Keeping your customer service quality at the top of its game is an important tool for your company’s continued growth. This truth drives the central purpose of call quality monitoring, which is to ensure that customers get what they need in an accessible, professional way every time they call. Maintaining this standard is about more than just developing quality assurance evaluation criteria that work for your customers. It is also about making sure you avoid these seven major missteps that take your call quality in the wrong direction.
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Monitoring Only Agents
IVR systems are a major point of customer dissatisfaction in a lot of situations where call centers wind up getting less than stellar reviews. By monitoring when customers opt out of the IVR system, when they hang up, and how they use it to complete their calls without needing an agent, you are able to build a better idea of how it is working for you, and eventually a better system. Without that information, you will never even know if your IVR is the problem.
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Failing to Provide Training and Support
The entire purpose of call quality monitoring is defeated if employees receive ratings and feedback but not training and support to effect change. If you want to see real results from your quality team, they need to use feedback as a pivot, moving from issues into direct strategies employees can use to be successful.
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Yes/No Evaluation Criteria
Just like a failure to provide training, a failure to provide nuanced feedback really keeps employees from following through on quality goals and improvements, because it doesn’t provide them with the information they need to successfully navigate the situation.
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Failing to Get Agents on Your Side
Your quality program is only as good as its support within the department. If agents view quality feedback as policing, or as unproductive, then they tend not to follow through with the steps needed to grow and to attain the objectives that define the purpose of call quality monitoring. This means that in a situation where you do not have the backing of the agents, it is likely that quality assurance is not working at all.
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Individualized Interpretation of Guidelines
This is an issue for any organization, but if you hold regular calibration sessions, it does not need to be. Most employees will do their best with guidelines and instructions, but only by reviewing the expectations together in an environment that allows for questions to be asked and clarification given can you be sure everyone is understanding the goals and procedures in the same way.
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Being Secretive
Your best results are obtained when employees understand how and why they are being evaluated, as well as what to do with the information they receive. By being secretive about sampling, monitoring, or any other aspect of your ongoing evaluations, you only work against your own objectives.
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Failing to Reward Staff for Improved Satisfaction
Last but not least, quality programs fall apart when staff does not feel invested in quality. That means that when your program starts to reach its objectives, you reward the agents and other staff involved in making it to this new benchmark.
By steering clear of these seven wrong ways to do quality monitoring, you begin to carve a path toward a sustainable, consistently improving quality program.
This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
