Quality Monitoring

What is quality monitoring?

Quality monitoring is a process that customer service organizations follow to track and evaluate agent performance, helping to improve customer-facing metrics in call centers.

Call center quality monitoring involves recording agent-customer interactions, quality checking every stage of the support journey, and analyzing resolutions for customer satisfaction and business impact.

Why is call quality monitoring important?

Measuring the impact of your customer calls is not as simple as tracking resolutions. Metrics such as first contact resolution (FCR) and average handle time (AHT) are surface-level indicators and do not provide a full picture of the service quality your agents are providing.

With the right call center monitoring system, you can track more of the quality indicators that make for a good customer call, including:

• The tone and empathy of the agents speaking to customers

• Consistent customer experience through all stages of a case journey

• The rapport between agents and customers

• Effective collection of customer feedback after phone calls and modern channels like social media and messaging

• Active listening skills — do agents make customers feel heard across channels?

• Asking the right questions to reach a speedy resolution

While these are variables that aren’t usually tracked as call center metrics, they ultimately contribute to a culture of quality assurance and compliance. Quality monitoring goes beyond the quantitative metrics that call centers are generally associated with, putting the focus back on earning customer trust to improve customer retention rates and ROI.

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How do you monitor quality in your call center?

The most basic form of call center monitoring is to analyze the quantitative metrics associated with customer calls. Companies use CRM tools and dialer systems to help record agent conversations and score them based on the resolutions delivered to the customer.

But basic call recording and outcome monitoring do not take into account emotional factors, like customer sentiment and agent effort, associated with support calls. Call center software goes beyond monitoring to help companies set up an end-to-end quality management in call centers.

Proven ways for efficient call center quality monitoring:

A quality monitoring program needs the nudge of modern call center software to track calls and set up a future-proof blueprint for customer service teams to follow.

• Real-time call center and agent performance dashboards to track inbound call trends, configure service level agreement (SLA) alerts, analyze the types of issues addressed, and plan support strategies accordingly

• Call recording and tagging to quickly identify different parts of a call and quality-check them to review agent performance

• Call center manager or supervisor access to listen in on live agent-customer calls

• Generate agent audit reports to gain visibility into agent actions taken throughout a customer lifecycle and develop relevant training programs

• Track customer interactions on all digital channels from a single place to help agents use cross-channel insights before getting on a call

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How can managers use quality monitoring to optimize call center performance?

Call center quality assurance and monitoring can open up new opportunities to serve customers better and make operational corrections for a profitable business. But how can call center managers and supervisors bring that into practice?

Define “human” quality standards

Listening to customer calls helps identify where your call center agents are lagging behind in exhibiting their human or emotional quotient. Dedicating your agent efforts right from the opening line to closing out a call shows how much you care for your customers.

1. Empathy: go beyond business talk and put yourself in your customers' shoes to try and understand what they are experiencing

2. Consistency: provide customers with a clear picture of support expectations, and honor them consistently

3. Dependability: exhibit the ability to solve problems with a sense of urgency and knowledge

If your call center software has AI and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, these sentiments and agent tones can be tracked automatically.

Learn more: Your customers don’t want to call you, and other hard customer care truths

Align call center insights with your company goals

Quality monitoring can indicate the types of customer issues that seem to be recurring and need quicker resolutions.

Customer feedback

Ask for customer feedback through interactive voice response (IVR) systems using dial pad response. Identify areas of strength and weakness in your organization and pass on the feedback to improve your company’s services or product offerings.

Recurring issues

Put routine questions from customers through an IVR-based self-service path to save your agents time, so they can focus on resolving the more complex cases.

Learn more: How AI can make your contact center’s routing strategy more efficient

Process optimization

Agent audit reports can collect customer pain points by analyzing agent decisions and customer efforts throughout the customer journey. You can identify these bottlenecks to implement operational improvements and optimize the support process.

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What are the benefits of call quality monitoring?

Call center monitoring can ensure that your customer service teams abide by a consistent framework that meets customer expectations in the long run.

Identify the key drivers of customer satisfaction

Getting into the service details and agent handling of a customer call can help you identify the key drivers or actions that result in high CSAT ratings. The ethos of these drivers can be applied across the customer service lifecycle for uniformity and successful outcomes.

Learn more: Survey says… it’s time to move to predictive CSAT

Generate process adherence reports for filling gaps in customer service

Create customized reports by consolidating the data tracked on factors like SLAs, customer feedback, call transfers, and accuracy of the information shared. Identify and bridge the gaps that prevent agents from delivering their best support to customers.

Plan support staffing and tech help around call trends

Analyze the average call volume and common types of issues raised by customers to plan better. Take into account special cases like holiday peaks to use the right tools and technology to offset agent count.

Pay dedicated attention to business, customer, and employee KPIs

Track all three types of call center KPIs separately so that all of your customer-facing efforts function holistically.

Types of call center KPIs

• Business KPIs: Agent turnover, net promoter score (NPS), CSAT, customer lifetime value

• Customer KPIs: Average handle time, abandonment rate, callback rate, first contact resolution

• Employee KPIs: Agent advocacy, rate of tech adoption, average monthly calls per agent

Learn more: Can You Have Your Cake and Eat it, Too? How to Balance Quality and Efficiency in Customer Care

Leverage AI and automation to create quality scorecards

Surface quality scorecards by assigning automation rules and training AI models on every inbound and outbound call. The score gives a chance to reassess cases and drill down to what went right or wrong.

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Scale your call center for quality assurance and customer satisfaction with Sprinklr Voice

Managing a call center involves taking care of multiple moving parts. There are tech stacks available to manage the workforce, handle calls and messages, or implement self-service. But monitoring each of these variables for quality is a tedious task — with call center managers required to close the feedback loop manually by sifting through hundreds of reports.

Sprinklr Voice is a smart Contact Center as a Service software that provides end-to-end quality management features across the spectrum, with little human intervention. Sprinklr is the world’s only unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform that helps you deliver benchmark call center support that meets your customer expectations at all times by:

• Tracking omnichannel data to gain the necessary context to personalize your support on customer calls

• Deploying 24/7 support by setting up IVR and deflecting calls to modern messaging channels like WhatsApp or Messenger, where conversational chatbots can take over

• Streamlining your workforce management by monitoring real-time performance dashboards and comprehensive agent audit reports

• Using AI monitoring and speech analytics tools to listen to calls and identify customer sentiment across the case journey

• Automating quality and performance monitoring to drive better processes, agent responses, and call center workflows

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