What area do you see as the biggest opportunity for growth in your contact center?
A McKinsey survey revealed customer care leaders’ top growth priorities included customer experience improvement, technology implementation, and identifying revenue growth opportunities. The kicker: they’ll have to achieve these goals even while a sizeable majority of them also expect to see a significant rise in call volume.
Fortunately, with the right approach to call quality monitoring, you can tackle all these priorities (and more). With the help of AI-driven solutions and proven best practices, you can efficiently record, track, and evaluate 100% percent of calls to improvements.
Want to see how it’s done? Get a crash course in how AI-powered call quality monitoring can streamline quality management—and help you elevate the customer experience to new heights.
What is call quality monitoring?
Call quality monitoring is a critical process in contact centers where calls with customers are evaluated to ensure they meet predefined quality standards and business goals.
However, call quality monitoring is much more than a matter of just checking boxes; it’s about gaining a deep understanding of how your agents are interacting with customers and identifying areas for improvement. By analyzing call recordings, live interactions, and other customer service data, businesses can pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to enhance the overall customer experience (CX). Effective call quality monitoring solutions and the contact center quality management programs they support provide valuable insights that drive agent coaching, process optimization, and ultimately, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Why is call quality monitoring so important in the contact center?
A survey by HubSpot reports that 63% of companies are spending more time prioritizing CX. And as customers themselves have increasingly prioritized convenient, qualified, and personalized experiences—whenever and in whichever channels they prefer—many contact centers have moved to an omnichannel model to meet these needs.
However, the voice conversation remains at the core of the contact center’s offerings—and ensuring call quality at scale is absolutely crucial to delivering excellent customer experiences. With the right tools, call quality monitoring can play a crucial role in helping contact centers:
- Ensure Consistent Customer Experience: Customers expect consistent, high-quality service regardless of the agent they interact with. Quality monitoring helps standardize interactions, ensuring adherence to scripts, compliance with regulations, and consistent brand messaging. This leads to a more predictable—and satisfying—customer experience.
- Identify Agent Knowledge Gaps: Consistent and comprehensive call quality monitoring also helps pinpoint areas where agents may lack product knowledge, communication skills, or adherence to processes. By identifying these gaps, you can provide targeted coaching and training to improve individual performance and overall team effectiveness.
- Uncover Process Inefficiencies: Analyzing calls, particularly in tandem with desktop and process analytics, can reveal bottlenecks, outdated scripts, or confusing IVR systems that frustrate customers and hinder agent productivity. Quality monitoring data provides insights to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and reduce call handle times.
- Mitigate Compliance Risks: Many industries have strict regulations regarding customer interactions. Quality monitoring helps ensure adherence to these regulations, reducing the risk of fines and legal issues. It also helps identify and correct any potential compliance breaches before they escalate.
- Enhance Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: By proactively addressing issues identified through quality monitoring, you can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships. Happy customers are more likely to become repeat customers and brand advocates.
- Gain a Competitive Edge: In a world where customer experience is a key differentiator, call quality monitoring that leverages key technologies like voice analytics and Voice of Customer tools can uncover trends, common issues, and even potential marketing insights needed to enhance strategies and outperform the competition. Plus, by consistently delivering exceptional service, you can attract and retain customers, leading to increased revenue and market share.
Top 5 best practices for AI-driven contact center quality monitoring
The right call monitoring best practices have always helped you identify areas for improvement in customer service. However, integrating GenAI and automation-driven tools into your quality assurance processes can unlock new levels of insight, intelligence, and scalability.
Here are five ways to upgrade your call quality monitoring strategy:
- Analyze customer sentiment to find the root of quality issues
Customer sentiment analysis extracts valuable information from interactions by analyzing customer behavior and emotions. With AI tools, you automatically:
- Process data about your customers’ intentions, attitudes, and opinions, being able to understand what they need (or why they are frustrated)
- Generate insight reports that lead to potential causes for quality issues
- Turn insights into actions to trigger customers with retention and engagement campaigns
- Use automated quality management to track team performance
In the face of rising call volume and customer expectations, manual quality monitoring processes will soon no longer cut it. (If they’re still cutting, that is.) Transform the way you analyze conversations with automated quality management. Leveraging an AI-driven tool like Calabrio’s AutoQM, you can streamline call quality monitoring processes by automating the evaluation of 100% of customer interactions, across a consistent range of key performance criteria.
The benefits of a deploying an automated quality management solution include:
- Comprehensive, Consistent Evaluations: Automatically evaluate all conversations, focusing on predefined criteria such as empathy, professional language, conversation flow management, and the hold/transfer process.
- Flexible, Detailed Insights: View individual agents’ scores and drill-down to identify coaching needs, or get a holistic view of team-level performance.
- Eliminate Bias: Get an unbiased view of your contact center’s calls with complete coverage of 100% of interactions
- Easy Feedback Delivery: Quickly access performance metrics in a simple dashboard and explore individual call details with an intuitive media player that enables transparency and simple sharing of feedback.
- Accelerated Time to Impact: Agents and managers can use automatically generated insights to take rapid action and drive faster improvements to CX.
- Offer personalized coaching based on hard data
Monitoring call center performance goes beyond tracking metrics and progress against business objectives. It also includes empowering call center agents with effective training, strong scripts, and targeted coaching. With AI-powered solutions like those from Calabrio ONE, you can identify overarching patterns as well as critical issues as they crop up. Easily pinpoint opportunities to intervene with support and deliver personalized insights based on automatically generated evaluations. Then, track the effectiveness of your coaching over time with integrated performance management capabilities.
- Integrate channels and tools in one place
Quality monitoring involves tracking interactions across multiple touchpoints simultaneously. That’s why an integrated solution matters: it centralizes data from sources such as CRM platforms and customer surveys, offering a holistic view of your contact center operations.
The integration enables your team to have a comprehensive view of customer interactions, which contributes to:
- Reducing average handle time (AHT)
- Increasing first call resolution and customer satisfaction rates (CSAT)
- Eliminating disruptions in communication with customers
- Streamlining workflows, improving agents’ efficiency
- Leverage quality management driven by conversation intelligence
A comprehensive conversation intelligence solution can automate much more than individual interactions’ evaluations. Drive holistic improvements with AI-driven capabilities like:
- Speech-to-text transcription: Instantly convert audio from calls into text
- Sentiment analysis: In-depth analysis of every conversation with your customers
- Keyword detection: Identify phrases or words that match with QA parameters
- Categorization: Classify calls based on established criteria (e.g., subject, issue type) and determine customers’ most common issues.
- Performance tracking: Score and monitor agents’ performance metrics
IBM reported that 78% of global executives have a plan to expand their use of GenAI into customer and employee experience management. Embracing AI in quality assurance unlocks a smarter, data-driven approach for both CX and EX.
Upgrade QA with the best call center quality monitoring software
As customer expectations rise and contact centers face increasing pressure to deliver exceptional experiences, effective call quality monitoring has become more critical than ever. By embracing the best practices outlined in this article alongside the right AI-powered conversation intelligence solutions, you can transform your quality assurance processes and unlock new levels of efficiency, agent performance, and customer satisfaction.
Remember, quality monitoring is not just about evaluating calls; it’s about driving continuous improvement, empowering agents, and creating a customer-centric culture. With the right tools and strategies, you can turn your contact center into a source of competitive advantage and a driver of business growth.
Ready to take your call quality monitoring to the next level? Explore Calabrio ONE and discover how our comprehensive suite of workforce engagement management solutions can help you elevate the customer experience and achieve your business goals.
Request a demo today and see how we can support—and accelerate—your journey contact center excellence.
