Call center quality assurance (QA) is the process of monitoring and analyzing customer conversations to ensure that the services the business offers align with quality standards. Call center quality assurance best practices include specifying your evaluation criteria, determining who conducts phone call reviews, and performing root cause analysis.
By closely supervising the team’s productivity and progress through key performance indicators (KPIs), the business is able to provide a better customer experience and boost agent efficiency. Adopt these strategies to enhance call center quality assurance:
Key Takeaways:
- Having clear goals is the foundation of a robust call center quality assurance process. Business objectives will form the quality assurance framework and dictate the KPIs that need to be tracked.
- Teams may implement the evaluation of calls in two ways: observe active conversations and revisit interactions through historical analytics reports.
- Agent performance assessment may be manager-facilitated, peer-to-peer, or self-directed.
- The primary benefit of implementing call center quality assurance is improving customer service and agent efficiency.
1. Define Your Goals Clearly
Your goals will direct which aspects of customer conversations you must track, what KPIs to monitor, and how to structure QA evaluation forms later. Goals may be customer-centric: reduce customer wait times, improve customer satisfaction, or increase customer advocacy. On the other hand, they may also be agent-centric: enhance service representatives’ problem-solving skills, increase first call resolution (FCR) rate, or reduce tardiness.
There are plenty of goal options, but limit yours to three to maintain focus on the most important aspects of customer service and business operations. You’ll find it easier to build the QA framework with your priority goals in place.
2. Determine Your Evaluation Criteria
With clear goals in mind, develop a rubric that includes criteria points reflecting those objectives. For instance, if you want to reduce customer wait times, your QA evaluation form should cover team members’ attentiveness, knowledge of products and services, and problem-solving.
Here are some of the evaluation criteria points to consider as part of your call center quality assurance guidelines and scorecards:
- Call handling
- Active listening
- Communication skills
- Product knowledge
- Problem-solving
- Conflict resolution
- Empathy
- Compliance
- Collaboration with team members
- Documentation and call notes
Dialpad, a call center quality assurance software solution, eliminates the manual work of creating scorecards and grading agent performance through artificial intelligence (AI). Simply toggle on the “AI Questions” option when creating a new scorecard, and the system will automatically display question options. Select the questions you want to add to the form.
Dialpad pre-answers questions on agent scorecards. (Source: Dialpad)
Similarly, the platform recommends answers to agent performance questions based on the information from the transcribed call. Subscribe to Dialpad’s entry-level plan, priced at $95 per user, per month. This package includes valuable features that assist in call center quality assurance, namely call transcription, call monitoring, and call recording.
3. Track Call Center Metrics
Aside from the evaluation criteria, you must determine metrics that assess agent and team performance. Fortunately, most voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone systems have built-in analytics displaying various KPIs, making tracking easier.
Here are some of the metrics you must consider while using a call center platform and keeping goals in mind:
- Average waiting time: This measures the average amount of time a customer spends waiting before speaking to an agent. The 80/20 principle states that call centers must aim to answer 80% of the calls within 20 seconds.
- Average handle time (AHT): This refers to the average amount of time agents spend on resolving customer concerns. Follow these steps to improve AHT.
- Net promoter score (NPS): This refers to the willingness of customers to recommend a company, a product, or a service to a friend or colleague.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): This measures how satisfied customers are with the organization’s products and services.
- First call resolution (FCR): This measures the ability of the team to resolve customer concerns at the initial contact.
To learn more about these metrics, including how they are calculated, refer to our comprehensive guide on call center metrics.
Zoom Contact Center displays various call center metrics on its wallboard. (Source: Zoom’s YouTube)
Zoom Contact Center offers access to a comprehensive reporting wallboard, which gives an overview of the overall team performance. It shows various metrics, including the service level, average voice waiting duration, average voice talking duration, and shortest wrap-up time. The customizable wallboard lets you display only the metrics that matter to your team.
4. Set a Regular Call Monitoring Schedule
One of the top call center quality assurance best practices is observing live calls routinely, as it allows managers to evaluate actual agent-customer interactions. Set a goal of monitoring a number of calls a day, per department or agent. Below are the most important customer service aspects to consider when performing call monitoring and completing your call center quality assurance checklist:
- Professional greeting: See if the agent started the conversation by mentioning your company name, introducing themselves, and directly asking the customer how they can help.
- Account verification: Evaluate if the service representative completed the steps for verifying the customer account.
- Proper understanding of the issue: Assess if the agent understood the customer’s concern or inquiry correctly and offered the right solutions.
- Cross-sell or upsell opportunities: The service representative must be able to offer customers the option to avail of other products and services.
- Appropriate case escalation: If the issue was raised to a more senior agent, determine if escalation is indeed necessary and if the agent complied with the proper escalation procedures.
- Appropriate call closing: The agent must confirm if the customer’s concern was addressed at the end of the conversation. They should be able to summarize what was discussed and what the next steps are and ask if the caller has other questions before ending the call.
RingCentral features various call monitoring tools. (Source: RingCentral)
Business phone system RingCentral allows managers to observe live calls through different call monitoring tools. Use the Whisper feature to listen in on calls without the customer knowing your presence. If you want to address both the agent and customer, choose Barge to create a three-way call. Meanwhile, the Take Over tool is useful for de-escalating a tense interaction between the client and agent, as it instantly removes the agent from the call.
If you want to use this contact center platform while adopting effective call center quality assurance tips, read about its notable features in our RingCentral review. The software solution’s entry-level plan is priced at $30 per user a month.
5. Analyze Customer Sentiments in Real Time
Included in this list of best call center quality assurance tips is monitoring what customers think and feel about your brand. By checking your call center system’s voice and speech analytics, it’s easier to identify what makes or breaks customer experience in conversations. This provides important insights on areas to improve on and types of training or coaching programs your agents would need. Live monitoring of sentiments helps you pivot strategies quickly as the calls happen.
Omnichannel contact center platform Talkdesk allows users to see customer sentiments across different channels, including voice calls. The platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool analyzes customers’ tone and keywords during conversations to evaluate the overall customer sentiment.
Talkdesk displays customer sentiments via its interaction analytics dashboard. (Source: Talkdesk)
If you want to monitor the effectiveness of newly rolled-out communication strategies, refer to the dashboard showing customer sentiment over time. It will show you the breakdown of positive, negative, and neutral sentiments for specific periods.
If you want to try this platform for your call center operations, subscribe to its base-level plan, which is priced at $75 per user, monthly. The package includes 70-plus out-of-the-box integrations with third-party solutions.
6. Secure Agent Inputs
Drafting an effective QA scorecard requires asking agents directly for their insights. They are immersed in the actual phone calls, so they would know customers’ pain points and preferences. This is especially crucial when assigning weights in QA evaluation categories. Agents might say that customers put more value on receiving meaningful advice on concerns over being accommodated quickly.
Another benefit of getting insights from agents is you secure their buy-in on quality standards and make them more aware of how they will be evaluated. As a result, they’re more conscious of their performance.
7. Automate Sending of Customer Surveys
As much as agent insights are crucial, customer feedback is important, as they are ultimately the stakeholders affected by call center activities. Ask customers which aspects of customer service are most valuable to them through a survey. Use those insights as evaluation criteria in your QA scorecards.
To make collecting customer feedback more convenient and avoid forgetting to send out polls, automate the surveys. Advanced call center software solutions have built-in tools that allow you to create and send customer questions automatically after every phone call.
8×8 features a comprehensive dashboard for survey responses. (Source: 8×8)
8×8 Contact Center lets businesses capture customer feedback by sending surveys in various channels. Its simple, clean dashboard displays poll outcomes, outlining the number of offered, opted-in, started, and completed surveys. Leverage the insights to recalibrate agents’ call handling and communication strategies. 8×8’s Contact Center offers custom pricing for its subscription packages.
8. Establish Who Conducts Reviews
The head of quality assurance is primarily responsible for ensuring compliance with proper evaluation processes. However, you may choose dedicated analysts and agents themselves to facilitate the activity. Here are review modes to consider as you adopt best practices in call center quality assurance:
- Quality assurance specialists: These are professionals dedicated to assessing agent-customer interactions based on quality standards. Moreover, they recommend action steps for reaching KPIs. The benefit of tapping QA specialists is that evaluations will always be prioritized and not neglected to give way to other call center tasks.
- Peer-to-peer: Have agents assess each other’s phone calls. The advantage of this review mode is that service representatives will be more familiar with quality standards and, therefore, be more intentional in delivering excellent service on calls.
- Self-review: Ask agents to evaluate their own performance. This helps them identify areas for improvement, which ultimately contributes to professional development.
9. Choose Which Types of Calls to Evaluate
There’s no hard and fast rule as to the number of calls you must analyze to ensure call center quality. Moreover, it’s more strategic to focus on the type of interaction rather than the quantity. When evaluating calls, direct your efforts on the following:
- Complex, lengthy customer queries to assess and recalibrate call center efficiency
- New agent calls to evaluate how fast new hires adjust to work processes
- Conversations with poor CSAT scores to understand the causes of customer frustration
Contact center system Dialpad features AI CSAT, which automatically detects CSAT scores from every customer interaction. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), it transcribes phone calls and identifies key factors affecting CSAT: long hold times, agent interruptions, resolution of queries, and customers’ positive and negative languages.
Dialpad automatically generates CSAT scores. (Source: Dialpad)
10. Perform Root Cause Analysis
While quality assurance scores give a peek into team performance, your assessment must involve looking into detailed reports to get more meaningful insights about agent-customer interactions.
Many cloud-based VoIP solutions come with various types of call center analytics, including speech, voice, interaction, and predictive analytics. These tools give you an in-depth look at knowledge and performance gaps, recurring customer pain points, and complex questions that stretch handle times.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A quality assurance specialist has the following responsibilities in a call center:
- Set call center quality assurance standards
- Evaluate agent-customer interactions
- Offer constructive feedback to agents to boost work efficiency
- Track KPIs and generate reports
- Provide higher executives with team performance updates
Knowing what call center quality assurance is matters, especially since the entire process requires a lot of team effort and investment. In a nutshell, QA processes are important as they identify areas for improvement in customer service and operational efficiency. Here are the specific reasons call center quality assurance is important to businesses:
- Increasing customer loyalty: By ensuring that services comply with quality standards, clients get a positive experience with the brand, making them choose the company’s products and services over competitors.
- Sharpening agents’ skills and knowledge: A robust quality assurance process enables representatives to know their strengths and weaknesses when handling calls and communicating with customers. Managers are able to tailor-fit coaching and training programs to accommodate knowledge and skill gaps. Over time, this builds agents’ competence.
- Understanding customer needs: Evaluating calls uncovers trends in customer concerns and demands, helping you improve call center scripts, knowledge bases, and even interactive voice response (IVR) menu options. The insights you get may even extend to other business aspects, like product development.
A good quality assurance analyst has the following skills:
- Attention to detail: The QA process involves listening to various phone calls and identifying ways to improve agent-customer interactions.
- Analytics: An analyst examines performance metrics and patterns in customer pain points.
- Written and verbal communication: The insights gathered from reviewing phone calls must be communicated to the team and higher-ups through written reports and face-to-face meetings or training sessions.
Bottom Line
Monitoring and analyzing customer conversations allows teams to identify agent performance issues, create effective coaching programs, and ensure compliance with quality standards. Adopt call center quality assurance best practices, including setting data-driven goals, pinning down evaluation criteria, and soliciting customer and agent feedback about your workflows and customer service strategies.
To further improve the process of reviewing customer conversations, explore software solutions with robust agent and supervisor tools. Read our buyer’s guide on the best call center phone systems.
