If you, being a call center manager, get such feedback from your call center professionals, pat yourself on your back. You are one step closer to attaining the goals of quality assurance in your call center management strategy. But is call center quality only limited to creating a good customer experience? Of course not! It does include increased revenues, increased productivity, and elevated agent performance.
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So, let’s take up a steady-going approach toward the fundamentals of call center quality assurance by employing the below sub-heads:
- What is quality assurance in a call center?
- Why is quality assurance so important in a call center? Or why is call center quality assurance so critical?
- How to measure the effectiveness of quality in call center management?
- What are the means of improving the level of quality assurance in call center management?
What is Quality Assurance in a Call Center?
Quality assurance in a call center is all about attaining desired outcomes in terms of customer service review. This review follows a well-planned and managed series of actions. These actions primarily consist of data collection and analysis, employee training, and development.
Do you remember? The last time you called the customer service center of your service provider, the introductory sentence before initializing the call with the call center representative was, “This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.”
In other words, quality assurance (QA) is all about ensuring a good level of alignment between business goals and establishing positive customer relationships. For this purpose, the quality management professionals continue the ongoing process of staff training and refocusing the values of a healthy customer relationship based on learning established through recorded and monitored calls.
Why is Quality Assurance so Important in a Call Center?
Quality assurance in a call center is an important attribute to improve employee performance and elevate customer experience on a routine basis.
“Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising.”
-Milton Hershey, Founder of the Hershey chocolate company
Remember that any person approaches a call center to resolve his query related to a particular product or service. Once the call is over, now it’s the responsibility of the call executive to pacify the caller and resolve his query with utmost patience. No one prefers to speak to the mechanized robotic voice of the executive. So behave like a human with a heart and brain. The quality of call service is directly proportional to customer satisfaction and customer retention.
How can Quality Assurance Benefit Call Center Management?
Ensures clarity of company goals and values
Regular follow-up of quality assurance disciplines the call center employees about the company goals, values, and mission and are of key importance. Their objectives for their customer calls are also clarified on a routine basis.
Quality becomes the culture of the company
Strict adherence to quality assurance as part and parcel of call center management develops a healthy and result-oriented work culture within the organization. Every employee is motivated and rewarded to come up with the best quality deliverables.
Takes care of customer service shortfalls
Using quality assurance, the managers can keep regular track of any shortcomings in the customer service process. Thus, improvements and rectifications can be ensured before the situation worsens, thus saving on the risk of losing the loyal customer.
Provides an exceptional customer experience
Quality customer service management analyses customer feedback regularly to keep its efforts aligned with customer expectations. To learn how to optimize the efficiency of your call center.
Improves customer retention
It’s not the number of solutions you provide to your caller, but it’s about the quality of call interaction you have with them. Do you know that retained customers contribute towards 60%-70% of the company’s revenue, whereas new customers contribute only 5-20%? Thus, retaining your customers is critical for the growth of your business. Call center quality assurance statistics provide a clear understanding of the needs and wants of the customers.
Support Agent Training
Regular monitoring tools and quality assurance metrics are of great help when the employees are to be trained with the help of real-life examples during onboarding or training sessions. The monitored calls are the biggest example of such training aids.
How to measure the effectiveness of quality in call center management?
Since we are well versed in the meaning and significance of call center quality management, we will now learn to assess the level of quality in a call center. But how?
With means of the below-mentioned sub-heads:
First Call Resolution (FCR)
First-call resolution is an essential driver for customer satisfaction. As per the reports of the SQM group, for every one percent improvement in FCR, there is a corresponding improvement of one percent in customer satisfaction. All call centers that show a report card of 85 percent FCR enjoy low operational costs and high employee satisfaction.
Response Time
Response time refers to the time taken to provide a solution to the customer. It can be measured in terms of minutes, hours, or days. A shorter response time means a higher level of customer satisfaction experience.
Self-service channel
Self-service channels are preferred by customers only when the result is a perfect take-home solution. Certain call centers do provide IVR facilities and self-help channels to their customers but forget to add a closing nod to it. As a result, these channels are bottlenecked with hindrances and glitches.
Customer satisfaction score
There are multiple software and tools available in the market to measure the level of customer satisfaction. Evaluating your customers’ satisfaction should be a regular task to be done in a fixed period. It ensures a regular check on the quality of call center management.
Contact Quality
The way of greeting the customer on contacting a call center along with providing appropriate information is highly relevant for a good quality service. Quick and appropriate response and resolution to the caller’s problem with professionalism and courtesy are certain parameters based on which contact quality score is checked.
Adherence to Schedule
The average handling time and the number of calls per hour are the most important parameters in checking the scorecard for employee adherence to the schedule.
Forecasting Accuracy
Metrics to evaluate the forecasted caller load and actual caller load is advantageous in ensuring call center quality effectiveness. It minimizes the queues and maintains customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.
Social media spillover
This is the latest metric to evaluate the quality assurance of a call center. Nowadays, many customers take up the help of social media platforms to connect with call center executives for their queries or complaints. Social media is a very open platform where the goodwill of the brand can be affected both ways for the long term. Therefore, social media comments require close monitoring and management.
How to Enhance Call Center Quality Assurance?
Here are the tips, techniques, and tools to optimize the level of quality assurance in call center management:
- Such a significant task of quality assessment and management requires experts like quality assurance specialists. So do appoint one today to let design a comprehensive quality assurance program.
- Appoint the call center employees based on their customer service skills.
- Ensure an application of quality assurance best practices to analyze, measure, and improve the call center employee performance during onboarding and training sessions.
- Keep a regular record of monitored calls for close observation and feedback.
- Rate the calls as high value and routine using call scoring and evaluation forms.
- Rate all the customer interaction channels regularly.
- Customer feedback should always form an essential part of the quality management process.
- Regular assessment of quality at the individual, team, department, and organizational levels.
- Create a culture of regular quality improvement by requiring employee-to-employee evaluations and self-evaluations of calls.
- Provide a clear response to the employees for their scope and areas of improvement in customer interaction.
- Create a remediation plan for employees who are continuously unable to improve their customer service report.
- Conduct a weekly meeting where the QA specialist, customer satisfaction specialist, and call center manager can discuss the essentials.
- Provide regular onboarding and coaching sessions.
Winding up!
Quality assurance is the best practice adopted by any call center to assess and improve the services of its employees and resources. But, this quality management practice requires a regular upgrade with time. This is done to ensure a routine check on the work culture and deliverables of the company. So, do tell us which quality assurance software or tool benefits your call center and how.
A digital marketing and content curator at SoftwareSuggest, a software recommendation platform. I am passionate about Digital Marketing, and all things digital. Also interested in technology and innovation. In my spare time, enjoy playing cricket, and Badminton.
