3 Ways to Ramp Up Call Center Quality Assurance

The benefits of a strong quality assurance program stretch far beyond the walls of the contact center. By continually assessing agent performance and call quality, organizations can protect their bottom line by pinpointing areas to improve the customer experience. This ultimately leads to increased customer retention and loyalty.

Technology has made huge advances in recent years as the contact center has shifted from an unsightly but necessary business function to the cornerstone of customer experience. Analytics technology has reshaped the contact center space, and organizations that have embraced it to improve the quality of customer interactions are gaining the upper hand competitively.  Here are three ways your call center can improve quality assurance through analytics.

Top 3 Ways to Ramp up Quality Assurance

1. Go beyond random sampling

While random sampling should absolutely be a part of any contact center’s quality assurance measures, it should not be the only sample. Evaluating your agents’ longest or shortest calls, for example, can be useful in identifying service outliers and opportunities to coach agent behavior.

However, for companies to really understand interactions within the contact center, evaluating interactions at random will not give a complete picture. Instead, I recommend supplementing random sampling with analytics. Through speech and text analytics you can pinpoint the most relevant interactions allowing you to find and evaluate:

• Emotionally charged interactions
• Interactions in which a customer requests to speak to a supervisor
• Interactions that contain prohibited words or phrases

2. Know what your agents are doing on their desktops

The quality of a call is not wholly measurable by the conversation alone. Equally important to the words being spoken are the actions going on behind the scenes on the agent’s desktop. What applications does the agent have open? Are the right applications being used during a call? What does the agent do after a call ends?

With desktop analytics, quality analysts can associate customer interactions with agent activity in order to understand how that activity might affect the outcome of the call. Desktop analytics also outperform simple screen recordings because they not only show an agent’s activity during individual calls, they show activity between calls and throughout the day.

3. Identify ways to reduce repeat contacts

With the rise of omnichannel and self-service options for customers, First Contact Resolution (FCR) has become harder to measure. However, repeat contacts still negatively impact on customer satisfaction scores and contact center operations.

According to SQM Group, half of all contact center inquiries are a result of the customer’s issue not being resolved the first time. Customer frustration levels increase with each call and customer experience deteriorates.

The ability to flag and get to the root cause of repeat contacts is an important way of maintaining customer loyalty. Traditional quality assurance processes deliver inconsistent and inconclusive insights into agent and the customer. The addition of analytics to the quality assurance process allows organizations to identify and evaluate interactions that are relevant to FCR and take steps to reduce repeat contacts, whether it’s addressing a training issue or making improvements to processes that impact the customer.

Brad Snedeker

Brad Snedeker is the Director of Customer Advocacy at Calabrio. With over 15 years in the industry, Brad has extensive knowledge of the contact center space. As Calabrio’s head of the Innovation Center, he works directly with users to teach and develop new and innovative techniques to implement customer engagement and WFO best practices.