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A call center receives 1000s of calls daily. Every call center needs some kind of quality assurance (QA) on these calls.
A well-maintained quality management system ensures that calls adhere to a specific benchmark. The issue with manually auditing these calls is that only 1-2% of all calls can be audited this way.
The massive number of unaudited calls can contain mines of information like compliance violations, customer insights, agent performance, and room for improvement. Leaving them unaudited can cause a lot of issues like unsatisfactory customer experience and poor agent performance, to name a few.
What is the way out when there is a vast gap between the number of audited and unaudited calls?
Finding call center management systems that can help bridge the wide gap.
Will using AI tools for automated QA help call centers cost-effectively? Before we find out the answer to that question, let us look at the importance of QA in call centers.
Check out our podcast episode on quality management in contact centers.
Why is Quality Assurance Important in Call Centers?
A Forrester report found that many firms damage their customer experience because of gaps in call center performance. A system should be in place that checks the calls made by agents and trains them to improve.
Most call centers have a team of auditors who review the calls and ensure that the benchmark is maintained and the laws are complied with. They alert the agents if there are any issues that should be fixed.
It is understood that call center QA is crucial. But no team of auditors can go through all the calls made in a call center.
This massive number of unaudited calls can contain troublesome customer interactions that go unnoticed. Automated call center QA is the only other option to ensure that all calls are audited cost-effectively.
What is Automated Quality Assurance?
Automated call center QA relies on tools with AI that automatically audit calls. Many companies offer such automated call center management systems with different features.
All these tools have the bare minimum of 100% automated auditing. Tools like Convin also provide features like CRM integration, conversation intelligence, and agent coaching, to name a few.
Since it is evident that it is time for AI to be integrated with contact centers, what is the revenue over investment (ROI) that they provide? Let us look at various ways that AI-integrated contact center QA can help reduce costs in a call center.
Results first, payment later.
How Automated Quality Assurance Reduces Call Center Costs
As mentioned above, the benefits offered by an automated call center QA tool differ from company to company. Irrespective of which tool is used in a call center, here are some benefits of automated contact center QA tools.
1. 100% Audited Calls
Since AI powers these contact center QA tools, they have no limitations, except the ones by the server it runs on. This ensures that every call is audited.
As these tools audit all calls, there is little to no chance of any issue going unnoticed. With such a close eye on all calls, agents can be trained not to repeat them immediately to avoid such kind of agent behavior happening again.
With tools like Convin at your disposal, you can step up your contact center game beyond automated call auditing. Convin also automatically audits chats and emails to become your go-to QA tool for omnichannel contact centers.
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2. Avoid Biases in Call Sampling
An auditor consciously or unconsciously shows selection bias when randomly selecting samples for audit. A study found that random sampling, when performed manually, often happens to be haphazard sampling.
Haphazard sampling differs from random sampling and tends to show different behaviors that aren’t entirely random. Such biases can affect the call center management process and deliver the wrong results.
For example, an auditor might not audit calls done by an agent he favors while continuously monitoring other agents. Similarly, auditors might audit only the most recent calls, which could overlook calls made by agents in different timeframes.
On the other hand, automated contact center QA tools will take completely randomized calls for sampling. This eliminates any bias, showing a complete picture of the contact center's performance for managers to view.
For companies that want to run manual tests occasionally, these tools provide the same random samples previously identified by the tool.
3. Enhance your Agent Performance
A manual auditing framework delays agents being informed about gaps in their service. A Forrester report states that this metric, known as Time to Influence (TTI), should be reduced for auditors to have significant returns.
With so many unaudited calls, auditors take extended amounts of time to flag consistent issues pertaining to a single agent. While these delays are usual in manual auditing, there would also be agents who get flagged frequently or never at all, depending on how frequently auditors often their calls.
This isn’t related to an agent’s performance as it is caused due to the biases made by auditors due to sampling biases. Irrespective of the bias happening knowingly or unknowingly, the haphazard sampling can spiral into more significant issues if not treated properly.
People can learn from their shortcomings only if they know them; the same goes for contact center agents. Automated contact center QA tools can suggest calls agents can learn from to fix a particular issue in their customer interactions.
Insights from these tools allow agents to understand and overcome their shortcomings. This is done automatically, shortening the feedback cycle’s duration by miles.
Such quick feedback loops increase overall agent efficiency in the long run. Having a system that improves productivity throughout the call center is a sustainable and worthy investment.
Attrition is a major issue in contact centers, and training fresh agents is time-consuming. Automated coaching can help decrease the ramp-up time for new agents, allowing for a faster agent training regimen.
These tools can show them areas of improvement along each call they take in their initial training period.
A well-maintained call center coaching can increase agent performance for both new and working agents, reducing the possibility of continuous unsatisfactory agent behavior.
4. Easily Available Data on your Fingertips
Apart from having the calls audited, people in charge would also need to see analytics and other data about the contact center’s performance. Automated call center QA tools show you an overall analysis based on the auditing it has done.
Tools like Convin can also be integrated into your CRM to show insights about specific customer interactions. Having all his data easily available on the go with mobile applications can help maintain smooth operations in any call center.
Manage Your Contact Center Operations Smoothly
A report that shows all needed insights makes it easy for contact center management. Such reports also help identify statistics like customer acquisition cost and average handling time.
Summing Up
The critical nature of auditing in a contact center requires it to be done as swiftly and comprehensively as possible. Manual auditing isn’t a viable option for this.
Automated call center tools are the best way to ensure that auditing is done without leaving room for error. Here are the different ways that using automated call center QA is a cost-efficient way to audit customer interactions in a call center:
- All customer interactions in a contact center get audited by automated QA, making it an investment with good long-term results for performance throughout the contact center.
- Manual call sampling tends to bring in biases, while automated contact center QA tools ensure that there is no bias in the random samples taken for analysis.
- Agents can be informed of their mistakes and are suggested calls to learn from.
- Ramp-up time can be significantly reduced for new agents.
- All analysis and data from these tools are easily available for managers to understand the call center’s overall performance.
Having understood the impact and long-term value that Automated call center QA tools can bring, get ready to take the next step in auditing your contact center.
