The Top Challenges Call Centre QA Teams Face (and How to Solve Them)

Dick Bourke of Scorebuddy describes the solutions to challenges frequently encountered by call centre QA teams.

A successful call centre is a competitive advantage. It is a key differentiator for many companies – sometimes even above and beyond the products and services they offer, or even the revenue they generate.

According to Walker, the customer experience will become more important to consumers than price and product by 2020.

This is a tremendous opportunity for call centre QA to be at the fore of a movement towards an enhanced customer journey.

But how? There are an abundance of challenges facing call centre QA teams, including agents, and managers.

Call Centre QA Team Challenges

We’ve collected some of the most common hurdles encountered by call centre QA teams to both share them and offer solutions on how to overcome these challenges.

Challenges: Staffing, Morale, Absenteeism

Call centre QA agent and team roles are demanding. Staff turnover can be high. Finding, hiring and training the best people for the job takes time and money. Call centres are often flat in structure, offering little to zero upward mobility for agents. This results in low morale and absenteeism, neither of which serves your customers well.

Solution: Without a path to greater success, it is difficult for agents to feel motivated to exceed goals or to improve. Providing this path incentivises employees to stay, grow, and be a more effective voice for both your organisation and your customers. Consider giving ownership to call centre agents. Empower them to set their own goals and self-score their interactions with customers.

Challenge: Quality Monitoring

It is common for call centre monitoring teams to be overwhelmed by the abundance of data to collect, with so many calls and and an ever-increasing number of customer touchpoints. Monitoring gaps and delays cause training challenges.

Solution: What is unknown cannot be measured and therefore cannot be improved. A thorough and high-quality scoring system must be in place to monitor, measure, and then be able to manage all aspects of call centre activity and customer touchpoints.

Challenge: Relevance

With fast-paced growth in digital marketing, online shopping, artificial intelligence, and chatbots, some call centre QA teams are struggling to maintain their relevance.

The truth is that as technology advances, there exists an even greater need for consumers to feel an emotional bond with a company. This level of deep connection is what will continue to set companies apart.

McKinsey recently reported that 70% of the customer journey is dictated by how the customer feels they are being treated. It is call centre employees, often the first to speak to customers, who have the unique opportunity to create an emotional connection with customers.

Solution: Focus on enhancing call centre agents’ emotional intelligence and watch results soar.

Challenge: Canned Replies

The secret is out. Customers know when agents are reading from scripts and they don’t appreciate it. Scripts are the easy way out. Creating an emotional connection is what’s necessary.

Solution: If you have to read from a script, use these pro script tips, but we strongly suggest you get to a point where scripts are the exception, not the rule. Developing agent soft skills (listening, tone, problem-solving approach) is what will truly move the needle on call centre performance.

Challenge: Listening More and Talking Less

Jumping right into a script that may seem like the right thing for a call centre agent to do, especially when trying to quickly get to a resolution. But not everything can be answered in a script.

Listening is the key to understanding, and it is something most agents fail to do well.

Solution: Hold specific training that develops listening skills, which are an essential part of a successful call centre customer experience. Agents must build emotional connections with customers.

And listening to, really hearing, customer needs is the first, perhaps most important, step in reaching this goal.

Challenge: Tone of Voice for Call Centre Agents

Call centre agents have only their voice to represent them in interactions with customers. The tone of voice used is the first impression customers have of agents and of the company they represent. If the agent is bored, rushed or annoyed, that will come across in their tone of voice.

Solution: As with the development of listening skills, specific training is needed regarding agent tone of voice. Here again, getting off script will help. Agents sticking directly to reading off the scripts tend to speak with monotone inflections.

Agents trained to connect by asking customers how they’re doing or by sharing something about themselves are empowered to be more empathetic, natural and positive in their tone of voice.

Summary: Attaining Call Centre Monitoring Team Success

The purpose of call centre monitoring teams is to monitor, measure and manage all of these moments between call centre professionals and customers. Yes, there are many challenges in this process, but with thoughtful goal-setting and agent input, weights and values can be assigned so that call centre QA is scored and quantified in a way that leads to growth and greater success. View these common call centre QA team challenges as opportunities to get things right.

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

For more information about Scorebuddy - visit the Scorebuddy Website

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.