How to Implement Best Practices With Quality Assurance Tools

Call Centre Quality Assurance refers to the activities and tactics that contact centre managers use to monitor and track call centre activity to ensure customer satisfaction and employee productivity. The right tools can also help to engage and retain agents so that they have immediate feedback and are recognized for good work.

Today, as contact centres handle ever greater numbers of consumer conversations and questions, the need for established call centre quality assurance best practices that agents can use to guide their actions has become essential.

Call Centre Quality Assurance goes far beyond ensuring regulatory compliance, it keeps staff grounded and focuses on producing the best possible outcomes for customers who are relying on them.

Setting quality standards and monitoring calls to ensure adherence to those standards is critical to ensuring positive customer experiences. Call centre QA means using any of the following activities to improve the call centre experience for callers:

• Listening to calls and reviewing emails or chats to enhance customer experience
• Creating QA Scorecards
• Monitoring QA Scorecards and providing immediate feedback to the agent
• Analyzing quality monitoring data
• Providing Call Centre compliance

Impactful QA programs actively engage their agents at all stages of the process, including development, roll-out, calibration, and continuous improvement.

But remember, it is essential to follow call centre quality assurance best practices to make sure that the initiative is carried out successfully. Let’s look at five critical best practices to help you with your QA initiatives.

Look Within for Quality Assurance Best Practice

Self-assessment is an important first step for organizations to take when it comes to outlining where improvements can be made.

In order to improve quality assurance, a call centre needs to understand how its customers feel about their experiences with the company and how they stack up against the competition. Customer feedback here is important (post-call surveys), as well as research into how your competitors are doing.

Some call centres also hire a third-party consultant to evaluate quality assurance to get an unbiased and neutral view of the changes that may be necessary.

Involve the Whole Team

When QA is done right, it supplies opportunities for the whole team to get involved, from planning to evaluations and improvements. Involving agents collaboratively should be a key part of ensuring QA activities run smoothly. Collaborative teams learn from each other.

Think about it, all your agents bring different skill sets to the table, and each one also handles different customer calls and deals with different questions every day. As a manager, you must gather all this knowledge and make it accessible to everyone so that you can all learn from each other as part of the everyday process.

Regular Feedback

You have developed this collaborative culture and now it is time to make regular feedback a part of that collaboration. Communicating what’s working and what isn’t is essential. And stay away from the bump in the road that is mixed message feedback.

Be wary of praising or criticizing one agent more than another for the same thing. This is a fast track to developing a disgruntled team.

While handing out positive feedback is easy, employees need to hear constructive criticism as well. And don’t simply find fault, point it out and move on, but always critique with a bend toward helping agents see the way to improvement.

This ties back into our collaboration best practice, as instead of reproaching agents when they make a mistake, use the moment to collaborate with them to figure out a more productive way forward.

Allow Room for Dispute

And while we’re on the topic of feedback, it’s common for feedback received from QA practices to be inaccurate. The fact is, it might not always be correct or fair. However, organizations allow little room for agents to dispute them.

It’s critical to allow agents the opportunity to register their discontent with an evaluation. Receiving a secondary-level assessment helps the QA process in two ways.

• Firstly, it allows agents to get their voice heard and gives them a sense of being part of the process.
• Secondly, it shows that the organization has faith in its agents and paves the way to detect system errors or improvements.

There are also times when managers may offer vague or non-specific feedback that falls short of providing agents with the actionable advice, they need to improve their performance. Combining tools like speech analytics software with text analysis can help call centre managers identify relevant issues and deliver precise, targeted feedback to agents.

The above techniques can significantly optimize your call centre’s QA practices and improve customer service quality, as they allow your call centre agents to have an important voice in the improvement process.

Monitor Calls

Simply said, you can’t monitor enough calls. There is nothing more important than being completely aware of how your customers are being treated. Monitoring as many calls as possible is the best way you can become aware of this vital metric.

When your customer calls are monitored effectively by managers, it provides them with the most pertinent information possible to both analyze agent performance and coach agents on where improvements need to be made.

Even with the best call monitoring software on the market, listening to every call yourself may not be possible. Instead, it might be productive to listen to your agents’ most unconventional calls.

Analyze the calls that highlight unusual extremes – agents at their best, as well as calls that may have fallen off the rails. Analyze the good, the bad and the ugly as this helps formulate future strategies and open doors to new strategies that may not have been on your call centre radar.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.