If you run a customer service team, it probably won't surprise you that customer satisfaction can make or break your brand. That is why quality assurance in the call center is so critical.
Customer interactions have high rates. And we are sure you want to improve call center quality.
We advise you to check out the best practices for quality management in your contact centre.
Why is Quality Monitoring Important?
Call monitoring ensures consistent and high-quality customer interactions. Positive evaluation leads to enhanced customer loyalty and, subsequently, customer retention.
Medesk is an assistant for clinic managers, collects and presents complex statistics about the work of the clinic in a simple and understandable way, that makes it easier for the manager to make both operational and strategic decisions.
Learn more >>Ensuring the quality of the call center is a continuous process of monitoring and analyzing your operators' interaction with customers. Managers evaluate these interactions against a set of quality criteria to ensure that their teams are improving and meeting each client's expectations.
Businesses can identify gaps and provide continuous improvement in agent performance and training. Additionally, you get valuable insights, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to enhance overall performance management.
A successful quality assurance process should prevent mistakes and improve quality standards. The right process can help managers make informed decisions regarding training, hiring, staffing, and other internal processes.
So, we may say that call center QA contributes to brand reputation and success.
Call Center Quality Assurance Practices
Assuring quality requires ongoing monitoring, collecting customer feedback and commitment. It's not a simple process, but a strategy. You must set clear expectations.
Determine the quality of your team's work and decide how to measure and monitor it. Decide how often you will conduct QA, provide coaching sessions, and make a plan for improvement.
Learn how to evaluate an employee's performance and plan a motivational scheme correctly using Medesk.
Open the detailed description >>Delegate the process
You, as a business owner or manager, have a lot to do. To achieve maximum success, someone must be responsible for quality control. If the roles in your organization are unclear, management should sit down and decide who or which team of people will play a leading role in the quality assurance process. When someone is specifically responsible for QA management, the process will run smoothly.
Identify your tone of voice
When training your employees on behaviors important to your business, clearly identify them. For example, if you want your agents to be friendly to customers, explain what this means. Give them examples of specific things they can say and do to ensure a high standard of quality in every interaction.
With our ready-made forms and adjustable templates you can make QA scorecards and scripts for incoming calls. Your call center agents can fill in the form during the call and save patients' answers using IP telephony functions. All calls are recorded, so you can make a comprehensive benchmarking analysis afterwards.
Provide feedback
Feedback and coaching must become a huge part of your daily or weekly workflow. We highly recommend to hold calibration sessions. These are meetings during which you, as a manager, QA specialist and other stakeholders review and evaluate customer interactions.
The idea is the following:
- QA team listens to the recorded calls.
- Each member make notes.
- You discuss and compare the evaluations.
The goal is to establish an improved strategy for providing better customer service, develop QA scores for agents. Not to mention the opportunity for supervisors and analysts to share knowledge, exchange feedback, and align their understanding of performance expectations.
To improve your agents' morale and efficiency, after coaching, give positive feedback about their improvements. This will show your employees that you are also interested in improving them. Focusing on the positives reinforces operators' good work. This gives them a sense of pride in their work and makes your team more receptive to constructive criticism.
Coaching is a management style in general. And the most exciting part is that coaching can be a pleasant and exciting activity for all participants, especially if you bring gamification into the game.
Save your highest-quality calls
Calls that use advanced techniques are invaluable learning tools. Giving agents the opportunity to hear real conversations that demonstrate and reinforce the training they have received gives them another tool for success.
It’s advisable to use IP telephony software, where all calls are automatically recorded. Moreover, it displays all the most important patient information on your screen, making interaction easier and more engaging.
The Medesk platform supports integration with a great number of software, for example, laboratories, patient aggregators, end-to-end business intelligence systems, or IP telephony.
Open the description >>Don’t forget the KPIs
There are some key performance indicators and metrics highly significant for every call centre. They can vary depending on your goals, but here are the most common ones.
- Average Handling Time (AHT). The less time is spent on a single call handling the better.
- First Call Resolution (FCR). High FCR indicates effective problem-solving.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Indicates the level of satisfaction based on post-call surveys or feedback.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS). It is based on the simple question: "On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?"
- Abandonment Rate shows how many people hang up their calls while trying to be connected.
- Average Speed of Answer (ASA). Lower ASA indicates faster call response times and improved customer experience.
- Agent Attrition Rate. This KPI tracks the percentage of agents who leave the call centre over a specific period.
Share real-time statistics with your team
When you share statistics in real time with your team, you ensure full transparency in the process. This shows your agents that everyone is evaluated fairly and gives them a sense of responsibility for their role. Employees with a sense of belonging are more motivated to work. Employee engagement is associated with higher company performance.
Implement quality assurance software
The most effective way to perform QA in a call center is to choose the right software. Don't waste extra hours checking quality with a spreadsheet when technology can simplify this routine. Use CRM-integrated quality control software and get 100% efficient and effective workflow.
Activating our IP telephony as part of your subscription is hassle-free. No need for extra software or equipment. With just a few clicks, you can conveniently call or text patients directly from their records and operate within a single window.
We record every call your staff make. You can see names, call duration and ensure that your agents correspond to standards and tone of voice.
Onboarding and training
People are the backbone of your business, so it's very important to choose the right people when expanding your support team. You need managers who are excellent trainers and operators who are willing and motivated to develop their skills.
Finding the right people for your team is where it all starts. This is where you can see how well a person communicates with people. You can also see whether he is really interested in customer support.
Your onboarding program will be most effective if you provide real examples of how to behave and not to behave with customers.
Involve your agents in creating a QA framework and give them responsibility for the QA process. It is logical that the people doing the work are the most qualified to monitor its quality. Creating a quality control list in the call center does not make operators feel monitored. At the same time, it contributes to a positive, team-oriented work environment.
If you hire the right employees and train them regularly, but still fail to achieve your quality control goals, it's time to evaluate your training program. You may also revise it.
Final Thoughts
Each of these practices affects the final result. A well-built working system allows you to meet client expectations, maintain loyalty, and avoid negative reviews.
The customer service quality assessment system should include an audit of the communication process with the client itself. In addition, it should include a study of the client's impressions after interacting with the operator and the company as a whole.
For an effective customer retention process:
- It is important to develop omnichannel service, in every possible way reducing the efforts of the client, which he spends on solving his question.
- Do not neglect technical innovations.
- Study the experience of other call centers.
- Work with people: pay personal attention, train, motivate.
- Monitor the service process by supervisors and make a third-party assessment, attracting secret buyers.
- Regularly measure customer satisfaction and loyalty, correct those customer comments that reduce their rating.
We hope you find our guide useful! For more information on marketing ideas, improving customer satisfaction and retention visit our blog.
