“This call may be recorded or monitored for quality and training purposes” your phone speaker announces when you dial a customer service number. Then, right after your call, an email notification pops up telling you to rate your call. We’ve all had these interactions before, whether it was while contacting your bank, healthcare provider, or local retailer. It is easy to dismiss these messages and carry on with your day, but have you ever thought about the purpose of these seemingly universal interactions? Are these companies actually using these call recordings and survey responses? If they are, what are they using this data for? These basic, automated interactions have significant importance in the call center industry, because it is tied directly to call center quality assurance.
WHAT IS CALL CENTER QUALITY ASSURANCE?
Call center quality assurance (QA) is essential in running a productive, successful call center. It is the process of observing an agent’s interactions on every channel and ensuring that every customer receives a consistent, positive experience. In today’s world, it’s not just calls anymore. Channels that need quality assurance include text, chat, email, bots, and messengers. Managers and QA specialists are needed to monitor these interactions between agents and clients. These managers are tasked with spotting problems within their teams and finding the best solutions to them.
Call center quality assurance traditionally focused on voice calls, but it needs to include all channels of communication. It is one of the most effective measures that a company can take to improve their customer experience.
PURPOSE OF QUALITY ASSURANCE IN THE CALL CENTER
Quality assurance attempts to achieve several goals that all contribute to a better customer experience. Some of these goals help call centers increase efficiency, while others are geared toward building loyal customers.
INCREASING EFFICIENCY, USING CALL CENTER QUALITY ASSURANCE TO REDUCE COST
One major goal that call center quality assurance strives to achieve is keeping costs low by ensuring agents are very efficient. Implementing effective quality assurance software and using quality assurance best practices can increase agent productivity, and reduce average handling times, thereby increasing the volume of interactions that agents handle per day. This increase in efficiency of your agents can lead to lowering costs for your call center, since fewer agents are needed to efficiently handle the same amount of interactions.
To further optimize your call center to reduce cost, try our free call center calculator here.
SETTING A STANDARD WITH CALL CENTER QUALITY ASSURANCE
Consumers today expect personal, high-quality service across all industries and channels. Good customer service is not a luxury anymore, it is an expectation among customers and table-stakes. All industries are now paying more attention than ever to providing good customer service in an effort to attract customers and build customer loyalty.
Call center quality assurance helps with providing consistently great customer experiences by allowing managers and team leads to monitor all interactions and identify where the problem is. Aside from monitoring interactions, these managers also evaluate agents and provide suggestions for improvement. If there is a problem, the agents in question are able to receive necessary and accurate coaching. In the event where a customer interaction becomes bad, proper quality assurance would allow managers to act in real-time to assist the customer, then provide agents with proper coaching afterwards.
A company’s customer support quality is part of the brand image, and a bad interaction between an agent and a customer can lead to the company gaining a negative reputation. Not only can this turn the customer away from your brand, but can negatively affect your brand image. One bad interaction can cost you many prospects. For this reason, call center quality assurance strives to maintain consistently positive interactions between agents and customers.
METRICS
When attempting to measure call center quality assurance, contact centers need to implement customer experience metrics. These metrics are usually referred to as Call Center Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These Call Centers KPIs pull data that is used to measure the status of your call center operations. There are many different kinds of metrics that can provide important insights for your organization. Here are some of the best metrics for call center quality assurance:
CSAT
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) provides a numerical score indicating how satisfied a customer is with a particular interaction, service, or product. A CSAT score is determined by conducting a survey to assess how a customer rates his or her experience. Read more about CSAT metrics here!
CES
Customer Effort Score (CES) gauges how much effort a customer needs to exert in order to have their inquiries resolved by a company. The benefit of calculating this metric is it allows you to identify any barriers to providing great customer service. Read more about CES metrics here!
NPS
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated by asking a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?” Based on their responses, customers are then placed into three categories: detractors, passives, and promoters. Read more about NPS metrics here!
HOW CALL CENTERS ARE FAILING THEIR CUSTOMERS
Many call centers today are not providing adequate call center quality assurance, which leads to unsatisfied customers. Most companies are only measuring a small amount of voice calls, leaving as much as 80% of calls unmonitored and unreviewed. This means a substantial amount of bad interactions are slipping through the cracks.
It’s not just calls that companies should be monitoring. Most companies are only measuring their voice channel, leaving other channels like email, video calls, and text unreviewed. Digital channels are growing dramatically, but most companies don’t measure quality on those channels, therefore, companies have a fragmented approach to measuring quality across channels. Many of these systems aren’t integrated together into one software, and are bolted onto existing legacy systems. This gives call center managers and leaders a hard time in getting a holistic view of customer experience quality. This, in turn, can affect how seamless the client’s experience is and make the various different channels have inconsistent service.
HOW TO IMPLEMENT OMNICHANNEL QUALITY ASSURANCE IN YOUR CALL CENTER!
Implementing call center QA can help boost the efficiency of your call center and the satisfaction of your customers. The best call centers in the world implement QA to ensure that interactions with customers are consistently excellent and that the image of the company is maintained through these interactions.
When establishing a omnichannel quality assurance system, it is important to be aware of how it is implemented in your call center. The best omnichannel quality assurance systems are embedded into your call center software rather than provided by third-parties to fit into your call center software. Doing this makes manageability easier and provides faster feedback to agents. Rather than translating data into the language of third-party systems, quality assurance software embedded into your call center software can immediately read the data and provide instant feedback to managers and agents. This allows for instant action to be taken when a dissatisfied customer is detected, and provides quicker feedback to agents and managers.
Implementing quality assurance effectively in your call center can be made easy with Bright Pattern. With quality assurance embedded into its call center software, Bright Pattern is one of the industry’s most advanced options for call center software. Our new Omnichannel Quality Assurance software is embedded in our call center software, which will allow you to monitor 100% of agent’s interactions on any channel and will give you access to our built-in AI to assist you in maintaining excellent customer service. Click here to learn about how you can implement quality assurance on all your channels!
