Call Center Monitoring – 3 Perfect Ways For Keeping your Business on Track

February 11, 2021

Call Center Monitoring – 3 Perfect Ways For Keeping your Business on Track

Call center monitoring is one of, if not the best way of improving their customer services. Call monitoring is solely designed to allow for the opportunity for management. In turn, the QA/QC teams analyze their agents while they are in direct contact with the customers.

The first thing that you have to realize is that call center monitoring is not designed to catch your operatives “in the act” of doing something that they shouldn’t. However, your staff may not feel that way.

It is vitally important that you make this clear at the beginning of this process. The main feeling of “big brother” is this: You are going to have to monitor and challenge your agents’ responses to the callers’ requests and actions.

It is through this monitoring that the QC staff can adequately and precisely identify the issues that occur within their teams’ processes, and ensure that the staff is following them correctly. Monitoring these actions that will help build and maintain your quality standards and regulatory compliance — therefore improving customer experience and call center performance.
Do you remember when in our last article we were talking about PDCA? You need to implement the same principle here, too. We are assuming that you are already in the Do stage; otherwise, you have no monitoring to do. Let’s have a look at what you need to complete for call center monitoring:

Check – Monitor and Analyse All Calls

Let’s face it: Manual reviewing 100% of calls, is not viable. We will use some numbers just for demonstration here. For this purpose, we will say that an agent can accept and deal with 30 calls in an eight-hour shift. Again, just for the sake of this demonstration, we will say that you have 100 operatives:
100×30= 3000 calls per 8 hours.

The idea that one, two, or even three managers could monitor 3000 calls every shift is unrealistic. So, to continue with the example, we will assume that you have one monitoring staff who can deal with five of these calls per shift. The reason that it is lower than the call handlers ability is that the managers have to deal with any issues that arise too. So:
100/3000 = 0.033 x 5 = 0.166%

You are now paying one person’s salary to monitor just over 1/8 of 1% of all calls that your call center handles. 
This percentage does not work out well in any situation. It is not a large enough number for anything, let alone coaching and training. There is one way that you can dramatically increase this.

Speech analytics systems will automatically record and monitor 100% of calls in real-time. Now that you have practical and useful data, you can move on to the next stage.

Act – Implement Changes

You now need to ensure that your call center monitoring goals fit with your customer’s expectations as perfectly as possible. Numbers and goals are all well and good when used correctly. However, they are useless if they are not. If you are always reviewing your company’s metrics based on things like AHT (Average Handling Time), you will see a drop in returning and satisfied customers. 

AHT is not a useful metric to base your company on for one reason. You are telling your employees that they need to complete customer interaction as fast as possible. Using AHT as a primary criterion will mean that they are going to rush through calls just to fit their numbers into their hours.

Your customers will not return, and if they do, they will be agitated as soon as they get on the line to an operative. In turn, this will demoralize your staff.

Now it is time to implement your sliding scale of quality.

Dynamic call handling is a mixture of speed and quality. They need to be as useful and timely as possible. You do not want them so fast that they are ineffective, and likewise, you do not want them to be on one call for two hours to resolve a simple issue. Utilizing Speach analytics systems can help you decipher the most critical issues that are common and make plans to change them.

Plan – Involve the Team to make a New Plan

Involving your team to create and implement a new policy will give them all a common goal. Doing this as a group activity will eliminate two issues.

The “he said she said” mentality is one thing that can often get confusing. For example, if you tell operative number 1 that they can’t “do this” but don’t say to the rest of the team, operative number 2 hears that they can’t do the same thing, but only through operative number 1. There then becomes confused about is acceptable or not.

The second is quality requirement knowledge. During this involvement of the plan, it is ideal that you define what you constitute as a quality interaction, and how the scoring gets calculated. For example, here are three of the main concerns that operatives have shown:

• How important is adherence to a set script?
• How important is the AHT? 
• Will we be judged on the handling methods used with frustrated customers?

Providing examples of outstanding, average, and poor handling of calls is an excellent way of giving the team ideal target ranges for which to aim.

Furthermore, the knowledge of analyzing 100% of the calls will push them to make their interactions as useful as possible. Not only that, it will give the whole team a full picture of the expected requirements and standards.

Call Center Monitoring – Conclusion

We have to face the facts. Call center monitoring is an urgent requirement if you want happy, returning customers who give good reviews and recommend people to your service.

However, a human call monitoring is just not your best option anymore. Using speech analytic systems is vital to get real, actionable insights to make quantifiable, positive changes. Including these insights and using them in group involvement and training is the key to a happy and productive workforce, and satisfied, returning customers.
Contact us here at CallCriteria to find out how we can help.