Your call center is the first point of contact customers have with your company, and your customers will form an opinion of you based on the quality of your call center team. Therefore, the importance of maintaining the highest standards of call center quality assurance cannot be overemphasized. The goal of every call center should be constant improvement. A contact center quality monitoring system can help you achieve this goal, but is most effective when combined with these additional strategies for boosting call center quality assurance.
Have a Quality Goal in Mind
If you aren’t working towards a concrete goal, you might as well be grasping at straws. The key to growth and constant improvement is to have a clear goal of the quality standards you want every agent to adhere to. This goal should be a minimum requirement and should be achievable without being too easy to obtain. When setting your quality goals, keep every aspect of the customer interaction process in mind. For example, you should aim to have separate, distinct goals for each of the following areas:
- Sales
- Customer support
- Problem resolution
- Follow-up
- Feedback
If your team does not know what is expected from them during each stage of the customer interaction process, it will be difficult for them to maintain a sharp, goal-driven focus. It is important to understand that no call center team can achieve perfection, but perfection is the very goal they should be striving for individually and collectively. Reaching for the stars ensures that they still come out on top even if they fall slightly short of their goal.
Utilize Technology
If you don’t provide your call center managers with sufficient technology to monitor their progress and shortcomings, you are setting them up for failure. The best call center quality assurance programs are typically those that include call tracking, accounting and recording technology. Rely on your managers to decide what type of technological systems will best help them accomplish their goals and identify weaknesses and strengths with ease.
Keep Track of KPIs and Metrics
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics are invaluable tools that should be tracked and analyzed religiously. These tools can reveal invaluable information including average call handling time, call resolution rates and more. If you are not currently keeping track of your KPIs and Metrics, you have no way to measure your weaknesses or the improvements that your team makes.
Rather than using the information gleaned from your metrics to punish your team or impose additional rules on them, use them as an opportunity to show your team what areas have room for improvement. Showing the data to your team and helping them come up with call quality procedures and goals will help them take pride and ownership in their roles.
Improving call center quality assurance is one of the most important things you can do for the benefit of your company and the improvement of your employee morale. When your employees know they are giving their best, they are more likely to take pride in their work and treat customers the way they should be treated.
This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
