Call center quality assurance (QA) monitors and evaluates agent performance, ensuring that their service complements customer and company needs.
By filling in a QA scorecard, teams can identify development opportunities. They may also measure the impact of training by tracking these scorecard results as a metric and monitoring it over time to benchmark performance.
5 Benefits of Call Center Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is much more than an initiative to benchmark performance. By engaging in QA, contact centers can:
1. Understand How Agent Performance Relates to Customer Satisfaction
Contact centers build quality scorecards through satisfaction research, assessing the impact of individual agent behaviors on customers. As a result, scorecards should correlate with customer satisfaction scores. If this is the case, contact centers can pinpoint improvement opportunities that enable agents to deliver better customer service. For this reason, it is best practice for QA and coaching teams to collaborate, ensuring that agents receive consistent advice that results in happier customers.
2. Conduct Root-Cause Analysis
QA allows operations to uncover performance and knowledge gaps, with scorecards providing granular information about every interaction. The more conversations monitored, the more likely these inconsistencies will reveal themselves, and performance improvement opportunities will come to the fore. Fortunately, many QA systems now analyze parts of the scorecard across every interaction through speech analytics innovation. As such, contact centers can uncover the true scale of performance issues.
3. Enhance Remote Agent Management
If a remote agent is struggling, it is sometimes difficult to tell if it is due to technical difficulties, distractions, or other reasons. Call and contact monitoring help uncover these issues and possible fixes. Also, with automated QA, companies can monitor agent performance in real-time. So, if they endure a succession of low-scoring contacts, supervisors can step in and support them. Having a quick conversation or offering them a five-minute break may improve future performance and safeguard wellbeing.
4. Engage Agents with Performance Improvement
By scoring calls and funneling these back to agents, they can monitor their performance over time. Having these statistics available on their desktops motivates them to improve and spot trends themselves to self-learn. However, agents must feel as though the scoring is fair for this to be successful. Alongside calibration sessions, offering agents the opportunity to challenge their scores and review contacts with an analyst helps here. It also reaffirms performance expectations.
5. Uncover Agent Best Practices
Alongside pinpointing improvement opportunities, QA teams can flag excellent contacts. With these, supervisors may recognize and reward the agent in question, fuelling positively. Meanwhile, teams can harness these recordings and transcripts as a coaching tool to playback to recruits as examples of best practice. Maybe they handled a particular contact reason, dealt with an angry customer, or delivered bad news exceptionally well. Whatever the case, these examples often prove to be a goldmine.
The Role of Call Center Quality Assurance
Quality assurance plays a vital role in a call center by:
- Setting Clear Performance Expectations – QA scorecard criteria demonstrates what good performance looks like to agents. It also helps align coaches, analysts, and supervisors, so they do not offer agents contradictory advice to improve performance.
- Changing Behaviors and Attitudes – Quality scores are excellent for engaging agents with their work. Indeed, an excellent QA program encourages agents to adapt their call handling approach to enhance customer service.
- Ensuring Compliance – When handling particular queries, agents must follow stringent guidelines – such as ID&V processes – to ensure compliance. QA ensures that agents stick to these, while automated QA does so across 100% of contact center interactions.
Tips to Improve Call Center Quality Assurance
There are a few key ways to improve call center quality assurance. Some of which include:
- Encourage Agents to Self-Assess – Give agents the time to review a couple of their own customer interactions. Doing so increases self-awareness and emotional intelligence, paving the way for better conversations. Meanwhile, agents familiarise themselves with quality scorecard content.
- Analyze Outliers in Handle Time – Analysts often swerve conversations with high handle times, as they take too long to evaluate. Yet, these often highlight the most significant learning opportunities as the agent could not quickly resolve the issue.
- Build Unique Scorecards for Various Channels – A QA scorecard for voice should differ from the form for email. Why? Because different behaviors will likely drive high customer satisfaction across the channels.
Find the best software to supplement your QA program by reading our article: 7 Leading Quality Management Software Providers
