How to Improve Your Call Quality Monitoring

Call monitoring aims to identify calls that fail to meet standards and understand why. With that data, you can improve processes incrementally over time.

A great example is spotting gaps in agent training, knowledge or processes. To achieve meaningful insight, you need to evaluate a reasonably large sample of calls — too small a base may lead you down the wrong path.

Call monitoring can be expensive — tying up supervisory staff for hours or days at a time, plus the resulting agent training and meetings.

A proven approach: measure the performance of the top 10% and the bottom 10%. For the bottom, you're looking for gaps in training or suitability. For the top, you're discovering best practice — but also ensuring top performers aren't cutting corners to hit their targets.

Agents can become frustrated when constant changes are made without their input. By engaging them fully and allowing input into the monitoring process, they'll understand it better and eventually buy into it.

You may even find that your agents become champions of the quality process — creating guidelines and scoring criteria themselves.

The best quality programmes focus on forming good habits rather than assigning tasks. When agents are given a task, they'll perform it — but may forget once the novelty wears off. By building habits, good call quality becomes second nature.

Agents typically handle different call types each day — sales, complaints, support. By separating quality forms for each type, you can score agents on their entire daily workload rather than a subset. You'll also find your staff become more well-rounded agents as a result.

Feedback must be objective, consistent and regular, using an agreed scoring method. Deliver it one-to-one, remotely, or via group sessions where agents share best practice.

The important thing is giving individual agents the opportunity to contribute. Not only does this encourage buy-in, their comments and suggestions are often extremely insightful. Support should include refresher training, skills development and action plans — always aimed at improving the customer experience.

Evaluation forms should never stand still — they must evolve as the business grows. When re-evaluating, always consider: are you asking the right questions? Are scores improving? Are conversion rates and customer satisfaction scores trending upward?

If a quality monitoring system isn't working well, it's usually the agents who notice first. A robust dispute system lets agents alert you to potential issues — and the simple fact of offering one helps agents feel more involved and invested in the process.