13 Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices

February 14, 2023

13 Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices

Effective communication with customers is a crucial aspect of any business. In fact, excellent customer service can be the deciding factor in retaining customers. For call centers, quality assurance is paramount. It ensures that every interaction a customer has with your business is a positive one. 

By prioritizing quality assurance, you can build trust with your customers, enhance their overall experience and ultimately boost your bottom line. Here are 13 call center quality assurance best practices that can help you deliver exceptional customer experiences:

1. Set Clear Quality Standards

Setting clear quality standards is all about defining what excellent customer service looks like for your call center. These standards serve as a compass, aligning customer expectations with business objectives. Clear, specific, achievable, and measurable benchmarks provide agents with tangible goals, fostering consistency and reliability in service delivery. This could include things like call handling time, first-call resolution and customer satisfaction. 

Ensure the standards are transparent and communicated to all team members. This way, everyone knows what’s expected of them and can strive to meet or exceed these standards. Remember to periodically review and update these standards to ensure they remain relevant to the specific customer needs. 

2. Invest In Regular Agent Training And Coaching

Agent training and coaching is not just about teaching agents how to use the systems or follow procedures but also about developing their communication and problem-solving skills. Schedule regular training and refreshers to update agents with the latest product information, policies and techniques. 

Call center coaching should take a more personalized approach where supervisors work closely with an agent to identify areas of improvement and develop strategies to enhance performance. Training and coaching your agents improves the quality of service and boosts agent morale and job satisfaction. 

3. Monitor, Analyze, And Evaluate Calls

Monitoring calls involves real-time listening to agent-customer interactions. This process helps identify immediate training needs and areas of improvement. Analyzing and evaluating calls enables a deeper dive into performance metrics and trends. It’s about understanding the reasons behind the numbers, identifying patterns, and using this information to provide constructive feedback to agents. The continuous cycle of call center monitoring, analyzing, and evaluating leads to constant improvement and high-quality customer service.

4. Use Balanced Scorecards And KPIs

Balanced scorecards provide a holistic view of performance by considering multiple dimensions such as customer satisfaction, agent productivity and operational efficiency. This helps managers assess the overall health and success of the call center.

KPIs and call center metrics specifically measure performance in different areas. They include things like average call handling time, customer satisfaction scores and more. By tracking and analyzing these KPIs, call centers can make data-driven decisions to improve performance.

5. Develop Feedback Mechanisms

Feedback mechanisms include surveys, feedback forms, or interactive voice response systems after a call. This allows customers to share their experiences and provide valuable insights for the call center to enhance their services.

Surveys allow call centers to gather direct feedback from customers, therefore measuring their satisfaction levels. For instance, you can ask your customers to rate their interaction with the agent they just spoke to. This is mostly done immediately after the call when the experience is still fresh on the customer’s mind.

6. Incorporate Customer Feedback

The best way to know how your customers feel about your business is to get direct feedback from them. However, getting this feedback and working on it are two different things. Your customers will feel more valued and heard only if you act upon these feedbacks. 

7. Leverage Technology

Many activities go on in call centers and can sometimes get overwhelming to manage. But thanks to technology and AI, it’s now easier to operate call centers with software and tools that help ease the process and improve efficiency.  AI powered voice and speech analytics, sentiment analysis and agent coaching have transformed the operations of call centers. Try out call criteria human verified AI for best call center quality assurance.

8. Consistent Quality Checks

The quality of service in your call center directly influences customer satisfaction. This necessitates the need for perfecting processes. Call centers, therefore, must conduct regular quality checks to ensure services provided in a call center consistently meet or exceed customer expectations. Understanding which calls and agents are performing the best can lead you to increase sales.

9. Incentivizing High Performance

Your agents will perform to their best when they know they are appreciated. Offer rewards, recognition, or incentives to agents who achieve their monthly targets. This can lead to increased productivity, increased customer satisfaction, and overall better performance from the agents. Incentives come in various forms, such as bonuses, gift cards, or even extra time off. 

10. Be Adaptable And Flexible For Continuous Improvement

Customer needs and expectations are ever-changing, requiring call centers to adapt as fast as possible. This is why call centers need advanced tools and software to ensure every change in preference is accounted for.

11. Adhere To Compliance And Ethical Standards

call centers must follow compliance rules to function ethically and legally while preserving the privacy and rights of both clients and staff. Failure to adhere to compliance rules can lead to serious repercussions, something you want to avoid. 

By incorporating certain tools, you can avoid lawsuits as a result of non-adherence to compliance rules. Having a dependable partner to provide these software and conduct quality assurance for your call center should be a top priority. Call Criteria offers advanced tools for call center quality assurance and monitoring.

12.  Encourage Peer Reviews And Collaboration

There is so much agents can learn from each other and allowing them to interact on a work basis allows this. Sometimes supervisors come out too strong and might intimidate the agents, hindering proper learning and coaching.

Recommend top-performing agents to work with those who are still struggling to adjust. This way, they will feel less attacked and be more willing to improve their performance. Sometimes, they just need to know that whatever you require of them is achievable, and what better way to show that than by pairing them with those who have walked in the same shoes? 

13. Outsource Quality Assurance

Your call center interacts with customers more often, therefore influencing customer satisfaction. Some companies prefer in-house quality assurance as opposed to outsourced because they believe it reduces costs.

However, this is not always true and might cost you too much in the long run. When you outsource quality assurance, you are assured of top-notch services because you will be dealing with experts. In addition to being highly knowledgeable, they come with their tools and software, which are incorporated with your systems to enhance efficiency. 

Call Center Quality Assurance by Call Criteria

With the many call center quality assurance providers, it can be challenging to find the right partner who understands your specific customer needs. Call Criteria aims to provide the most accurate and efficient results and does this by combining the speed of AI and human precision. 

AI enhances the processes but is not always accurate. Every process facilitated by AI, such as speech analytics, must be double-checked by our human agents to ensure accuracy. Partner with Call Criteria today to boost your call center’s performance and improve overall customer experience. 

Call us for further inquiries or request a demo to get an experience of what your call center could be like with Call Criteria by your side.