August 25, 2021

Top 5 Tips to Improve Call Center Quality Control

Running a call center is a difficult thing to do. To ensure your company produces the best possible experience for your callers, you need to focus on quality.

This might seem like an impossible task, especially if you’re only just starting. Even if you have an already established call center with hundreds of calls a day, some of your agents have likely gained some bad habits.

It is possible that you already have a call center quality control plan. Although, if it is not quite right, you are losing money and productivity every day.

Call center quality control may seem daunting, but it can be easy.

However, there are some key areas where you can improve your performance by focusing on quality control.

You will find in this article: 

Top 5 Tips For Call Center Quality Control

Here are the top five call center quality control tips that will save your customers time, save you money, and increase your productivity.

1. Adopt a Call center Quality Control Strategy

Far too many companies concentrate on the quality assurance side of calls, such as the right questions asked, were there enough rebuttals, etc.

However, not many businesses focus on actual quality service. Some of the primary goals of quality service are:

• Customer satisfaction – If you have the right customer satisfaction and provide positive customer experiences, you will gain customer loyalty.
• Active listening – Active listening is a crucial component of any interaction with customers. While most people communicate by listening to others, active listening is more than we often do. Agents need to learn to really understand what customers are saying in more than just words. Using active listening means listening to sentiment and emotion as well as words.
• Customer feedback – high-quality standards rely on customer feedback. However, not just receiving it, but acting on it, too. The more information you take away from calls, the more chances you have to act on it and improve your quality of service.

Along with these points, you must ensure that you deliver what you promise.

If you do not, you risk having more negative calls, thus more stress on your agents and your business.

2. Focus on the Quality of Service, not just the Call Itself

Far too many companies concentrate on the quality assurance side of calls, such as the right questions asked, were there enough rebuttals, etc.

However, not many businesses focus on actual quality service. Some of the primary goals of quality service are:

• Customer satisfaction – If you have the right customer satisfaction and provide positive customer experiences, you will gain customer loyalty.
• Active listening – Active listening is a crucial component of any interaction with customers. While most people communicate by listening to others, active listening is more than we often do. Agents need to learn to really understand what customers are saying in more than just words. Using active listening means listening to sentiment and emotion as well as words.
• Customer feedback – high-quality standards rely on customer feedback. However, not just receiving it, but acting on it, too. The more information you take away from calls, the more chances you have to act on it and improve your quality of service.

Along with these points, you must ensure that you deliver what you promise.

If you do not, you risk having more negative calls, thus more stress on your agents and your business.

3. Listen to your Call Center Agents and their Concerns

Call Center Agents can be a great source of feedback. They can help you figure out what’s working and not working in your product or service.

They can also tell you what’s confusing your customers, what they are asking for, and if they have any suggestions for improvement.

Call center managers often forget that the agents are the front line of their customer interactions and can actually provide constructive feedback based on their own experiences.

No matter how many recordings you listen to, you are never likely to hear 100% of the calls that take place.

Individual agents can actually provide actionable insight toward Quality Assurance that you would never get through any other evaluation process or management reports.

Therefore, it is essential that you listen to and provide accurate feedback to agents whenever they have concerns. One of the best ways to do that is through scheduled meetings to allow your agents to speak freely about their thoughts and take notes.

4. Identify Problems in your Call Center Quality Control Before they Cause Damage

Of course, this point seems very obvious, and it should be.

However, as with everything, you need to take action on your information, especially from quality assurance. The point to note here is, actionable insight is nothing without action.

We all know that a successful call center needs its key metrics to be high, and agent performance is the biggest key.

Obtaining deeper insights from good quality monitoring with good contact center software allows pinpointing coaching sessions on an individual agent level.

Gaining those insights into individual agent performance will help you spot agents doing things that could potentially damage your reputation as a business.

When you see them, you can coach the agents on those points with accurate performance management, allowing you to gain consistent service levels across all agents and stop problems before they cause any damage.

5. Use Technology to Help you Achieve Call Center Quality Control and Efficiency

As you may have seen throughout this article, contact center Quality Control needs more than the notepad and pen we spoke about in the manual review system.

For continuous improvement ad corrective actions based on the reviews, monitoring software is a powerful tool.

Technology is evolving, providing more cost-effective analytics tools and solutions and making them more available to everyone.

Some of the benefits that Call Criteria’s software offers are:

• Operational reports. – After dialing in the requirements of your business through meetings and analyzing as many calls as necessary, we create custom, dynamic agent scorecards that change based on the call and provide reports based on single, group, and total business calls.
• Calibration sessions. – Ensuring the right data is not a one-time thing; we carry out many calibrations, often weekly, to ensure you have the right scorecards for your requirements.
• Training and coaching. – Increasing call center performance requires analytics-driven quality monitoring from a dedicated quality team. However, Quality Assurance software provides formal coaching sessions and training programs, enabling a business-wide standard of agents. Furthermore, initial training for new starters and ongoing regular training will improve overall operational efficiency.

If you would like to find out how Call Criteria can help you with your call center quality control by Quality Assurance, please contact us.