Looking to boost your call monitoring efforts? Here are some tips from our clients and support staff:
1. Understand exactly what a positive customer interaction is and how you measure it.
For the most part, call monitoring tries to identify any call that’s failing to meet standards and understand why. Once you have this information, you can begin to make improvements to your processes – making them better over time.
A great example, is spotting gaps in agent training/knowledge or the processes they use. By correcting the gaps or improving processes, you can speed things up and improve customer communication.
To achieve this level of detail, you’ll need to evaluate a reasonably large sample of calls. If you sample too small a base, the data you collect may lead you down the wrong path.
2. Focus on the top and bottom performers
Call monitoring can be quite an expensive process. It ties up supervisory/team leader staff members for hours/days at a time, plus the agent training and meetings that result.
One of our long term customers suggests: “Measure the performance of the top 10% and also the bottom 10%.”
For the bottom: You’re obviously looking at gaps in training, knowledge or staff members who may just not be suited for the role.
For the top: You’re discovering best practice, but also ensuring that top sales performers aren’t cutting corners to obtain their targets.
3. Allow agents to take part in the Quality Monitoring Checklist
Sometimes, agents can become jaded when constant changes are made to a process. From their point of view, constant tinkering means they never truely understand what’s happening.
By being fully engaged with your agents and allowing them input into the call monitoring process, they’ll begin to understand it more – eventually buying into it. You may even discover that your agents become arbiters of the quality process – creating guidelines and scores for it.
4. Aim to create agent habits
The best quality monitoring programs, are more about forming good habits rather than tasks. When agents are asked to complete a task, they’ll perform it; however, they may forget to complete it once the novelty wears off.
By forming habits, good call quality will become second nature to them.
10. Use a different form/metric for each type of call
Typically, agents will deal with different types of calls each day. Some of these will be sales related, some complaints and others than need support or help.
By separating the quality forms out, you can score agents on their entire daily workloads – rather than a subset. You’ll also discover your staff becoming well-rounded agents as a result.
12. Feedback, Support and Training are Important
Feedback from the monitoring process should be objective, using a method of scoring and evaluating that is fair and agreed by all in advance, and it must be consistent and regular. Once milestones are agreed and set, they must be kept to, built on and progressed.
Feedback can be delivered one-to-one, remotely, or via group sessions where agents share and spread best practice. Whatever method is selected, the important thing is that there is an opportunity for individual agents to contribute to the discussion.
Not only does this encourage their buy-in to the process, their comments and suggestions are often extremely insightful. But bear in mind that agents are sometimes harder on their own and colleagues’ performances than supervisors would be.
Staff support should be provided through interventions such as refresher and formal skills training and development and action plans to improve agent performance, always with the aim of improving the customer experience and achieving your business objectives.
13. Always improve your forms
The evaluation forms used within a quality monitoring program are hugely important. As a result, they should never stand still, always evolving and improving as the business grows.
When re-evaluating the forms:
– Always consider if you’re asking the right questions.
– Are agents getting the desired benefit? Are scores now higher, conversion rates being boosted or customer satisfaction scores improving.
14. Have a good dispute system
If a quality monitoring system isn’t working well, it’s usually the agents who notice it first? By running a robust dispute system, your agents can alert you to any possible issues.
Even the simple fact of offering a dispute system will help your agents feel more involved in the process.