Call Center Quality Assurance

What is call center quality assurance?

As rightly said, quality is never an accident but the result of intelligent efforts. Quality assurance (abbreviated as QA) is the art of enabling a finished product to meet expected outcomes. 

Call quality assurance helps in aligning customer interactions with business objectives. With call center QA, it becomes possible to identify common customer issues. 

Call quality assurance also enables the establishment of standardized communication processes that aid in boosting customer satisfaction. 

In short, call center quality assurance helps in fine-tuning agent performance while fixing various loose strings in the call center. 

With call center quality assurance, you can carry out call monitoring and scoring using software and draw actionable insights in boosting your call center agents’ performance.

Why is call center quality assurance important?

It is evident that more customers prefer calls over chats and emails. According to a report by Microsoft, 39% of people prefer phone or any other voice channel for customer service, which was the highest compared to the other channels. 

With voice calls, customer service becomes easier and faster. But, the calls become difficult to assess, which can under shadow many grievances. Additionally, calls can contain many opportunities that go unnoticed. 

Finding the root cause of many issues from 100% of the voice calls was impossible until automation came into the picture. 

Call quality assurance in call centers made 100% call monitoring possible within a reduced time without losing the human touch. 

Listed below are a few ways in which call center quality assurance helps in improving call center performance:

• Reporting on call center metrics like AHT, FCR, etc. 
• ‍Using trends to track team performance
• ‍Sentiment analysis to track customers’ feelings in their buying journey
• ‍Insights on improving training programs

What are the functions of a QA team in a call center?

Quality assurance is vital in a call center, and we’re pretty sure you already have a QA team doing the necessary work to keep the organization going. 

• Improves customer experience 
• Increasing the effectiveness of auditing
• Evaluating agent performance
• Root-cause analysis
• Compliance monitoring
• Aligning remote workers by monitoring
• Coaching plans for learning and skill development

But are you using quality assurance to its maximum potential? 

Using quality assurance for a fixed number of organizational tasks leaves many unperceived opportunities. 

Also, post-covid has opened doors to remote working, which challenges aligning employees to their work and monitoring them. 

‍Not to worry! We have discussed some essential functions of a quality assurance team below that will help you assess your call center’s status better:

Improves customer experience 

A report by GetFeedback says that 73% of respondents have increased their efforts in delivering a personalized experience to customers since Covid-19. 

With call center quality assurance, you can operationally, strategically, and tactically measure how well you are at positive customer experience. You can also perform root-cause analysis to understand every customer interaction. 

The insights acquired with root-cause analysis can be used to fix identified issues that can help improve customer experience. 

Additionally, quality assurance for call centers has more benefits that help better understand the customer experience, like the voice of the customer, empathy, rapport, active listening, etc. 

Increasing the effectiveness of auditing

Quality assurance for auditing comes into the picture when interactions with a failure are detected.

Audits assess corrective measures that were taken during a failure. High-quality QA flags and tracks these corrective measures and helps in reducing manual efforts. 

Good quality assurance will also enable you to alert agents through email and make them aware of their QA scores. Agents will therefore be able to view the actions taken with their respective dates. 

Evaluating agent performance

One of the most common uses of call center QA is the evaluation of agent performance. Voted as the most popular way of assessing agent performance, QA in call centers grades the quality of customer service. Agent performance is evaluated on actionable items which are associated with KPIs.

Root-cause analysis

Often, call centers don’t dive deeper into quality assurance. Identifying gaps in performance and knowledge by root cause analysis is one of the most valuable functions of a call center. 

The bottom of causation and determination of correlation is achieved by monitoring and spotting discrepancies, pitfalls, and opportunities. Quality assurance overall provides a detailed insight into these factors in the form of scores and reports. 

Compliance monitoring

Providing a great customer experience requires empathy, active listening, and responsiveness. With certain miscommunications, harsh tones, or language usage, a customer can walk away feeling negative about the company. 

Quality assurance ensures that an agent faces the customer decently while providing the best service possible. Moreover, companies can set parameters that an agent has to follow that would bring out the best results in facing the customer. 

Aligning remote workers by monitoring

Remote working has become more and more popular. With quality assurance, aligning the agents to collaboration tools, softwares, and productivity-tracking apps become easier. 

If your remote call center is using a cloud system, call center software is definitely the most vital tool you need in your tech stack. 

Coaching plans for learning and skill development

Quality assurance aids in providing proper training to managers and agents in call centers. With the right QA, you can save ample time and effort while not compromising on the quality of coaching your employees get. 

Good quality assurance eases the onboarding process and can decrease your ramp-up time to as low as 60%.

How is quality assurance assessed?

Call quality in a call center is assessed by the team leader, quality assurance auditor, or sometimes the manager.

Commonly, there are two categories of parameters on which call quality is assessed:

Customer and Call metrics

Customer and call metrics include average handle time, average after call work time, service level, first call resolutions, average speed of answer, average time in call, average call abandonment rate, etc. 

Adherence to agreed parameters assessment

Every company agrees to a set of parameters to be followed by the agents while facing the customer. A QA is performed by a QA specialist or a team leader where the agreed parameters are assessed. The assessment indicates the agents’ professionalism and performance while opening doors to improvement and growth of the organization. 

What makes a good call center QA analyst?

Quality assurance for call centers is evidently crucial. But a quality assurance analyst is vital to run an effective QA. The quality of service sought to continuously improvise is determined heavily by the call QA analyst. 

Listed below are some of the skills every quality assurance analyst must possess:

• Attention to detail 
• Interpersonal skills 
• Exceptional customer care skills
• Solid written and verbal communication skills
• Excellent analytical skills 
• Great technical comprehension
• Outstanding problem-solving skills

How to create a call center QA framework?

Before we discuss the way to create a perfect call center framework, we need to understand the 3 types of quality assurance frameworks.

1. Operational
   Virtually all call centers start with an operational quality assurance framework. An operational QA framework is the building block of daily operations and supports core functions and workflows in your call center. 
   To create an efficient and customer-centric quality assurance strategy, you can make a note of the following points:
   1. Daily measurement of QA
   2. Monthly evaluations
   3. Monthly score targets for call center agents
   4. Identification of poor performers using QA
2. Tactical
   Tactical framework is more flexible and allows you to modify your QA process.
   A tactical call center QA framework which goes beyond customer service goals involves:
   1. Recognizing sources of low KPI
   2. Increasing customer retention
   3. Investing money and time in training to reduce agent turnover
   4. Deriving performance trends
   5. Identifying processes and workflows that need adjustment
3. Strategic
   For a strategic call center quality assurance framework, your call center structure needs to be structured in a different way. You should be able to share, analyze, and interpret data related to your business’s tactical objectives and goals.
   Some factors of a strategic QA framework include:
   1. Increasing long-term customer loyalty
   2. Understanding where customer sentiments, QA, and customer service intersect
   3. Boosting net promoter score (NPS)
   4. Increasing revenue by examining the impact of customer service
   
   Now that we are accustomed to the three frameworks of a call center quality assurance, listed below are some ways to create a perfect call center QA framework.
   1. Metrics are essential to measuring against agents
   To move the QA needle, you need to identify which metrics are important to your business. Your customer service team should look into the following essential metrics:
   - Customer satisfaction rates
   - First call resolution rates
   - Return contact rate
   - Negatives response rate
   
   2. Monitoring, analyzing, and measuring metrics
   QA data storage has been a challenge due to the large amount and complexity of the process. Thanks to the integration of call center QA software!
   With call center monitoring software, you can easily streamline processes by monitoring, measuring, and analyzing your teams’ performance data,
   
   3. Improving customer interactions
   Once you have sufficient data, it is necessary to use it to improve customer interactions.
   For instance, agents can be trained better via coaching sessions once a requirement is felt by CSAT scores indicating gaps in training.

Call quality assurance best practices you should know

Here is a call center quality assurance checklist that will help you improvise your QA and help you achieve maximum results: 

Choosing the right QA software

The right call center software will allow you to automate data collection and make the process of monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting way easier. 

An AI-backed conversation intelligence platform like Convin provides the right combination of features that you need to stay on top of your QA process:

• Automated call QA
• Peer-to-peer coaching
• Omnichannel contact center
• Call and chat transcriptions
• 100% auditing and compliance monitoring 
• Customer intelligence

Avoiding the fatal flaws

To make the most out of your QA program, everyone must be on the same page. A better experience needs the understanding of your team towards the word “better.” 

Your team must be well acquainted with the KPIs that assess them. If your team manages to avoid the unnecessary “I didn’t know” moments, your call center will never face another customer disappointment moment. 

One person to be responsible 

Call center managers and team leaders often have too much on their plate to handle quality assurance. So instead, it can be worth it to bring in a dedicated quality assurance manager.

QA specialists or department managers will monitor calls and improve training materials. If budget is a concern, look into outsourcing your QA process.

Call center managers and QA leaders often have too much to handle, which can be gruesome, along with the various complex issues haunting them. 

With a dedicated quality assurance manager, these tasks can be streamlined with ease. Outsourcing a QA manager is also a good way to go in case of budget issues. 

Consistency is the key

There are two key aspects to keep in mind:

1. Schedule of the QA program.
2. How will agents adhere to the schedule?

A consistent schedule aligns agents and managers to analyze and exchange helpful feedback. 

Have regular agent feedback 

Constructive criticism always opens doors to new opportunities and improvement. Agents need to receive feedbacks on their performances to understand their status of work. 

With good call center software, this feedback can become easier to be assessed and deliver. 

Agents needing refinement in their performance can be coached and monitored. 

By the end of the day, skilled agents bring out the most results. Rewarding them with incentives is also a way to upskill your feedback process. 

Refine your KPIs and processes from time to time

Your call quality assurance is a process that is continuous. It is very necessary to revisit the processes and KPIs from time to time to ensure their effectiveness. 

The market is changing constantly. It is always healthy to frequently question your strategy, change frameworks, and revamp your team.

How Does Convin’s Call Center Quality Assurance Capabilities provide 100% compliance monitoring?

Convin is a versatile software solution that doesn’t claim to solve your contact center woos but resolves many challenges with a few capabilities. Customer management and experience creation is one area that Convin can help. 

By employing automated tools and influencing agents' performance, elevating CSAT by 27% is only a matter of time. 

Let’s dive in and learn how Convin can help with CXM.

1. Focus on active listening, and eliminate repetitive tasks
   Dedicatedly working on customer-centric tasks have a higher chance of creating the best customer experience.
   Ditch note-taking and manual call review. Focus on listening to the customer and developing strategies for high-quality follow-up meetings. In parallel, switch to automated call scoring and get 100% of calls reviewed without human interference.

2. Access to key customer moments
   Conversation intelligence extracts critical moments from the call recordings to put forward customers' requirements for the next meeting. These key moments also reflect the customer's real intention and offer brownie points for creating a positive customer experience.

3. Discover call best practices
   Convin offers an intuitive insight dashboard that displays actions, behaviors, and phrases with a higher probability of call success. Investing in the best practices of top-performers ensures higher CX in every contact center conversation.
4. Nurture customer-friendly agents
   Automated coaching targets and treats every agent as a unique entity and assists them in unlearning old tricks and learning customer-friendly methods. Personalized coaching can make every agent your best performing agent and ensure exceptional CX delivery in every interaction.

5. Proactive measures with violation alerts
   One aspect of a call that can ruin customer experience is an unsolicited agent behavior that negatively impacts clients. Screaming, abusive language, misleading information, flawed statements, incorrect knowledge, and more are timely caught by Convin’s tool and alert the management team for corrective actions.

6. Learn customer sentiments
   Customer sentiment presents an accurate picture of a call. How was the customer's overall experience during the call? And presents the chances of a new call or a painful goodbye.

What Are The Product Capabilities Of Convin?

Convin monitors and analyzes 100% of calls automatically based on custom parameters set by your organization. The conversation analysis offers winning behavior identification and last-mile automated agent coaching.

Automated Quality Management

Convin’s call center tool automatically reviews 100% of customer calls, chats, and emails using custom call evaluation forms and spots agent performance challenges and unhappy customer conversations. Through automated quality management, managers and QA generate call scores that help establish coaching needs and staff dissatisfaction. 

Convin also allows auditors to do manual auditing on calls, chats, and emails and leave necessary feedback. 

Winning Behavior Identification

With the help of customer intelligence and custom-tracking , Convin presents parameters that drive positive and negative outcomes for the business. Spot violations, winning parameters,  customer sentiments, and threats to take proactive measures before customer calls.

Automated agent coaching

Convin’s system automatically generates coaching opportunities after reviewing agent performance. Based on the AI-driven call scores- good, average, and poor performers are identified, and the platform triggers personalized agent coaching based on the requirement. Coaching instances are extracted from the top performers' conversations and best practices. This method improves call handling quality and reduces supervisor escalations to a large extent.

Moreover, with Convin’s peer-to-peer coaching, managers and supervisors can add the best-performing agent’s conversations as a module into Convin’s library and assign it to agents who need further coaching. As a result of Convins’s automated agent coaching, businesses can reduce ramp-up time significantly and focus more on productivity. 

Conversation intelligence

CI records, transcribes, and analyzes conversations to generate call insights and transcriptions. The conversation intelligence software discourages manual conversation review and all other non-sales activities by automating notes, action items, and CRM entries.

Access agent performance KPI and customer experience quality criteria to produce consumable role-based reports pinpointing key challenges and opportunities. These reports are not only available on the Convin platform but are periodically emailed to the managers.

Convin’s Call Monitoring system is safe and secure

At Convin, we understand the customer and call data security importance; that’s why we ensure your data is completely secure and safe in our in-house transcription and NLP engine. We ensure call data security in the following ways:

• In-house transcription and NLP
• Secure login and monitoring
• Hosted on AWS
• SSL data encryption
• Role-based access control
• Enterprise-grade application monitoring
• GDPR compliant meeting recording

And before you go, as of now, Convin supports English, Hindi, and Hinglish. And it takes less than a week to get you onboarded, so don’t wait, schedule a demo right away!