Quality Monitoring System: How to Build One That Improves Every Call

Using new quality monitoring technologies in combination with quality analytics software is the key to empowering your customer service call center to move to the front of the industry. Where monitoring technology was once used for mainly training purposes and dispute resolution, new technologies that help with analyzing and understanding that data are providing solutions that allow companies to institute quality assurance programs in their customer service departments that match anything found in their manufacturing or service divisions.

Analytics Software

The key to the entire revolution in call center quality has been the growth of sophistication in analytics software. Modern quality analytics software is capable of guiding your business toward the best practices that lead to increased agent success, improving both individual performances and the department as a whole. This works because these programs are able to coordinate information coming from your quality monitoring technology in ways that allow the accurate measurement of:

• IVR use and abandonment
• Agent success rates
• Call lengths
• Queue waiting time lengths
• Customer satisfaction ratings

By bringing all of these points of information together, your company can move beyond industry recommendations by monitoring the different elements that correlate to higher success for your agents, in your industry. That way, you know that your procedures are reflected by rising success rates and, when customer attitudes or needs shift, these data points also provide insight that helps you change with them.

Monitoring and Metadata

Part of the way that these new software packages work is by monitoring what is called metadata—the data that describes the call, rather than a recording of the actual call. This data is much more efficiently gathered by the system, allowing it to be easily sorted and analyzed. When combined with traditional monitoring that is used for training and dispute resolution, this provides multiple ways of interpreting information and gauging results and helps to map individual sites of evaluation onto the company’s larger outlook.

Training and Support

To get the most out of your quality monitoring technology and quality analytics software, the department also needs to commit to using the information. That means moving beyond reports and supporting employees with tools that help them hold to standards and deliver consistent performances while also understanding better ways to do things as they are learned. This usually means:

• Evaluation criteria with detailed feedback
• Calibration meetings to keep everyone on the same page
• Support and training resources that can be accessed alone or in formal settings
• Managerial support for employee questions

When you bring the supports together, you get an infrastructure for disseminating the information learned from the data analytics, so that way you are able to continue improving your call enter even as it reaches your original objectives. This kind of responsive combination of management and technology also keeps your department versatile and ensures that you know enough to move with your customers.

Five steps to make quality monitoring efficient

Analytics tells you where to look. These five steps turn that information into a program that holds up as your team grows.

1. Lock down the call-handling basics first

Before chasing advanced insights, check that every agent handles the fundamentals the same way: the greeting, hold etiquette, keeping the customer engaged while you research, and the close. Early quality monitoring catches bad habits while they are still easy to correct, and it shows you which new or existing agents need more training.

2. Put the metrics to work

A number only helps if someone acts on it. Use call length, speed of answer and first-contact resolution to set clear standards, coach against them, and revisit the targets as performance changes.

3. Build the program in stages

A full quality framework on day one overwhelms supervisors and agents alike. Start with a simple, consistent monitoring routine and add scoring depth, calibration and reporting once the first layer is working.

4. Share the data and the feedback

Results that stay with managers change very little. Share team and individual performance openly, recognize your strongest agents, use group sessions to pass on what works, and feed individual results into reviews and incentives.

5. Give quality a dedicated team

Consistent scoring needs people whose job is quality. Train and support a specialist QA team, staffed in-house or with outside expertise, depending on the skills you need.

Conclusion

Quality monitoring technology is nothing new, but its usefulness has traditionally been limited by the fact that it singles out individual instances. With new quality analytics software and updated technology, though, your company can put together a comprehensive heuristic program that will steer your customer service toward the top of the industry.

Etech runs this for clients through its quality and analytics services.

Includes material originally written by Shawndra Tobias.