What is call center monitoring?
Call center monitoring refers to evaluating and overseeing all aspects of customer interactions—not just calls. This includes phone calls, emails and chats. The goal? Uphold your brand’s customer service quality and ensure operational efficiency.
Customer service managers or quality assurance supervisors typically handle this, using tools like CRM systems, AI-driven analytics and call center recording software. They aim to enhance customer satisfaction by identifying areas for improvement, providing feedback and ensuring consistent service quality.
In the past, call center monitoring involved basic call logging and manual reviews. Today, it has transformed with advanced technologies like generative AI, conversation analytics and sentiment analysis, making it more precise and insightful. For example, predictive analytics can forecast call volumes, allowing for better resource allocation and customer service.
Fundamental Read: Call Management: A Comprehensive Guide
Why is call center monitoring critical?
You can't improve what you don’t measure. Similarly, call center monitoring helps measure and improve customer service efforts. Here’s why it is important.
📈 Increases customer satisfaction
Tracking CSAT is crucial. Regularly monitoring call center interactions can help you devise a more targeted approach to problem solving, helping your agents address issues quickly. Consequently, this improves your CSAT and ensures your customers are content with the help they receive.
Related Read: Top Techniques to Measure Customer Satisfaction [+Role of AI]
🗣 Improves agent experience
According to the Harvard Business Review, employee well-being is closely linked to how happy your customers are. To ensure that, you need to focus on improving your agent experience. Monitoring agent performance helps you to identify gaps and subsequent training needs for every member of your team. This approach enables personalized coaching, which makes them more skillful and confident on the job. It even reduces call center agent attrition, as agents feel supported and less stressed.
Deep Dive: How Generative AI Drives Agent Experience
📊 Enhances ROI
Good customer service can make your customers willing to pay more. Since monitoring your call center can help you allocate your resources more judiciously, it can in turn optimize operations and reduce customer care costs.
Learn More: How to Calculate Contact Center ROI
Challenges in call center monitoring
Monitoring a call center isn’t limited to just calls and interactions. It’s a comprehensive process that could entail certain challenges, such as:
⚠️Monitoring all calls
It's difficult to monitor all calls, especially in high-volume call centers. Despite advanced tools like CRM analytics, AI transcription, and call recording software, some interactions might slip through the cracks. For instance, peak hours can lead to rushed interactions. Your agent might miss nuances like tonality changes or specific complaints.
Do this 👉 Implement a dynamic sampling strategy using AI to prioritize calls based on complexity, customer sentiment and issue type. Use real-time analytics to flag high-risk interactions for immediate view, ensuring critical calls receive attention without overwhelming your monitoring resources. AI-driven voice analytics can even help you assess customer satisfaction on all of your calls ahead of time to ensure your agents are amped up to make pivots proactively.
Want to see it all come together in harmony? Book your personalized demo today.
⚠️Ensuring agent participation
Encouraging agents to engage fully in monitoring and feedback processes can be tough. Some may view it as micromanagement. For example, agents might feel their autonomy is compromised if supervisors constantly review their calls. This can lead to resistance, where agents may become defensive or less open to constructive criticism.
Do this 👉 Foster a culture of continuous improvement by integrating self-assessment tools and peer reviews. Use gamification to reward proactive participation and highlight success stories. This approach empowers agents, making them active participants in their development rather than passive subjects of scrutiny.
⚠️Upholding transparency
In call center monitoring, it's tricky to share enough information without revealing too much. Agents need to know how they're being judged — what metrics matter and where they need to get better. If they don't have this clear information, they might feel unsure and less trusting of the process. This means being open about performance targets and feedback methods while keeping sensitive data protected.
Do this 👉 To address this, create a straightforward guide that explains how agents are evaluated and the importance of each metric.
Employ AI to consolidate data from all customer touchpoints, thereby ensuring a single source of truth
Use anonymous examples during training to protect privacy
Offer agents access to their performance stats in real time and keep them informed about any updates to the evaluation process
These steps are made easy with the help of a solid Service Command Center. Using Sprinklr’s, you can build your central reference point to ensure unambiguity in strategic decisions.
A simple demo can bring this to life for your business too. Book one today.
Key metrics for call center monitoring
Supervisors track some key metrics to monitor their call center operations and activities. Let’s have a look:
Metric | Definition | Formula | Application Example |
Conversion rate | The percentage of outbound calls leading to sales, booking or leads | (Total conversions / total calls) * 100 | If 500 outbound calls are made in a month, resulting in 75 sales, your conversion rate is 15%. |
Cost per call | The average cost incurred per call | Total costs / total calls | If a call center spends $10,000 and handles 2,000 calls, the cost per call is $5. |
Service level | Percentage of calls answered within a set time frame | (Calls answered within time / total calls) * 100 | If 900 out of 1,000 calls are answered within 30 seconds, your service level is 90%. |
Call volume | The total number of calls received in a specific period | A sum of incoming calls | If a call center receives 5,000 calls weekly, the call volume is 5,000. |
The percentage of calls abandoned by customers before reaching an agent | (Abandoned calls / total incoming calls) * 100 | If 50 out of 1,000 calls are abandoned, your call abandonment rate is 5%. | |
The percentage of calls resolved on the first interaction without follow-up | (Calls resolved first time / total resolved calls) * 100 | If 700 out of 1,000 calls are resolved on the first contact, the FCR is 70%. |
You Might Want To Know: Important Call Center Agent Performance Metrics to Track
Now that your fundamentals are set, let’s dive into the best practices for call center monitoring.
5 essential practices for call center monitoring
The following practices apply to businesses of all sizes. We've ensured they are practical and easy to apply:
1. Set clear KPIs and standards for call quality
Define specific call center KPIs for assessing call quality, such as first-call resolution, customer satisfaction scores and average handle time (AHT). Don’t use vague or overly broad KPIs that fail to measure performance. With clearly defined KPIs, you can avoid inconsistent service quality and misaligned team efforts.
Related Read: Important Call Center KPI Benchmarks by Industry
💡Pro Tip: Benchmark your standards against your contenders to build a healthy understanding of what you need to excel. Join industry groups or forums and participate in benchmarking surveys. This gives you access to a broader data pool, allowing you to compare your call center's performance against both industry standards and top-performing competitors accurately. You may even get access to exclusive benchmarking research to know how you perform against competition.
For example, this report below can help you accurately gauge how you stack up against the top 300 tech brands so you can develop a level-headed standard and KPIs of your own.
2. Analyze 100% of calls for comprehensive insights
Use call listening to get a complete view of customer interactions and agent performance. Feeling overwhelmed? Leverage call center quality monitoring toolkits to monitor and evaluate the calls. With AI and speech analytics, these solution stacks can evaluate all customer calls in bulk, create transcripts and provide data insights. They cover customer sentiment, common issues and call quality.
This practice helps identify trends, common customer complaints, training needs and technical difficulties early. With full analysis, you can avoid overlooking critical feedback and emerging patterns.
💡Pro Tip: Utilize emotion-based sentiment analysis features in your call center quality monitoring software. For instance, if the software detects frequent mentions of "refunds" and negative emotions, you can investigate and resolve recurring refund issues. This helps pinpoint specific customer concerns and emotional responses, enabling you to address issues more effectively and enhance the customer experience.
3. Provide agents feedback based on monitoring insights
Give agents constructive feedback based on your call monitoring insights. This feedback should be specific, actionable and timely. Hold feedback sessions to help agents understand what they did well and where they need to improve. Formulating agent feedback can even help you devise targeted coaching strategies and plans to help address individual knowledge gaps. Without regular feedback, agents may not know how or where to improve, resulting in stagnant performance and missed growth opportunities.
💡Pro Tip: Schedule regular one-on-one feedback sessions and use call center agent performance scorecards to present monitoring results. This approach helps agents better understand their performance metrics. Encourage open dialogue during these sessions to foster a supportive and growth-oriented environment. This allows agents to feel valued and motivated to enhance their skills.
4. Let agents listen to their calls
Encourage agents to listen to their calls. This helps them understand their tone and communication style. They can spot areas for improvement and recognize their strengths. Self-review can reveal mistakes like talking over customers or giving unclear information. The approach also highlights their strengths, like customer empathy demonstration and problem-solving skills. This practice promotes accountability and personal growth, improving service quality. Without it, agents may miss self-improvement opportunities.
💡Pro Tip: Encourage agents to take notes and reflect on their performance. Schedule follow-up discussions with supervisors for guidance. Utilize call playback features in training sessions to highlight best practices and effective communication techniques. For example, demonstrate how to show empathy in customer service calls and support a collaborative learning environment.
5. Perform regular calibration sessions for consistency
Hold regular calibration sessions with supervisors and call center quality assurance teams to align on-call quality standards. These sessions ensure that everyone evaluates calls consistently and understands the expectations for agent performance. Discuss real call examples to identify common issues and successful resolution strategies. Without regular calibration, discrepancies in evaluation standards can arise, leading to confusion and unfair assessments.
💡Pro Tip: Use a standardized call-scoring rubric during calibration sessions to maintain consistency. For instance, if your rubric includes criteria for demonstrating empathy, problem-solving and adherence to the script, it will help highlight common evaluation errors. This approach also aligns your team members with quality standards. Encourage open discussions to clarify doubts or ambiguities in the scoring criteria, promoting a more accurate and fair assessment process.
Top tools for call center monitoring
In addition to the tools mentioned earlier, the following are equally valuable for enhancing your call center monitoring. Integrating these into your workflow can provide long-term benefits and improve overall effectiveness:
Conversational analytics software
Conversation analytics can help you analyze conversations across social and digital service channels. Using AI, it detects root causes, anomalies, trends and top impact factors on key contact center metrics.
Go Smart: With Sprinklr’s Conversational Analytics, you can analyze data on over 30 digital channels, create intelligent reports to score conversations based on quality and compliance parameters and implement actionable strategies. The tool also provides AI-powered insights behind these scores and supports transcription in 20+ languages, making it ideal for globally distributed teams. Let our experts show you how.
Supervisor console
A supervisor console provides real-time insights into your call center operations, letting you monitor agent activity, track performance and manage tasks like backlogs and callbacks across queues. It sends instant alerts on potential issues like CSAT drops or escalating conversations, so you can quickly intervene, whisper guidance to agents or take over calls if necessary.
Reporting and analytics platform
A robust contact center reporting and analytics platform lets you monitor individual agent performance while also providing a floor view to track overall team metrics. This dual perspective helps you spot trends and uncover the root causes of any performance issues. With real-time visibility into queue and agent activity through the floor view, you can take immediate action to improve SLAs and reduce average handling time, ensuring your contact center operates smoothly and efficiently.
Quality management tool
Quality management tools can help you record customer conversations, making it easy to review interactions and ensure agents stick to brand guidelines. And with the Sprinklr Quality Management platform, you can enable real-time transcriptions in over 20 languages, so you can quickly assess calls and reduce evaluation time. Automated scoring based on 30+ quality and compliance factors — like empathy, active listening and opening/closing quality — gives a clear picture of agent performance. The AI also detects key cues like background noise or high-pitched voices. With this tool, you can keep a close eye on call quality and ensure consistent, high-level service.
Workforce management platform ✨
A workforce management platform is essential for call center quality monitoring. It analyzes historical data to predict workforce needs and accurately meet service targets. The platform also helps optimize staffing levels, develop proactive hiring plans and manage labor costs efficiently.
This platform supports digital queue management and scheduling agents across various channels. Additionally, workforce management enables supervisors to comply with regulations and policies. It reduces schedule conflicts and provides clear visibility into leave reports. All these features ensure that the correct number of skilled agents are available at the right times.
Monitor all contact center operations, not just calls
Think call center monitoring is just about tracking calls and agent performance? Think again! Effective monitoring is a comprehensive process that involves quality management, compliance tracking and analyzing customer feedback.
To build a robust monitoring strategy, leverage emerging technologies. Forget about juggling multiple tools — Sprinklr Service offers a unified platform that integrates everything from a supervisor console to quality management and analytics. Powered by advanced generative AI, this platform ensures top performance across the board.
Discover how companies like Uber, McDonald's and Microsoft succeeded in call center monitoring with a free trial today 🚀.
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