According to a worldwide study by the Qualtrics XM Institute, poor customer service costs businesses over $4.7 trillion in revenue annually.
While your customer service may be optimized, there's always room for improvement. You can be more proactive and holistic to increase customer satisfaction and revenues.
In this blog, we'll explore how to improve quality assurance in a call center through tried and tested steps and practices.
We'll also discuss how you can use modern technology, such as artificial intelligence, to make the process better, including the best AI-powered platform to help you enhance operational efficiency and customer experience.
TL;DR - Call Center Quality Assurance Checklist
Let's kick this off by listing the top steps to include in your contact center quality assurance checklist. We'll discuss each step in greater detail later in the blog.
- Develop a clear quality assurance strategy
- Implement a comprehensive conversation monitoring system
- Implement a comprehensive training, feedback, and reward program
- Invest in modern quality assurance technology
These steps can take time to bear great fruits, but the right technology can help you achieve significant results within the shortest time possible before trouble comes calling.
With Hear, an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform, you can monitor and analyze all your conversations to gain real-time insights for improving customer experience and boosting operational efficiency.
Transform your quality assurance and customer experience today - try Hear now.
What Is Call Center Quality Assurance?
Call center quality assurance (QA) is the systematic process that businesses use to ensure that customer service interactions are precise, compliant, professional, and efficient.
Call centers use this process to monitor and improve how they serve customers by:
- Monitoring and evaluating customer interactions regularly
- Applying feedback mechanisms
- Analyzing performance metrics
- Providing continuous training, coaching, and excellence awards to your employees.
The Importance of Quality Assurance in Call Centers
Imagine you contacted the customer support of your favorite business and received top-notch service that exceeded your expectations and enhanced your trust in the brand. Now that's the power of quality assurance!
You can do the same for your customers and enjoy benefits such as:
- Better Customer Service: Through quality assurance, you analyze customer interactions to identify areas of strength and weakness as well as strategies to improve your customer service. Every customer who reaches out to your support is more likely to leave with a smile, feeling appreciated and satisfied.
- Agent Empowerment: You'll be able to empower your call center agents through constructive feedback, continuous training, and excellence awards. Quality assurance can help keep them motivated to deliver the best service possible, even in the face of challenges, such as conversation complexity.
- Improved Bottom Line: Your business's bottom line can improve because you'll avoid costly mistakes that can damage your reputation or cost it money. When customers are happy, they are more likely to recommend your business to others, potentially increasing brand visibility and sales.
Challenges in Call Center Quality Assurance
You can face the following challenges in call center QA:
- Difficulty Standardizing Evaluation Procedures: It can be hard to establish a consistent and objective evaluation process, especially without modern technology systems or platforms.
- Limited Visibility into Multi-Channel Performance: You may struggle to monitor how each agent performs across various channels if you don't have clear visibility into each channel. Agent performance may also be inconsistent, and improving it becomes an uphill task if you can't monitor it in the first place.
- Customer Churn: Many customers may leave conversations before their issue is resolved. You'll not only have lost a potential repeat customer, but also a broader opportunity to assess your customer service and identify where it’s strong and what you need to improve.
- Expensive and Inefficient Manual Processes: Most contact centers still conduct quality assurance manually, with a designated person or team sampling and reviewing only a small percentage of interactions. The process is costly because of the significant human effort and time required.
Key Components of a Strong Call Center QA Program
A strong call center quality assurance program has several elements that promote optimal agent performance and high-quality customer interactions.
Be sure to include the components below in your program.
- Quality Goals and Standards: You must set clear and achievable QA goals and standards that align with your overall business strategy and objectives. For example, you can prioritise higher customer satisfaction scores, empathy, and consistent conversation-handling procedures.
- Conversation Monitoring and Evaluation: You need to monitor agent-customer interactions regularly by recording and evaluating conversations. The focus should be on both positive and negative conversations to discover areas of strength and opportunities for growth.
- Performance Metrics and Analysis: It's important to set and analyze critical performance metrics, including customer satisfaction (CSAT), First Call Resolution (FCR), and average handling time (AHT). When you analyze these metrics, you can see trends, areas for improvement, and the effectiveness of your quality assurance efforts.
- Feedback and Coaching: Regular and constructive feedback is necessary, based on conversation monitoring and performance data. You'll want to invest in coaching and training to promote a culture of continuous learning.
- Continuous Review and Improvement: Review the effectiveness of your quality assurance program regularly and adjust as needed. You can use feedback from agents and customers to improve on weaknesses, refine quality standards, improve coaching, and enhance the overall customer experience.
How to Improve Quality Assurance in a Call Center
Let's now look at the steps to improve QA in a call center in greater detail.
1. Develop a Clear Quality Assurance Strategy
Start by defining specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound quality assurance (SMART) goals. Go beyond basic metrics like AHT and CSAT to consider First Call Resolution, compliance, and qualitative aspects like proper tone and empathy.
Involve your agents in developing the strategy to secure their ownership of the process. They will be more collaborative and receptive if you honor their insights, especially regarding tracking and improving the quality of their work.
2. Implement a Comprehensive Conversation Monitoring System
Monitor all your customer support channels in real time by analyzing 100% of customer interactions across voice, chat, and email rather than just random samples.
100% cross-channel conversation monitoring ensures consistent service quality, performance tracking, and coaching recommendations.
Real-time monitoring allows for immediate feedback and intervention in critical situations.
3. Implement a Comprehensive Training, Feedback, and Reward Program
You should train your agents regularly to keep them up-to-date with best practices, internal policies, regulatory compliance, and even new services or products.
You can also provide real-time feedback based on individual and team performance to promote a culture of appreciating effort and focusing on improvement.
You'll also want to make things more interesting by incentivizing agents and their team leaders with rewards, such as bonuses and public acknowledgement.
It's important to celebrate your employees when they improve, not just when they achieve high scores, to keep them engaged and motivated.
4. Invest in Modern Quality Assurance Technology
You can use next-generation quality assurance technology, such as AI-powered interaction intelligence platforms, to automate QA, monitor compliance, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Look for a platform that can:
- Integrate quickly and easily with your telephony and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
- Help you become more operationally efficient by reducing AHT and increasing FCR rates.
- Help you share real-time data or statistics with your team to promote full transparency and more visibility into agent performance and client satisfaction.
- Monitor customer interactions in real time to offer instant feedback.
- Analyze every customer interaction across various channels.
- Automate QA scoring.
- And more.
Here’s how to tell if your call center is ready for AI.
How AI Enhances QA in Call Centers
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming quality assurance in call centers by automating manual processes, enabling real-time insights, and delivering comprehensive analyses across 100% of customer interactions.
As an AI-powered contact center conversation analysis platform, Hear can do the following:
- Analyze 100% of interactions at scale across various channels to eliminate limited conversation sampling and manual reviews.
- Promote compliance by consistently monitoring and flagging compliance risks through AI call analysis.
- Enhance visibility into agent performance, including trends and coaching opportunities.
- Analyze both voice and text interactions to ensure consistent quality, compliance, and adherence to internal and industry customer service procedures.
- Enhance visibility into customer sentiment through comprehensive sentiment analysis.
- Automate quality assurance scoring to ensure consistent service quality.
- Detect customer churn signals early to remain autonomous rather than reactive.
- Deliver real-time business insights to drive revenue growth, enhance customer experiences, and optimise agent performance.
- Enhance quality assurance efficiency and reduce costs by automating and analyzing a larger volume of interactions than human reviewers can handle.
Book a demo today to see how Hear can enhance your call center quality assurance and customer satisfaction.
Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices
Applying best industry practices in quality assurance for a call center can help you ensure consistent, high-quality customer service and continuous improvement.
Let's check out a few practices you can employ.
- Focus on the Customer Experience, Not Just Compliance: Even as quality assurance involves compliance with external regulations and internal policies, you can encourage your team to personalize conversations while staying within your on-script guidelines. Emphasize empathy and monitor how agents connect with customers, especially in sensitive situations. You can use Hear to analyze as many signals as possible from agent-customer interactions to evaluate compliance and customer experience.
- Integrate Quality Assurance with Other Departments: Share your quality assurance findings with the production, training, marketing, and operations teams to ensure that every department contributes to the overall customer service experience. QA data can reveal recurring customer complaints, which you can share to promote collaborative problem-solving aimed at improving customer service.
- Maintain Comprehensive Documentation: Document all your QA procedures and policies to ensure everyone understands how you evaluate conversations and why. Develop and update scorecards and standards as your business needs evolve. You can also maintain audit trails by keeping records of all your evaluations, feedback, and coaching, ensuring compliance and transparency.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let's wrap up with answers to a few questions about quality assurance in call centers.
How Often Should QA Evaluations Be Conducted?
You should conduct QA evaluations on an ongoing basis, which can be weekly, monthly, or quarterly, to ensure consistency and identify potential problems early.
The frequency depends on the volume of interactions, agent performance, internal goals, and the complexity of conversations.
How Do You Score Calls in a Call Center?
You can score calls by evaluating how an agent performs across conversations against predefined criteria.
With an AI-powered platform like Hear, you can automatically score calls through speech analytics, which analyzes specific phrases and sentiment patterns to assess an agent's performance.
What’s the Difference Between QA and Call Monitoring?
Call monitoring is a quality assurance method that focuses on listening to and evaluating agent-customer voice interactions.
Quality assurance is the broader range of activities for improving overall service quality and compliance.
How Does Speech Analytics Help in QA?
Besides helping score calls, speech analytics is beneficial in other ways. The technology helps detect opportunities for sales or improvement by uncovering customer insights hidden in your call recordings.
The general insights you gain from analysing speech patterns help you identify common issues, proactively address problems, and enhance coaching for agents.
Conclusion
To improve call center quality assurance, you can develop a clear QA strategy, monitor conversations across multiple channels, and assign a specific staff member to own the process.
You can also share data with your team, encourage cross-department collaboration, and train your agents and team leaders on an ongoing basis.
Investing in quality assurance technology is also worthwhile to automate manual tasks, detect real-time customer sentiments, and identify revenue opportunities.
As an AI-enabled conversation monitoring and evaluation platform for call centers, Hear effectively addresses the need to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.
You can use Hear to automate call scoring, analyze all your conversations, and gain actionable real-time insights for better decision-making.