Quality assurance is an essential part of the contact center operation. A carefully designed call center QA initiative ensures an excellen t customer experience. It is the only way any business organization can confirm consistency in the quality of its services. Contact centers receive hundreds of thousands of calls every day from customers, making them one of the most crucial touchpoints in the customer journey. Agents listen to a variety of complaints, requests, and issues and need to act on them immediately. Be it an inquiry for information or assistance for a task, quality assurance ensures agents always deliver optimum service and represent the best version of the company and brand in front of the customers.
To implement the best quality assurance process, one can follow the following call center QA best practices:
Firstly, Identify the priorities
What outcomes do you desire for your company? Which element would you emphasize? One can only respond to these inquiries by defining the long and short-term goals.
So, clear objectives and priorities are essential for a successful call center QA operation. Therefore, start by determining what you hope to accomplish with the QA program. Decide on the aspects to be focused on while implementing the quality assurance program. Set short-term and long-term goals for the call center quality assurance program and quality management team.
So, for future development long-term goals and objectives must be established. These outline call protocols as well as the actions you should take to improve your CSAT score. Short-term objectives are more present-oriented. It can provide a solution to queries like, “How many cold calls should be made per week?” It enables organizations to create daily call quotas or other goals that are practical for the agents to achieve in a short time.
Discuss with the team and make a clear plan of how to achieve these short and long-term goals. Call center QA software should include these goals and objectives and analyze the performance of the agents based on these set criteria.
Secondly, Customer-centric approach
Some businesses lose focus because of a lack of proper management. They either prioritize the wrong targets or care excessively about the other facets of their operations. They overlook the fact that they are assisting customers who must be cultivated into patrons and supporters of their services or products in the midst of their mistaken priorities. Never waver from a customer-focused approach. Work on developing and improving what you have to offer but be careful not to focus so much on it that you forget who your business is meant to serve. Customers should be at the core of your quality assurance strategies. This will assist teams to remember that customers are individuals, not just statistics.
Thirdly, Monitor and record
Everybody has heard the voice prompt that warns callers or customers that their conversations will be recorded for quality assurance. But why are call centers so keen on recording such a large volume of calls and taking the pain of storing them? The purpose of it is to make quality analysts, supervisors, and trainers monitor the customer-agent interaction and transcribe each call for quality assessment. Call monitoring is the core of the quality assurance process. It can be a voice call, a chat, or any other type of interaction through different channels.
Their responsibility is to keep track of any deviations from the script, guidelines, or compliance process while agents handle calls. They also evaluate and determine if issues or queries were appropriately handle, and if certain areas still require improvement.
Call center management software, workforce management tools, and software, or quality monitoring and assessment solutions with call recording and live call monitoring facilities can help QA monitoring. Also, call center QA solutions with AI technologies can transcribe 100% of contact center calls for QA analysis and monitoring and can automate the entire QA process.
Fourthly, Efficient training program
The proverb “practice makes perfect” is quite well known. However, this does not mean random and aimless training can bring the desired outcome, or rather, any positive result for the agents. Management leaders, trainers, quality analysts, and stakeholders with process knowledge should sit together and must take the time to define the scope and boundaries of the contact center quality assurance training program. Next, trainers, coaches, or the person responsible for training agents should clearly explain the objectives. Purpose of the training and how agents can make the most of the training program.
They must patiently explain the scope and limitations of the contact center activities and must assist the agents in developing their abilities properly. Effective agents are produce through carefully design training programs. Additionally, the customers are more likely to be satisfier with agents who are more accustom to handling calls. Content customers mean more CSAT. So, the more hands-on training is provided, the more the agents will be ready to face real-life call situations & will be able to handle even complex scenarios. Agents can listen to the recorded calls through a call center QA or quality assurance software to experience such situations and learn how to behave or what they need to do in these kinds of situations.
Fifthly, Hire a quality analyst
Quality analysts are an indispensable part of the contact center operation. They are responsible for quality monitoring and assessment of agents. Call center QA professionals listen to the calls or conversations that happen through any channel and evaluate the agent’s performance based on set standards and benchmarks. Therefore, ensure agents are adhering to the guidelines, and procedures and compliant with the rules and regulations.
They make sure agents are meeting the customer expectations and highlight the strength and weaknesses of the agent. They can identify what is preventing agents from reaching their peak and even call center processes or operational bottlenecks. Additionally, they can design more effective training or coaching sessions for the call center advisors, research call center industry trends. Contribute to improving the call center operation, enhancing the overall efficiency.
Sixthly, Employ omnichannel approach
Different channels are being use by the customers and contact centers must infuse their operations into these channels where their customers frequent. It will help the business organization improve its reach, and customers will enjoy the services through their preferred channels. The purpose of the contact center is to make sure that consumers can reach out to them when they are in need so that they can help the customer.
Multi-channel presence enables them to reach out to more customers and assist them. But the omnichannel approach demands technologies that allow flexible and seamless operation through multiple channels. Many contact center management solutions provide omnichannel support. Also, there are call center QA solutions that enable users to monitor and manage quality assurance through multiple channels.
Lastly, Assess the relevance of QA practices to business goals
For the best outcomes, your quality assurance plan must be strong enough to support the corporate objectives. Set aside some time to assess the current QA practices to ensure that they support the organizational goals. Continue to make it easier for one to transition between training, coaching & work on a 24/7 basis. If you see that your quality control efforts for your contact center services are at odds with the outlined outcome. It is time to concentrate on a fresh approach and adopt a strategy that appreciates your brand more.
Endnote
Do not follow QA or contact center trends just because you see competitors or industry titans doing so. Rather, adjust your communication channels in line with consumers evolving requirements and expectations. Make sure the quality program complements the contact center operation and helps the agent to perform better. The call center QA program that reflects the organizational value and helps to achieve its goals the perfect approach for quality monitoring and assurance.