Understanding Call Quality: Key Insights & Tips to Improve

Assuring call quality is not as easy. There is a lot going on behind the scenes. Managers have to spend hours listening to call recordings, grading agents, and making sure standards are being maintained.

In this blog post, we discuss the concept of call quality, its monitoring and how you can use the insights to deliver outstanding services.

What is Call Quality?

Call quality measures the overall performance of the agent-customer call. It’s based on factors such as professionalism, efficiency, accuracy, and adherence to company policy and procedure.

Based on their business goals, businesses can use various metrics to measure call quality, such as customer satisfaction, first-call resolution, and average handle time.

What is Call Quality Monitoring?

Call quality monitoring is the process of quality assurance that evaluates how a call center agent responds to calls based on customer expectations and requirements. Call center managers look into real-time actionable insights to identify and deliver solutions and improve call center operations.

Benefits of Call Quality Monitoring

Here is how call quality monitoring can help businesses deliver exceptional customer service:

1. Identify Problems

Each call center agent has specific strengths and weaknesses. Call quality monitoring enables managers to identify the weak areas and offer improved feedback on performance, along with specific training.

It can also help you identify areas where staff excel so their skills and hard work can be acknowledged.

2. Set Specific Goals

The more specific the goals, the easier it is to achieve them. Call monitoring helps you set specific goals by identifying areas for improvement and determining the path to achieve them.

For example, if you want to reduce overall handling time, you can review recordings to identify critical areas where conversational flow could be improved.

3. Speed Up Onboarding

Call quality monitoring helps managers identify training gaps that can help them plan holistic training and employee onboarding. Agents can get new and improved interaction and customer service skills to solve problems better and meet customer demands from the beginning. 

This also helps create uniform training standards and helps agents understand product features and customer service phrases, accelerating the customer process.

4. Improve Products & Services

Consistent call quality monitoring provides critical insights and helps customers identify the exact areas where their products or services require enhancements.

For example, if quality monitoring reveals a similar pattern of shipping-related complaints, the product team can take corrective action.

5. Comply with Rules & Laws

Call quality monitoring helps businesses comply with regulatory requirements and ensure adherence to guidelines and protocols. Supervisors or managers can monitor calls to evaluate if agents follow the prescribed procedures to maintain legal and ethical standards and protect sensitive customer information.

How to Improve Call Quality?

Consider these steps to incorporate a good call quality monitoring process into your organization:

1. Create a Quality Monitoring Team

The first step is to select the most qualified people to measure call quality. You can select people who are experienced and know the business well. It’s also a good option to hire third-party party professionals to monitor call quality. 

2. Develop Scorecards

Identify the areas that mean “high” quality to you and prepare scorecards highlighting the key factors to evaluate agents.

The criteria could be anything from how long the call lasts to how well the agent handles a frustrated customer. Or also whether the customer takes a certain on-call action or not. This totally depends on your business goal.

3. Review & Give Feedback

Create a feedback loop that includes real-time monitoring, regular reviews, and the uses of technology such as speech analytics. Automated feedback from speech analytics can provide daily insights into performance, which can be used to set clear performance metrics and ensure that feedback is structured and actionable.

4. Focus on Training Low Performers

Call quality monitoring can help you identify the root causes of underperforming calls and develop personalized training programs to target these areas. You can break the training into small, manageable models to avoid overwhelming them and provide continuous support through mentoring.

5. Encourage Self Monitoring

Self-monitoring is critical to empower agents to take ownership of their performance and drive continuous improvement. Allow agents to access their performance data, including key metrics such as average handling time, customer satisfaction scores and call recordings. Use an easy-to-use dashboard where they can track their progress in real-time and set personal goals.

Exotel provides a stunning dashboard with graphical displays, custom reporting, real-time stats, and more to facilitate accessible and in-depth analysis of customer interactions.

6. Acknowledge Good Work

Focusing only on the negatives may demotivate agents and hinder your team’s long-term success. Make an effort to recognize the positives and motivate the agents to improve. This is an excellent way to balance the good with the bad and reward them while providing them with opportunities for improvement.

7. Hold In-person Reviews

After you’ve observed and analyzed the agent’s performance metrics, it’s time to communicate your feedback while meeting in person. Giving feedback on other channels, such as emails or calls, makes it easier for agents to misinterpret or be confused. That’s why it is essential to establish a relationship where agents feel comfortable opening up to you, and the best way to do this is by meeting in person.

Tips for Monitoring Call Quality in a Call Center

Monitoring your call quality is essential to ensure that agents follow guidelines while helping customers with solutions. Here are a few ways to monitor call quality:

1. Listen to Agent-customer Interactions

The first step is to implement a call center software with monitoring capabilities, which allows you to listen to customer/agent interactions. Ensure both the agent and customers are informed that they are being monitored. The primary goal here is to listen and assess how current calls are handled, so don’t interrupt or get involved unless necessary.

Listening to interactions will give you an idea about the type of questions agents ask and whether they are relevant to organizational goals. You will know if these interactions lead to positive, sales-driven outcomes. Additionally, this will allow you to create a standard for managing all calls and improve the weak areas.

Exotel offers speech analytics and call recording features for quality assurance evaluations. These features are crucial for identifying selling opportunities and tracking regulatory compliance by placing words and analyzing audio patterns.

2. Get Post-call Feedback From Customers

After the conversation is over, you can immediately ask the customers to rate the experience. Or you can also collect feedback afterward via email or SMS.

You can also collect detailed feedback from customers through surveys by asking questions like:

• How satisfied are you with the overall experience?
• How would you rate the quality of service received?
• Was your issue resolved during the first interaction?
• What could we do to improve your experience?

3. Analyze Scorecard Results

Analyzing scorecards will allow managers to grade an agent’s ability to handle customer interactions effectively and efficiently. Scorecards provide insights into an agent’s performance and KPIs that can be used to improve an agent’s behaviors, skills, and abilities. Additionally, analyzing scorecard results can identify the root causes of key problems.

4. Utilize Multiple Methods to Ensure Quality

The quality control team should be skilled and flexible and use multiple ways to analyze every area of customer service metrics. This includes:

• Recording of all calls
• Call scoring criteria
• Agent feedback & coaching
• Team feedback & coaching.
• Tracking the progress of reps.
• Call leveling sessions 

5. Evolve Continuously

Since customers’ expectations and behaviors continuously evolve, you, too, must constantly monitor and change according to their priorities and preferences. This means creating a sustainable monitoring framework that regularly assesses performance, compares results with current expectations, and evolves as needed.

What is Call Center Quality Assurance?

Call center quality assurance involves monitoring and evaluating customer-agent interactions. The key idea is to assess the quality of customer interactions, ensure compliance with regulations, and improve overall customer experience. It involves testing a variety of factors, including employee attitude and behavior, customer satisfaction and more.

It’s a broader, structured approach that monitors multiple aspects of agent performance and overall call center operations. For example, a weekly call review process where the QA team selects a random sample of recorded customer calls from different agents and evaluates them based on:

• Adherence to scripts
• Tone and communication
• Problem resolution
• Compliance

Improve Your Call Quality With Exotel

Exotel is a comprehensive contact center platform designed to enhance call quality. Its features include speech analytics, sentiment analysis, call recording, real-time monitoring and detailed analytics.

It also offers unparalleled reliability and security, complying with ISO, PCI-DSS, and SOC2 certifications. It effortlessly integrates with knowledge bases, CRMs and other conversation platforms to allow smooth interactions and provide a truly omnichannel experience. You can book a demo today to learn more about how it can help you improve customer interactions.

FAQs?

1. How Do You Measure Call Quality?

Call quality can be measured through:

• Cal monitoring and recording
• Quality assessment scoring
• Customer feedback
• Speech analytics

2. How Do You Improve Call Quality?

Call quality can be improved by continuous monitoring and assessment, identifying gaps to create targeted training programs and using a call monitoring tool.

3. What Methods are Used in Call Quality Monitoring?

Common methods include live call monitoring, recorded call analysis, customer feedback surveys, speech analytics, and the use of quality assessment scorecards to evaluate performance based on specific criteria.