center compliance. So, stay updated with local and global rules and be sure to comply with them.
Your call center quality assurance process shouldn’t be all about the negative. Highlight the best performances and reward all your agents for taking part in the quality assurance process.
Voice calling is not the only way your agents and customers interact with each other. There are other mediums as well, such as text, email, etc. So, don’t limit your call center quality assurance process to monitoring calls. Dig deep into other interactions between your agents and customers to get a better idea of how your agents perform at calls.
Once the QA process is complete, share the best practices with your agents. Point out the best calls, performances, and agents, and reward them. Also, don’t hesitate to outline their mistakes.
Some Mistakes to Avoid
Here are some call center quality assurance mistakes to avoid.
Don’t go overboard with bulky evaluation forms and unnecessary items. It can confuse your agents and slow down the process.
- Too Much Focus On Quantity
The more the calls, the better for your business. But don’t emphasize a lot on quantity as it can deviate the agents from focusing on quality and the overall customer experience.
- Using A Black/White Approach
Most evaluation forms consist of simple Yes/No questions. Some aspects and qualities of your agents go beyond an objective answer, so look for a more positive and flexible evaluation approach.
Wrapping it up
The benefits of call center quality assurance can vary. It can help you provide better customer experience, increased customer retention, or stronger employee motivation. Whatever your purpose of quality assurance might be, make sure to incorporate a reliable QA strategy in place.
Are you looking forward to implementing a QA process into your call center? What challenges are you facing?
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