The quality assurance (QA) process in a call center involves tracking various metrics and monitoring interactions between agents and customers to ensure that standards for quality and compliance are met. Call centers can take several steps to improve the QA process.
- Develop a clear QA strategy. Ensuring quality in the call center begins by establishing a vision for what quality looks like and developing key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to get there.
- Monitor every support channel. While call centers primarily support phone conversations, customers expect to engage companies on every channel – phone, email, chat, text, social, web, and others. Monitoring some channels and not others will deliver an incomplete picture of quality.
- Automate QA processes. Traditional QA methods involve manually reviewing call recordings and issuing a quality score. However, this process can only capture a small fraction of the total interaction with customers. With tools that automate analysis and review, call centers can track metrics for 100% of interactions to gain comprehensive insights.
- Involve everyone. A well-executed QA program can be a great source of motivation, engagement, and ownership for employees throughout the call center. Developing transparent QA processes and giving agents the tools to monitor and enhance their own performance can help to create a consistent culture of improvement.
What is the role of QA in a call center?
Quality assurance practices ensure that agents and processes adhere to the standards established by the call center and to regulatory requirements and local privacy laws.
What are the benefits of QA in the call center?
A strong QA program can help call centers to:
- Reduce costs by increasing efficiency, implementing optimal staffing levels, and resolving customer issues more quickly.
- Enhance customer experiences by routing calls to the best agent, handling calls effectively, and adhering to best practices that deliver the best possible service and outcomes for each call.
- Improve agent training by targeting behavior for guidance or reinforcement, uncovering gaps in agent knowledge, and identifying the agents and approaches that are most effective in resolving customer issues.
- Increase operational performance by identifying inefficiencies and implementing a culture of continuous improvement.
What KPIs are most important in a call center QA review?
Call-center QA relies on a broad range of metrics that track the efficiency with which calls are processed and the quality of interactions between agents and customers.
- Average handle time (AHT) measures the time required to complete a call, including talk time, hold time, and after-call work.
- Average speed of answer (ASA) tracks the average time customers must wait before their call is answered.
- First call resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of calls that can be resolved on the customer’s first contact with the call center.
- Transfer rate is the percentage of calls that must be referred to a supervisor or a more experienced agent, which can frustrate customers.
- Customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort customers feel they have to exert to resolve their issues.
- Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend the business or the call center to others.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) tracks how satisfied customers are with their interactions with the call center.
What are the challenges of managing call center quality assurance?
Challenges of call center QA include:
- Reviewing comprehensive interactions. Manually reviewing call recordings is a time-consuming endeavor and enables QA teams to capture only a small fraction of the total number of interactions between agents and customers. To gain a more accurate and complete picture of quality, teams need solutions that can automate quality reviews of all interactions.
- Translating call quality data into training and coaching. As QA processes reveal inefficiencies and knowledge gaps, teams must find ways to turn that intelligence into effective training and coaching.
- Uniting call center employees around quality goals. Poorly managed QA processes can lower morale and increase agent attrition. Call centers must find ways to make quality assurance a positive endeavor and a point of pride for everyone.
- Measuring and tracking QA KPIs. Collecting and analyzing data and reporting on KPIs can be an overwhelming process. The best QA programs use technologies that automate every aspect of tracking and reporting. This enables QA teams and call center managers to focus on strategic tasks rather than routine, manual processes.
What’s the best way to measure QA metrics in the call center?
Many call centers today have adopted conversation intelligence technology to automate every aspect of their QA programs. Conversation intelligence combines text analytics and speech analytics to automatically capture and analyze every customer interaction across all channels. Using AI and machine learning, conversation intelligence platforms transform unstructured information in audio and text-based interactions into structured data that can be searched, analyzed, categorized, and scored against quality standards. This technology lets call centers glean insight from 100% of customer interactions, rather than just a fraction.
How can CallMiner Eureka improve call center quality assurance?
CallMiner Eureka is the industry’s most comprehensive conversation intelligence platform for analyzing omnichannel customer interactions at scale. CallMiner enables call centers to capture, analyze, categorize, and score 100% of customer conversations on every channel, delivering tools and capabilities that drive value and improve quality across the organization. With CallMiner Eureka, QA teams can better understand agent behavior, identify opportunities for improvement, and level up the workforce to improve outcomes. Capabilities for real-time guidance offer support to agents in overcoming knowledge gaps, adhering to compliance requirements, and finding optimal outcomes for challenging interactions. From improving training and coaching to providing transparency and quality management, CallMiner delivers the tools that help call centers to automate and improve quality assurance.
