If you’re still trying to improve quality assurance in a call center manually or maybe you’re just planning on scaling your customer support efforts, it’s time we gave you an up-close look at what other specialists are doing.
Whether we’re talking about agent training or automating call analysis, here are four expert-approved ideas to improve quality assurance in a call center this year.
Use coaching moments as an opportunity for you, the leader, to give your team better tools to do their best work
Charles Sustaita, Director of Customer Support at Coastline Academy, advises on creating a culture of feedback and coaching as a method of improving agent productivity and the quality of your support services:
“Over the next 18 months, we’ll see a rise in more AI products at affordable entry points for smaller teams than those available 12 months ago.
For example, voice sentiment analysis is available for large-scale call center platforms like Amazon Connect. We’ll see even more robust features than previously available which makes instant quality analysis available to agents as well as rich reporting for leaders.”
That said, Charles is expecting coaching to be easier for leaders. Because agents are getting information before having conversations about how to improve:
“Regardless of technology, leaders should continue to create a culture of feedback and coaching as a method of enriching or improving the team member’s professional skills, the team’s ability to perform, and the customer’s experience.
QA conversations, summaries, or reviews traditionally have been methods of performance management (and they can be when appropriate), where they should be used as opportunities for an exciting change.”
Ensuring complete security and anonymity when getting customer feedback
People are social by nature. We take decisions based on recommendations from our family, friends, or reviews. And we’re quite open when it comes to sharing our thoughts on a product or service.
Within this context, consumers rightfully want organizations to use their data ethically. 86% of consumers feel a growing concern about data privacy. 78% are also scared about the sheer amount of data being collected.
Daniel Prindii, Fractional Head of Community and People, is also knowledgeable in call center quality assurance best practices:
“Good feedback comes from engaged customers who feel confident about sharing their thoughts. And when you couple that with a secure and anonymous system, your chances grow exponentially of getting quality feedback.”
To succeed in your quality feedback process, Daniel recommends the following guidelines:
- Be mindful of privacy and anonymity. Reiterate that all the feedback will be anonymous, and the data will be stored securely on your internal systems.
- Keep it simple and short. Have a short list of questions written in plain language without jargon or technical words.
- Adapt to the medium. Personalize the feedback form to the medium you choose. For example, if you request feedback after an audio call, have an automated system to record the answers. Don’t send your customer onto your website to fill out a written reply.
- Use confirmation messages. Prerecord messages that will confirm when a customer sends a survey (or not). If there’s an issue, explain why the problem occurred and how survey respondents can solve it.
Implementing a system to ask for feedback for your call center services will save you a lot of research time and costs. Plus, you can discover future improvements and make your customer feel that their opinion matters. Just keep security and anonymity as a top priority.
Turn to AI-driven automated call analysis to increase support quality
One of the ways to improve quality assurance in a call center is to ditch manual tasks.
On this note Samir ben Marzouk, Customer Service Checker at gevekom GmbH, shares his own call center quality assurance tips:
“Through AI-driven call analytics, call center agents can get valuable feedback to improve their communication skills. AI can analyze various aspects of a call, including tone of voice, rate of speech, use of keywords, and customer satisfaction.”
Samir revealed he relies on several benefits of automated call analysis with artificial intelligence in his work, including:
- Real-time feedback: AI can highlight positive aspects and also provide suggestions for improvements we need to make.
- Problem case detection: For example, we use AI to identify when a customer is dissatisfied or frustrated.
- Identifying training needs: By analyzing calls, we can spot common weaknesses or misunderstandings. Based on these insights, we prepare targeted training programs to refine our agents’ performance.
- Call guide compliance: AI can check if agents stay compliant with guides and policies we’ve predefined. This lets us provide consistent communication and enhance general compliance with our company standards.
Samir also highlights that automated call analytics is not a replacement for human interaction:
“It serves much more as a supporting tool to improve the quality of calls.”
That’s why humans are still needed to ensure the ticket scoring process is accurate (not without the help of call center quality assurance software). After all, real evaluators are ultimately the ones in charge of following up with agents to share feedback through a one-on-one meeting or to mentor them throughout their training and development process.
How Kaizo’s QA Insights can help you improve service quality
Kaizo’s QA Insights make Quality Assurance much easier by letting you identify the root causes behind poor or declining agent performance results.
If you’ve already analyzed the Internal Quality Score (IQS) of your team, reviewed individual agent results, and checked how many QA ratings they have, the next step is to understand what you need to improve.
The feature provides valuable insights into the impact of each scorecard, category, and criteria selected during the QA rating process. By analyzing this data, users can identify the most and least impactful criteria. It varies depending on whether the QA scorecard is deducting or accumulating.
For deducting scorecards, the highest impact criteria highlight areas for improvement, while for accumulating scorecards, they showcase strengths. The trendline feature helps users identify recent improvements and avoid coaching on resolved issues. Additionally, the dashboard presents the number of times specific criteria were selected. This enables users to address repeating mistakes and prioritize coaching sessions accordingly.
For the next steps, you can also review all this information in one place and plan your next coaching session with the agents based on the new insights!
Where to start if you want to improve quality scores in a call center over the next month
Susanna Aleksanyan, Customer Service Head at Leanbe, says that one of the keys to having high-quality customer service is monitoring agent performance:
“Different call center quality assurance metrics like response time, average resolution time, and customer satisfaction scores can be tracked and analyzed.
AI algorithms of different customer-related tools can process and interpret this data to generate reports and insights. This is helpful since it helps the QA teams/specialists make data-driven decisions, see the gaps and find the solutions for filling in those gaps.”
So that’s exactly where you should start. Make analyzing your agents’ performance the very first thing on your list. This will help you understand how your team is evolving, find potential customer service challenges, and establish the root causes of declining performance results.
Kaizo can provide all of these insights, plus:
- Save you over 5 hours/week by automating quality assurance
- Help you review conversations across both in-house and remote teams
- Let you customize the review criteria for your team
- Track and compare agent performance and zoom into individual call center quality assurance scorecards