Keeping on top of quality management means systematically evaluating agent performance and customer experience. Quality management (QM) is a vital method for improving customer experience (CX) and agent productivity, ultimately driving operational efficiency.
A well-implemented strategy reduces errors, identifies process improvement opportunities and aligns the call center’s goals with the overall business objectives. It’s an essential component of call center management that leads to a more effective and customer-centric call center.
Why Does Call Center Quality Management Matter?
Quality management enhances both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. It aims for high quality interactions, every time. But it’s important for many other reasons:
- Better customer satisfaction: Higher quality calls result in more positive experiences, leading to happier and more loyal customers. Encouraging agents to maintain high standards positively impacts customer retention and brand reputation, helping your business stand out from the competition.
- Increased operational efficiency: QM identifies process inefficiencies and highlights any room for improvement, enabling managers to streamline workflows and spend less time resolving issues.
- Better agent performance: A constant feedback loop between agents and managers, as well as regular training sessions, fosters a culture of continuous development and high productivity. It keeps agents performing at their best and gives them a voice when operational inefficiencies arise.
- Service consistency: QM standardizes call center processes, allowing them to maintain high standards across all customer interactions. It provides uniformity in service quality, which reduces any variations across agents and departments.
Implementing Quality Management in a Call Center
Define Your Quality Assurance Criteria
- Start by identifying the core metrics for your call center’s success, such as first call resolution (FCR) to measure how often issues are resolved in the first interaction. The higher the FCR, the better the customer satisfaction. Average Handle Time (AHT) is a strong indicator of how efficiently agents solve customer problems, while Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) measures direct feedback from customers through post-call surveys. Having a healthy balance of all metrics keeps call centers operating smoothly and efficiently.
- Focus on specific and measurable standards. Ensuring resolutions for every call reduces escalations and repeat callers, allowing agents to focus on important customer queries rather than the same issues over and over again. Ensure that agents demonstrate empathy in cases where it’s needed; if a customer is particularly frustrated, empathizing with their struggles significantly impacts customer satisfaction. Agents should also be technologically proficient and able to diagnose and resolve technical issues accurately.
- Finally, aligning your QA standards with the business objectives is essential. Each industry is different; for example, tech support call centers should prioritize technical resolution accuracy to resolve issues quickly and correctly. Sales call centers may need to focus on metrics like closing rates or upselling with revenue generation as the primary goal, while customer service centers should emphasize customer satisfaction and reduce escalations to bring down churn rates. Be careful not to overemphasize one metric at the expense of another, such as putting AHT first at the cost of FCR or CSAT.
Outline Your Goals
Implementing quality management without the main company objectives in mind is like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel. For it to work effectively, your goals must align with the company objectives, reflecting both call center operations and the company’s broader direction.
For example, if improving customer retention is your main target, the call center’s goal should be aligned with reducing churn by improving customer service, whether by implementing extra training programs for agents or offering AI-driven automation tools to speed things up.
Goals come in different forms, primarily short-term and long-term. Short-term goals focus on quick wins: improving efficiency, reducing average wait times, decreasing call escalations or bringing down abandonment rates. They’re important for quick, day-to-day improvements and are best managed using real-time dashboards that provide full visibility over the call center’s operations.
Long-term goals are just as important, though. They’re crucial for driving sustainable results and steady growth. Focus on providing consistent, high-quality service to increase customer loyalty, strengthen the brand’s reputation and improve lifetime customer value over time.
Monitor Regularly
Setting your goals is easy; staying on track with them is the tricky part. Continuous monitoring is the best way to keep your team on the same page, working towards the same goals. There are a few ways to do it:
- Random call reviews: With the help of call recording or call scoring software, choose calls at random for each agent and review them for compliance, agent performance and customer satisfaction. Regularly auditing each agent’s interactions is the best way to ensure they’re sticking to their training and treating every customer to the company’s standard.
- Metric tracking: Using a real-time dashboard, measure KPIs such as FCR, AHT and CSAT. Keeping track of important metrics on a daily basis means any drops in performance can be quickly acted on, preventing problems before they arise.
- Survey feedback: Sending post-call surveys to customers after each call is the quickest and easiest way to gauge their satisfaction immediately after the interaction. Constantly check customer experience scores to see how they’re responding to your agent’s service and act on any discrepancies as soon as possible.
Take a proactive approach towards monitoring: instead of simply reacting to the problem when it comes, identify issues early to address problems before they escalate. This allows managers to tailor agent training, introduce process improvements to prevent future issues and even provide target, one-on-one coaching sessions for skill gaps.
Automate The Call Center QA Process
We’ve seen how automation is changing the face of call centers in 2024. And QA is no exception. QA automation tools streamline the entire process of quality assessment. They’re able to track and analyze large volumes of call data simultaneously, which compared to a human agent, speeds up the process exponentially.
Automation tools track customer interactions from start to finish. They can flag potential compliance issues and identify dissatisfied customers, enabling managers to act on problems immediately. They significantly reduce the manual workload on QA teams who would historically have to go through hundreds, if not thousands, of individual calls. Not only that, but they increase review frequency: automation can monitor 100% of calls every single day.
And AI-driven insights go hand-in-hand with automation. AI technology such as speech analytics, call summaries and call transcriptions are powerful tools that provide in-depth analysis into all customer interactions. They identify trends and emerging patterns, analyze language and tone of voice, highlight positive and negative sentiment and generate rich reports into customer satisfaction and agent performance.
They are ideal for call centers handling high call volumes or frequently encountering frustrated customers, as they can prompt agents in real-time based on the customer’s emotional tone. Teams can act quickly on these insights to improve service quality and ultimately, overall operational effectiveness.
Track Sentiment
- Sentiment analysis: understand emotional tone of customer interactions in real time. Provide insights to managers to identify calls with frustrated customers so they can prioritize follow ups accordingly.
- Improve customer experience: ccs can take action on negative CXs asap, resolve issues before they escalate and improve satisfaction.
Gamify
Gamification in call centers is an excellent strategy to improve engagement and incorporate friendly competition into the workplace. It uses game elements like rewards, points systems, leaderboards, goal-based countdowns and any other form of competition. It incentivizes employees to work towards a specific goal with the promise of reward, such as monetary prizes or vouchers.
Gamification motivates agents more than other strategies as it provides direct benefits for hard work. Agents can earn points, badges, or bonuses based on their performance. The element of friendly competition enables them to work against fellow employees in a relaxed atmosphere, and share in each other’s victory when a winner emerges. It not only boosts motivation and engagement, which increases productivity by up to 18%, it reduces the risk of burnout.
And not only that, it’s a surefire way to enhance employee performance. Using leaderboards, for example, allows employees to see how they stack up against fellow agents. They encourage agents to perform better by recognizing top performers and striving to surpass them. The positive reinforcement from gamifying call centers leads to much higher job satisfaction, which ultimately drives higher quality service.
Strategies for Managing Quality in a Call Center
Managing call center quality involves a comprehensive strategy covering every aspect of the implementation and development process. Let’s take a look at how to do it.
Agent Training
Strong onboarding
Starting a new job is never easy. Even the most experienced call center agents struggle in the first few weeks, which makes the onboarding program that much more important. Giving your agents the tools they need from day one is the best way to set them up for continued success. Provide them with in-depth training to make sure they’re fully equipped with the right tools to perform their roles successfully.
Regular training programs
Customer service is a volatile industry, full of technological changes and evolving customer preferences. This means that agents can be faced with entirely different situations month-on-month, depending on a variety of factors such as time of year, emerging technologies, new product launches or simply the weather. Offering agents continuous training on the latest policies, tools, procedures and tech ensures they’re constantly up to date with the information they need. Training should cover everything from technical skills to empathy, helping them deliver high-quality support across every interaction.
Role-playing
While difficult situations are less common in certain industries, agents must be prepared to handle them when they arise. Role-playing and simulated scenarios can help agents practice with managers in a controlled environment. They improve their ability to handle challenging situations, such as frustrated or angry customers. Role-playing exercises help agents develop problem-solving skills, preparing them for real-life situations. Plus, they boost their confidence and ability to de-escalate a heated conversation.
Quality Monitoring Tools
Keeping your QM on track is challenging enough without the unnecessary stress of manual admin. Quality monitoring tools are essential for keeping everything in one place, well-documented and easily accessible. There are a few quality monitoring tools to look into, but the main two are call recording and real-time monitoring software.
Call Recording and Reviewing: Call recording software enables managers to assess agent performance by reviewing both successful and unsuccessful calls. It’s instrumental in quality assurance as it allows managers to identify best practices and areas for improvement. It’s also beneficial for agents as they can review their own calls and self-assess where they might have gone wrong. Plus, it’s a great way of collecting training material for new agents, as they can listen back on the most successful calls and use them as guidance for future interactions.
Real-time Monitoring Software: Used in tandem with call recording tools, real-time monitoring software enables managers to listen to live calls and provide instant feedback to agents. They can use call whispering to speak to agents during calls, prompting their responses and guiding them through difficult interactions, allowing for immediate feedback and coaching. Real-time monitoring ensures that any deviations from scripts can be quickly corrected and quality standards can be addressed on the spot.
Encourage Feedback
Call centers thrive on excellent customer service. But they’re also notorious for high levels of employee burnout and turnover. This is often due to existing issues going unnoticed or unaddressed, causing agents to become exhausted and feel undervalued. This ultimately leaks into the customer experience as tired agents can’t provide high quality service levels.
Gathering feedback from both agents and customers should be high on the priority list for any call center manager. Customer feedback collected through post-call surveys, for example, gathers direct opinions from customers about their satisfaction levels. They allow managers to identify trends or patterns in customer complaints or praise, which is key to tracking how certain changes and campaigns impact customer perception over time.
Employee feedback, on the other hand, can sometimes get overlooked, but is just as important for call center longevity. Employees are one of the greatest assets to businesses; they drive sales and lead generation, support customers and keep the business running every day. Ensuring that they’re equally as supported is just as important as customer service.Hosting Q&As, conducting one-on-one sessions, or sending anonymous surveys are excellent ways to gather employee feedback. And make sure you’re acting on any issues or concerns raised by agents.
Establish Performance Benchmarks
Key Performance Indicators are the call center’s bread and butter. They’re essential for measuring agent performance and overall operational efficiency, as well as customer satisfaction and day-to-day trends. Based on the call center’s type and industry, KPIs will differ from business to business. But one thing is certain: every call center needs clearly defined KPIs that are measurable and achievable.
Establish clear KPIs like abandonment rate, average handle time (AHT), calls per day, first-call resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) as targets for both individual agents and the call center as a whole. Make sure they’re easily understood and measurable with a real-time dashboard, and act on any sudden dips in performance as soon as possible. KPIs must be attainable; otherwise, employees will never be aligned with the business. But too low and agents will grow complacent.
Setting the right KPIs with appropriate targets requires analyzing both historical and current data. Look into past performance of competitors to see how they’re performing and strive to hit their numbers or surpass them. Historical data can provide a baseline for measuring improvements after new strategies or technologies are introduced, while current data guides the business on a day-to-day basis. Measure up your goals with the industry standard and continuously monitor it to see how it fluctuates throughout the year.
Regularly Review & Update Processes
Implementing a continuous improvement cycle is the best way of keeping up to date with evolving market conditions. Customer preferences change all the time – and call centers must change with them to stay competitive. Regularly review and update your processes, tools and performance standards based on customer and agent feedback and industry trends. Remaining efficient and effective depends on staying informed about market conditions, regardless of the circumstances.
And don’t forget to adapt to customer expectations. Choosing a path and sticking to it isn’t always the way forward. Quality management has to change with the customer’s expectations; for example, for customers who want quick and efficient service without waiting on hold, AI-driven chatbots can quickly answer their queries in minutes. Staying effective in the market means constantly bringing in new quality standards and updating performance criteria to avoid being left behind.
Conclusion
Strong quality management is essential for operational excellence. It improves agent performance and customer satisfaction, helping businesses stay competitive in a rapidly evolving industry.
Call centers that embrace technology and AI are well-positioned to continuously adapt their quality practices and strategies to meet growing customer expectations. They are better equipped to maintain a competitive edge and succeed in an ever-evolving market.
