Call center quality management

What is call center quality management?

Call center quality management is a structured and proactive process that helps you monitor, assess and enhance the performance of call center agents to optimize the customer experience (CX).

It involves using various tools and metrics such as call quality monitoring, speech analytics and customer feedback analysis to evaluate and improve the quality of agent-customer interactions.

The process also entails providing targeted coaching and feedback to agents to help them identify areas for improvement and enhance their skills and knowledge. By implementing changes to address identified gaps in performance, call centers can deliver superior service, reduce customer churn and increase operational efficiency. 

Why is call center quality management important?

The quality of your call center interactions is key to prevalent brand perception in the market. Here are the benefits of call center quality management. 

1. Improve customer satisfaction

Call center quality management helps organizations improve the customer experience by identifying and resolving roadblocks that negatively impact CX. By ensuring that customers receive timely, accurate and personalized support, call centers can improve their KPIs, enhance their brand reputation and build higher loyalty. 

2. Provide valuable insights

By analyzing customer interactions and feedback, call center quality management provides valuable insights into customer preferences, pain points and behavior. Such information can be used to drive strategic decisions, improve products and services and optimize customer experience. 

3. Enhance agent training and retention 

Call center quality assurance surfaces agent performance gaps — which help you provide necessary feedback, training and coaching to improve their skills and performance. Regular interventions and coaching can boost employee satisfaction and engagement, leading to increased agent retention and reduced turnover. 

4. Ensure compliance 

Call center quality management helps organizations comply with industry standards, regulations and policies. By monitoring agent’s adherence to guidelines, call centers can mitigate risks, avoid fines and maintain legal and ethical standards.

Must read: Empower contact center agents with AI-powered quality management 

Call center quality management tools at your disposal

A call center quality management system is a tool that helps companies evaluate and analyze the performance of their customer service representatives (CSRs) on the phone. 

There are several features needed for call center quality monitoring including: 

📞Call recording
The ability to record and store calls for later review is essential. This feature allows quality analysts to evaluate CSR performance and identify areas where improvements can be made. 

🔊Speech analytics
This feature uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the content of calls for insights into customer sentiment, common customer issues and areas where CSRs may need additional training. 

📝Quality scoring 
A system for evaluating the quality of calls is essential. It allows analysts to objectively measure how well the team is meeting performance standards and identify areas where call center agent training is needed. 

🔎Live monitoring
The ability to listen in on live calls is useful for coaching and training purposes. Quality control team can provide real-time feedback to CSRs and help them improve their performance on the spot. 

📈Reporting and analytics
A comprehensive reporting system is essential for identifying trends, tracking progress and making data-driven decisions. Reports should be customizable, easy to understand and provide actionable insights. 

🔧Integration
A good call center quality monitoring tool should be able to integrate with other software systems used by the company, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or workforce management (WFM) tools. 

Call center quality management best practices

Call center quality assurance (QA) is a critical aspect of call center management, but given the volume of available call data, it can be overwhelming. These best practices will help you establish an effective call center QA process and enhance the performance of your agents. 

Apprise agents of expectations

Agents must have no doubts with what’s expected of them to ensure a call center works smoothly. Dispel doubts and set quality benchmarks effectively through periodic caliberation sessions.

• Audit calls to identify communication or product knowledge gaps.  

• Set realistic expectation and targets for each agent — ensuring reviews are transparent, helpful and unambiguous.  

• Ensure a waterproof feedback loop. Be receptive and empathetic, yet more comfortable with giving constructive feedback.

Build a toolkit to address disgruntled customers

Auditing customer calls is an enlightening process. Here are some common reasons why call centers have to tackle unhappy customers.

• Problems that recur and frustrate customers 

• Commonly reported technical glitches 

• Holdups regarding refunds, returns and exchanges 

Design standardized policies and escalation routes so agents know the appropriate plan of action. So, when they’re confused tackling a real-time irrate customer in real-time, the know exactly what route to take to pacify the situation. When rectifying has a monetary implication (business bears the cost), ensure the policies are in-accordance to the financial damage the business can write off. 

Create a quality scorecard

To create a scorecard for call center quality management, start by identifying customer service metrics that are important to your call center. Assign a weighting to each KPI based on its importance and set target values for each metric.

Create a scoring system that assigns points to each metric based on whether the target was met or not. Finally, regularly review the scorecard results and provide feedback to agents based on their performance. This scorecard should be a living document that is regularly reviewed and updated to ensure it remains effective in driving call center quality management.

Deep-dive: How to leverage a call center agent performance scorecard 

Recognize efforts and acknowledge achievements

Manning call center phone lines day in and day out can be incredibly mundane. To ensure the quality of your call center interactions doesn’t dip, you must keep the morale high. 

Agents are often working tirelessly, so it’s important to take the time to recognize and appreciate their hard work. Start reward programs for high achievers and set up fun challenges to motivate others. Appreciate agents publicly and strive to achieve a happy and conducive working environment. 

Invest in call center automation

Call centers are chaotic. They are usually not built to handle the volume of queries they receive — a key reason why call centers fall behind on keeping up with quality standards. A call center automation solution can help call centers record, store and access information more structurally. While agents can offload a lot of their tasks to a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, automation also helps quality analysts improve the overall standard of call center interactions. 

Interesting read: Quality management to improve agent performance and retention 

Why choose Sprinklr — the ultimate call center quality management solution

Call centers have a lot on their plates. The constant barrage of calls can make life for an employee too overwhelming to work on improving call center quality. A complete call center software like Sprinklr Service not only makes an agent’s typical work day ess stressful but also surfaces points of improvement and actionable ways to address them. 

• Monitor and set up alerts for low quality scores for each agent — identify and fix performance gaps in time 

• Dive into caller’s psyche and analyze customer sentiment through interactions from 30+ channels 

• Make quicker strategic decisions with AI-powered quality and performance reports

Drive customer happiness with AI-powered call quality monitoring

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