Quality Assurance in Call Centers: Best Practices for Monitoring and Improvement

Rolling Plans Pvt. Ltd. Aug 20, 2024 1432 0

Call Centers that can be entitled as the backbone of the business organizations, are subject to provide exceptional customer services to the customers who express their queries, complaints are issues at call centers with the instantaneous hope of remedy. And call centers are established with the motive of addressing customer doubts’ quickly accelerating customer satisfaction, forfending brand image and escalating business leads. Hence, all the businesses  are pinpointing the importance of delivering jim-dandy customer experiences making Quality Assurance (QA) practices more applicable and essential in terms of organizational needs. 

 

Quality assurance is a business jargon, the systematic process of ensuring the quality of call interactions of the customers through the lens of professionalism and efficiency. It is an assurance whether the calls are operated or managed in terms of established business standards and ethics. CCQA (Call Center Quality Assurance) involves the regular evaluation of the performance of the call center agents, identification of strengths and weaknesses of the system operations and maintenance of the operational efficiencies for delivering exceptional customer services. Call centers should adopt the proactive and holistic approaches as QA practices for making customer service more than the mundane catalogs of the call center. Quality assurance is not just a one-time process but the ongoing transformative approach of creating eloquent customer experiences and the key components of Call Center Quality Assurance includes: 
 

- Call monitoring, evaluation and mapping 

 

- Developing collective feedback dynamics 

 

- Defining call center metrics with analysis 

 

- Integrating new tech and trends in call processes 

 

- Ceaseless T & D (training and development) to the call center agents 

 

Quality Assurance in Call Centers


In terms of delivering continuous and exceptional customer services, call centers need to bear-hug the effective and best quality assurance practices for monitoring and improvement. Following are the best Quality Assurance practices that call centers need to adopt for the execution of the effective customer service practices/experiences that optimize the business standards leading towards a greater brand image of the organization. 

 

1. Define call center metrics along with performance analysis 

 

Organizations or, say, call centers must realize the basis on which the quality of customer service or experience should be evaluated and monitored. They should establishe the specific quality metrics that meet their business goals. They should establish the specific quality metrics that meet their business goals. There are various measurable quality metrics but according to organizational or situational needs, such metrics should be selected for evaluation of customer service quality. The metrics may include: 

 

i) Customer calls’ response time 

 

ii) Average Handle Time

 

iii) First Call Resolution 

 

iv) Average Wait Time (AWT)

 

v) Customer satisfaction and more 

 


2. Conduct customer journey mapping 

 

Customers are responsible for the operation of business just like call center agents and other required resources. If customers begin to get dissatisfied about the service, they may switch to other organizations that create a severe loss to the organization. Hence, customer journey mapping is quintessential from first contact until the resolution of their queries/issues. It is  significantly important to understand the customers’ interactions from beginning to end. It helps the call centers for the in-depth understanding of their specific or frequent problems which helps to take necessary actions in an immediate way. 

 


3. Real time monitoring of customer calls

 

Customers always want immediate response over their queries/issues when they buzz the call centers. And real time monitoring tools help in assessing the live calls which  assist call center agents to generate instant feedback for the customers. Click on the link of Call handling to understand more about real time monitoring of the calls. Also, automating AI-powered call center management softwares will be the best option for reducing time and manual efforts on reporting. Automating call quality scoring helps to avoid human errors and inconsistencies. The usage of AI speech analytics with the advanced techs like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) assists in analyzing the various types of calls creating more data-driven decisions beneficial for both agents and managers. 

 


4. Reward and recognition initiatives 

 

There is such a great importance of Reward and Recognition at workplaces that encourage the call center agents to dedicate their more than 100% efforts in the organization. Call Center agents are like the engines of the organizations. And fuel and servicing are required to accelerate the business and their commitments. Hence, performance-based incentives and rewards should be introduced for motivating the agents. Gamification elements should also be acquainted with the engaging QA practices.

 


5. Coaching and training sessions for the agents 

 

The world of business is ever-changing with the new techs, trends and updates and call center agents need to be timely nurtured with these trends and further excellencies. Call center agents training namely, persona based training, computer empathy training and knowledge based training should be provided to the call center agents. Not all training needs to be allocated for the call center agents. According to the requirement and need for the agents, specific training should be selected. If frequent coaching programs are organized then only they can tackle new challenges in a confident and progressive way. 

 


6. Integrating omnichannel accesses in the call center processing 

 

What happens when the customer frequently calls for the same issue? It's obvious the customer may get frustrated or even express grievance and switch to other business. Hence, it is important to have a 360 degree customer profile with the customer details and all the interaction history so that agents can identify about the customer and his/her intent of the call. With the integration of omnichannel networks, agents can see the reports based on history and take immediate action for quicker resolution of customers’ issues. It showcases the power of omnichannel customer services that creates a win-win situation for both organization and customers.

 


7. Continuous constructive feedback mechanisms 

 

T & D sessions showcase bigger importance in escalating agents’ professional growth and delivery of the customer service in a smooth way. Hence, organisations should also provide constructive feedback to the agents after calls’ evaluation and monitoring and encourage them for self-assessment and self-improvement. Self-scoring can be the best way for identifying their own weak points and strengths and looking for areas of improvement. The agents’ performance can we evaluated on the basis of several KPIs and metrics that may include: 

 

i) First Call Resolution Rate (FCR)

 

ii) Average Call Duration 

 

iii) Average Handle Time (AHA) 

 

iv) After-call work time 

 

v) Call Transfer Rate

 

vi) Call Quality Score

 

vii) Agent Script Adherence (Call-scripting)

 

viii) Schedule Adherence

 

Also, customers’ feedback is also vital as a QA best practice and using post-call customer surveys such as Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Utilizing customers’ feedback can also help to instigate the SWOT analysis of the organization. 

 


8. Ensuring compliance and periodic audits for Quality Assurance 

 

Every organization is guided by the industry standards and regulations along with the company policies too. Frequent examinations should be adopted whether the agents are working according to industry regulations maintaining the brand image across the networks. The compliance evaluations are must and the violation of the service level agreements (SLAs) can cause customer dissatisfaction endamaging the organizational brand image. Also, the QA audits should be performed semi-annully or on an annual basis to reevaluate the alignment of practice with standards. It helps to take corrective actions for improvements or corrections in the course of requirements. 

 


9. Developing the sense of ‘Us’ than ‘I’ 

 

A single individual’s efforts is baseless to make any kind of work successful. The team of ‘We’ is required at any cost. Collaboration between the managers, supervisors, agents, technical and support person, and every individual working in the organization is must for the successful business operation. There should be the trend of the ‘Quality Circle Discussions’ where the call center team can express their opinions for course corrections and improvement. Knowledge transfer and peer learning amongst the team can contribute for smooth operations and business leads. 

 


10. Focussing on Customer satisfaction methodologies 

 

Customer satisfaction is the topmost priority of the call centers. Customers’  happiness and positive experience should be the major focus of the call center agents. They should calmly handle customers and deliver positive customer experience (CX) to them. It should be set in the mindset of every team member that customers’ satisfaction can only accelerate business growth and customer loyalty. Customer-centric techniques should be adopted or introduced for maintaining quality assurance to the customers. 

 


Plus points: 

 

1. Conducting Root cause analysis (RCA) helps to find out the previous issues of the customers and agents can search for immediate resolution along with future prevalence of such issues saving both time and manual efforts. 

 

2. Call scripting is one of the best measures to analyze the customer service interactions. It may help to avoid customer dissatisfaction as agents can search for instant resolutions while they are uttering the solid script by engaging with the customers. 

 


Quality Assurance practices have been hardwired in the call centers’ heart as these practices transform a normal customer service to exceptional one. These practices per need, should be followed by the call center to accelerate business productivity, brand loyalty and lasting impression on positive customer experience. To thrive in the completely business market, the best quality assurance practices should be actively followed by the call centers.

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