Call centres are notoriously busy and fast-paced places of work. With hundreds, if not thousands of callers a day, it’s critical that call centre quality assurance is monitored and maintained.
By implementing call centre quality assurance, it helps to stop mistakes from occurring in the first place but also improves the standards of call agents, making them more efficient and ensuring the best service possible to all callers.
But it isn’t just a tool for agents, managers can use call centre quality assurance to find trends in the services and make adjustments accordingly. We look at some of the best ways any contact centre quality assurance can be improved.
Identify The Best Practices
Identifying and learning from the best practices from agents is one of the best ways to increase the quality assurance in any call centre.
This data can be gathered with the use of call centre quality assurance software, taking away the arduous task of managers manually listening to phone calls. This software can flag the very best quality of calls and the problem-solving methods agents used to allow these recordings or transcripts to be shared with the rest of the team and present training opportunities.
By being presented with a range of calls in just a few clicks, the benefits of great performance can be easily highlighted or examples of poor service can be flagged and prevented in the future.
Both new starters and underperforming agents can gain essential skills and tips from these scenarios and can follow the examples of the best-performing agents.
Analysing Data
Some of the most crucial data can be extrapolated from quality monitoring. By using call centre quality assurance software, performance is quickly monitored and reported on to management.
The analytics used can easily determine the evaluation of scorecards and allow management to see any agents who are underperforming, allowing them to step in as soon as possible and provide the right support.
It also allows management to see the best-performing agents and give them the praise they deserve.
Keep Compliant
Part of quality assurance is ensuring compliance at all times within every call agent and every call. Many call centres are required by law to keep recordings of all their customer interactions, so should the need to provide evidence of any conversations arise, they can be easily pulled from systems.
Call centre quality assurance software allows this while also storing these safely and securely, meaning any sensitive information that was revealed within the phone call is kept confidential and won’t leak into the wrong hands.
Agent Initiatives
It’s no secret that call centre staff can become bored and unfulfilled within their roles. If not properly managed, the job can become repetitive and stagnant. This can be made worse with only ever providing negative feedback.
By praising agents for a job well done and sharing positive feedback whenever possible, staff can feel more valued and less likely to leave their roles. By using incentives, such as a reward scheme, vouchers or evening extra days off for certain tasks achieving well, agents have more of an incentive to perform to the best of their ability and have a hunger for new training opportunities.
Involve Everyone
It isn’t just management who should be involved with quality assurance. Involving agents from the very beginning of your quality assurance journey can make all the difference.
Having all teams collaborate when it comes to creating scorecards and new practices can provide insight from every angle of the business and allow the best results. By helping create these, agents will have a better understanding of how to use these and really know what is expected of them each day.
When updating or changing any of these, always consult the teams on the front line, after all, they know their customer’s needs, wants and complaints more than anybody in the business.
Be Clear With Expectations
Create a dedicated role within the business for someone to be in charge of quality assurance, this could be someone new with previous experience or someone already part of the team who suits these requirements.
Have them train staff from their first day on exactly what is expected of them and make sure these expectations are realistic and achievable.
But it doesn’t stop there, these expectations should be reiterated periodically to refresh minds and allow feedback from agents, after all, in a fast-paced world many services and products can change almost overnight and when this happens, quality assurance should be reassessed.
Remember, quality assurance isn’t just about agents’ performance, it should be applied to every level of the business.
Quality assurance can be a challenge and maintaining this, especially on a large scale can take some time to get perfect. But by following the right methods, you can improve your quality while also keeping agents and customers happy and engaged with the business.