Why Call Center Quality Assurance is Key to Customer Satisfaction?

Do you want to improve your call center quality assurance process? Looking to put call center quality assurance best practices in place?

If there is one sure way to lose your customers or get a deep dent in customer loyalty, it is a poor call center customer service experience.

After exploring all possible self-service options, when customers try to call your business, they are looking for efficiency! They are looking for someone who cares about their time, empathizes with their wasted effort (most probably failed self-service), and is knowledgeable enough to give them prompt and crisp answers.

Efficient quality assurance in a call center is the way to ensure this happens and that your customers not only stay with you but become your ambassadors.

Before getting into the best practices that will enable you to achieve this for your business, let us start from the very basics and understand what is call center quality assurance.

Here we go!

What Is Call Center Quality Assurance?

Call center quality assurance ensures your customer service meets or exceeds organizational quality benchmarks by monitoring customer-client interactions and tracking KPIs while setting up and optimizing the processes to enable the agents to do so, including training and feedback.

The interactions monitored can range from calls to chats and even emails and social media, depending on the business. These interactions are not only monitored but also evaluated across various criteria aligning with the organization’s quality standards and business goals.

QA analysts evaluate interactions using several key performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction, average handling time, and compliance adherence. QA scorecards help identify finer areas of improvement by keeping a close tab on agent behavior in terms of active listening, empathy, building rapport, etc.

Quality assurance includes providing constructive feedback to the agents backed with real examples from interactions. At the same time, the analysts work on refining scripts and improving processes to optimize agent performance and customer satisfaction.

Traditionally done on a spreadsheet with a limited number of calls, Quality assurance has come to a different level with the advent of AI. AI tools can monitor all interactions irrespective of the volume, putting great power in the organization’s hands in terms of sample size.

Human teams can then monitor and evaluate the most significant ones to draw insights that can transform customer satisfaction, resulting in better business in multiple ways. But that is not the only benefit of all-center quality assurance.

Now, before we proceed to our main section on call center quality assurance best practices, let’s take a quick look at how Call center quality assurance positively impacts a business.

Importance Of Quality Assurance In Call Centers

The goal of Quality assurance in a call center is threefold. While enhancing customer satisfaction is one aspect, the other two are enabling the customer service team and refining business goals and processes.

QA benchmarks are nothing but company standards and values in action. These are communicated by the Head of Support to the QA team, which further enables customer service teams to represent the same values in their interactions, making them the ambassadors of your company’s service culture.

On the other hand, continuous QA empowers you to adjust your business goals and procedures based on customer needs that are successfully derived from QA data.

You cannot build a customer service team that truly cares without transparency. A transparent QA process that gives agents access to their performance and its systematic evaluation enhances their sense of ownership and encourages them to improve.

Identifying individual areas of improvement will help you organize more efficient coaching sessions. With the constructive goal of improving agents’ performance and efficiency, such personalized or segmented coaching sessions deliver actual results and build agents’ trust and confidence, resulting in healthy agent experiences.

Lastly, an efficient Quality assurance system enables agents to deliver consistent service quality, boosting customer loyalty and retention. Most businesses can manage to make a great first impression, but it is the consistency in empathy, eagerness, and genuine desire to serve customers that makes a remarkable business – thanks to a good Quality assurance process. 

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9 Best Practices To Improve Quality Assurance In A Call Center

Ensuring high-quality customer interactions is key to running a successful call center.

1. Regularly Monitor

Call center quality assurance starts with monitoring customer-agent interactions. So, everything from calls to emails to chats must be monitored for quality. And to get the context right, they must be monitored entirely, from start to finish.

Choosing the right call center software is the most important step in doing this efficiently. The software should preferably come with quality assurance software with features including call monitoring, recording, transcription, etc.

The software should be easy to use for your team and must be flexible and scalable in case your customer volumes go up or you have a seasonal workflow. Additional features such as analytics and workforce management are also helpful.

Tracking everything randomly can be both overwhelming and useless, so deciding which metrics/KPIs to analyze in the call monitoring process is key to deriving actionable outcomes. Doing this will also help you identify calls that must be analyzed more closely than others. For example, calls where many KPIs are poor are an ideal choice to derive learnings.

Unless you are using an AI tool that can record and monitor everything, you must monitor a sizable sample that is good enough to derive comprehensive results.

2. Use AI To Automate Workflow

AI is revolutionizing call center quality assurance with many amazing capabilities and features.

Starting from making the Herculean task of monitoring each interaction possible, AI-automated workflow can also get you automated scoring, transcripts, and summaries of all customer interactions in a jiffy.

By investing in an automated AI workflow, you can:

• Pinpoint key terms and critical moments across conversations
• Perform sentiment analysis to understand how to build stronger connections with customers
• Identify friction points and train agents to deliver smoother interactions

For these and many more reasons, AI is becoming an integral part of establishing an outstanding quality assurance process.

3. Monitor Calls In Real-Time

With real-time call monitoring, you can simultaneously enhance agent performance, increase customer satisfaction and compliance, and increase operational efficiency.

Real-time call monitoring allows you to give direct and immediate feedback, along with instant corrections and guidance. For example, if an agent is having a hard time handling customer objections, real-time monitoring software can prompt the agent with effective strategies to overcome the situation immediately.

With many more scenarios like this, real-time monitoring can help improve your sales conversion on the spot.

Monitoring calls in real time can also help you address critical issues promptly as they occur. These issues can be as outrageous as clients swearing at your agents or as annoying as your agents putting a client on hold for way too long.

To do so, you can set keyword triggers or duration triggers, for example, in your real-time call transcriptions and provide immediate help. 

4. Do Root Cause Analysis

While real-time monitoring helps you identify issues immediately and enables you to provide operational solutions, it only solves the issue at the micro level. Performing a root cause analysis is the only way you can stop the same issues from recurring and causing a waste of organizational resources.

RCA is a systematic process where you collect data related to a specific issue from various resources such as QA scores, post-call surveys, agent performance metrics, etc. Then you look for patterns, trends, or correlations in the data to reach the underlying cause of that issue.

For example, you identify that long customer wait times are associated with a specific time of day, which can lead to analysis such as understaffing, faulty call routing, etc. Once you figure out the root cause, you can fix it effectively.

5. Train Your Employees

Right and continuous training and skill enhancement are vital for any quality assurance framework to be successful. The focus of this should not just be enhanced customer satisfaction but also increased employee engagement and reduced agent churn.

Among all other types of training and skill enhancement, knowledge base training can be a remarkable way to empower your employees. A knowledge base empowers your agents with knowledge at their fingertips as and when they need it, without having to rely on their memory.

Training across channels, including calls, chats, emails, texts, and even social media, is equally important to maintaining consistency and quality. The best approach is to create a flexible coaching plan with follow-up and continued support.

6. Standardize The QA Monitoring Process

To make QA effective, you must standardize the process across channels.

By establishing standards across channels, call centers can deliver a cohesive omnichannel customer experience. This, in turn, strengthens customer trust and reinforces brand integrity. You can use channel-specific scorecards, regular cross-channel audits, and agent training for cross-channel consistency to standardize the QA process.

7. Develop And Implement SOPs

Developing and implementing SOPs is an integral part of standardizing your QA process. SOPs help you to streamline the operations and enable your team members with written documentation of what exactly must be done in a situation.

A simple outline to develop a good SOP is:

• Identify a process
• Summarize the requirements
• Describe what actions to take
• Define the timeline for each action
• Decide who will be accountable for the task
• Determine the expected result

You can develop and implement SOPs for separate teams for support, sales, after-sales services, etc., to make them most effective.

8. Give Timely, Balanced Feedback

Feedback is most effective when given regularly, constructively, and backed with real examples. When done right, feedback can not only help agents perform better but also help them take ownership of their performance and encourage them to outperform themselves.

9. Adopt A Customer-Centric Culture

Designing your QA processes around a customer-centric culture is the key to achieving an outstanding business.

This means that rather than focusing on refining your internal processes randomly, you must focus on how you can best deliver a remarkable customer experience.

Look at what matters most to customers. Is it empathy? Resolution effectiveness? Clear communication? Or something else? Based on direct feedback from customers, such as post-call surveys, CX Sentiment, NPS, etc., see how your call center is performing around these metrics, and then integrate the analysis into your QA process.

Keep this process evolving with evolving customer needs.

Conclusion

After reading this article, I hope you have a clear idea of the call center quality assurance best practices you need to implement. Given how important call center quality assurance is for the overall health of your company, implementing these practices can take your business to the next level.

I wish you all the best!

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