Call center quality assurance is the systematic approach to ensuring each call meets the expected standard that enhances the quality of customer interactions. It is critical for call centers where thousands of calls are made daily to maintain service quality. But if you can assure quality, your business is bound to accelerate quickly and gain more loyal customers.
In this article, we will discuss call center quality assurance, its core components, benefits, challenges, and more.
What is Quality Assurance (QA)?
The term “Quality Assurance” is self-explanatory. Quality Assurance refers to the process of assuring a product or service meets quality standards. Quality Assurance includes setting quality standards, maintaining them, and establishing processes to prevent defects. From a call center perspective, Quality Assurance is the method that ensures customer interactions meet business goals.
Why is QA Crucial in Call Centers?
QA in the call center is a must to gain loyal customers. It assures that the agent delivers the same or even better service consistently according to company standards. Quality assurance helps boost agent performance and accountability and improves customer satisfaction, which eventually contributes to business growth.
Benefits of Effective Call Center Quality Assurance
A properly developed QA benefits agents, customers and business at the same time. Here is how:
How QA Benefits Call Center Agents:
- Maintains consistency
- Improves agent performance
- Reduce agent turnover
Quality assurance in call centers helps agents maintain consistency. They get a better overview of their responsibilities and expectations, such as key performance indicators and evaluation metrics. When they know their predefined criteria of performance and also aware that their performance is monitored, they stay extra cautious. Besides, regular feedback and training help them and motivate them to perform better.
How QA Benefits Customer:
- Provides consistent customer experience
- Improves customer satisfaction
- Improves customer loyalty and retention
As customers receive seamless customer experience like top quality of service, reduced average time, and positive interactions. Such a positive experience makes them feel valued and saves them time. As a result, they are satisfied and become loyal in the long run.
How QA Benefits Businesses:
- Enhances cost and operational efficiency
- Brand reputation and competitive advantage
- Boosts financial performance and drive business growth
Businesses are the ultimate beneficiaries of call center quality assurance. Simply, businesses get loyal customers and highly skilled, high-performing agents, which eventually results in business growth.
A top-quality QA can give a business a competitive advantage over its competitors by attracting it to get new customers and expand its business. Additionally, more efficient agents help businesses meet customer satisfaction and gain cost efficiency too.
What Are the Core Components of Call Center Quality Assurance?
There are 4 core components that a contact center quality assurance must have. They are defining quality in terms of evaluation metrics, performance monitoring, feedback mechanism and lastly training and development.
Defining Quality: To ensure quality you must clearly define the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Average Handle Time (AHT), First Contact Resolution (FCR), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). Such clarity in communication in the early stage can benefit all 3 aspects (customer, agent and business).
Monitoring Performance: Regular performance monitoring is another elementary component of a call center QA. You can monitor the calls both in real-time and post-call. Real-time call monitoring is a modern approach but it is challenging as there are multiple calls being made simultaneously.
Feedback Mechanism: Feedback is critical in call center quality assurance. It helps understand the loopholes in the process and rectify it. Besides, regular feedback on call quality allows agents to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Constructive feedback not only helps improve individual performance but also it creates a sense of ownership.
Training and Development: There is no alternative to continuous learning and development to ensure quality in a call center. It can directly enhance agent performance and customer satisfaction. When agents receive regular feedback and the required training to improve, they become more confident in handling customers. Such confidence reflects on their performance, like increased first-call resolution rates.
Challenges and Best Practices for Success in Call Center Quality Assurance
Inconsistent customer experience, high agent turnover rate, and compliance risks are very common challenges in contact center QA. However, with some strategic moves, you can certainly overcome such challenges.
For instance, one significant challenge in call centers is the number of daily calls. Monitoring all the calls and maintaining the same quality is very challenging. Such a massive number of calls often leads agents to depression and frustration.
Many eventually struggle to maintain quality and burnout. However, high call volumes also result in longer customer waiting times, leading to dissatisfaction and damaging the company’s reputation. But you can easily overcome these challenges if you ensure you have all the points ticked mentioned in the following image.
Best Practices to Overcome Such Challenges
- Create a call center QA frameworks
- Document your predefined criteria (define clear metrics how they are tracked)
- Explain call monitoring and recording process
- Implement agent training
- Develop a script
- Install a QA team leader
- Hire the right people
- Instill agent feedback in the quality assurance process
- Implement training and coaching sessions
- Create an encouraging culture
- Get customer feedback
- Enhance customer experience
- Reward initiatives
How to Create a Call Center QA Framework?
As we mentioned earlier, creating a QA framework is one of the best practices of call center quality assurance. A QA framework provides you an overview of the established standards, metrics to measure the performance and troubleshooting techniques. You can follow the following steps to create your personalized QA framework.
Understand the Business Needs and Define Your Goals From the QA Framework:
The first step in creating a call center QA framework is to understand the needs and define goals. Include customer satisfaction metrics such as First Call Resolution (FCR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) in this list.
This helps businesses have a clear vision and plan ahead. You should also decide how often and how many calls you will monitor and evaluate, and who will be responsible for the QA process.
Identify Roles and Responsibilities and Create a Plan of Action:
Once you have identified your goals you can easily list out all the responsibilities and assign them to different roles. The next step is to design a plan of actions. Make sure you break down each role elaborately and identify the success metrics of each role. Because the best QA framework covers such details so that everyone involved can get a proper overview.
Select Necessary Tools:
Now that you know the goal and plan of actions, it is time to list out the tools required to complete the tasks. It’s better if you can develop your personalized tools as per your need. But you donât have such an opportunity to search and select the tools that best match your needs. You may take help from our next section where we will list some necessary tools for Call Center QA.
Measure, Review and Update to Improve:
The next step in creating a QA framework is to monitor and review the process meticulously. It will help you identify if there are any flaws. You can take feedback from various stakeholders such as customers, and agents.
Then analyze those feedback and update the framework for better results. Make sure the framework meets the goal of enhancing service delivery, maintaining high standards, and continuously improving customer satisfaction.
5 Best Tools for Call Center QA
Having the best tool can ease the process of call center quality assurance and boost team performance. There are plenty of tools available to assist you in maintaining industry standards. Most of them offer multiple features. It’s a challenge to select the best tool for you.
We have researched hundreds of tools in this regard and listed 5 best tools for call center QA here, which can save your time in learning about them and help you make the right decision.
Genesys
Genesys is a comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) platform that enables businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all channels. It’s an ideal tool for Large enterprises with complex customer service needs, seeking to unify their CX operations.
Key Features:
- Omnichannel engagement (voice, chat, email, social media)
- AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants
- Workforce engagement management (WEM)
- Customer journey mapping and analytics
- Automation and self-service capabilities
Convin
Businesses that are searching for a tool which can help them improve sales performance via conversation intelligence, Convin is a top choice. It is a revenue intelligence platform and it helps businesses optimize sales calls, improve win rates, and onboard new reps faster.
Key Features:
- Conversation recording and analysis
- AI-powered real-time insights on customer sentiment and behavior
- Real-time agent guidance and coaching
- Performance dashboards and reporting
CloudTalk
CloudTalk is a cloud-based phone system. It is an ideal call center software for businesses that require a modern phone system with advanced call center features like call routing, and queuing.
Key Features:
- Inbound and outbound calling
- Call routing and queuing
- Click-to-call functionality
- Integrations with CRM and helpdesk tools
- Call analytics and reporting
CallMiner
Call centers who are aiming for a tool to gain deep actionable insights from their customer conversations and drive continuous improvement can try CallMiner. It is a conversation intelligence platform with a focus on Analyzing customer interactions to improve agent performance and business outcomes.
Key Features:
- Speech analytics and text mining
- Sentiment analysis and topic detection
- Agent scoring and performance monitoring
- Real-time alerts and notifications
Scorebuddy
ScoreBuddy is a top-rated software for call center quality management. It can help businesses improve agent performance and customer satisfaction through quality assurance, performance optimization and agent training.
Key Features:
- Call monitoring and evaluation
- Performance dashboards and reporting
- Coaching and feedback tools
- Workflow automation
Playvox
Playvox is a call quality monitoring and contact center management software that helps businesses improve agent engagement, performance, and customer experience. Most users agree that it is very easy to use. On the other end, the major downfall of this tool is its limited customizations options.
Key Features:
- Quality assurance and monitoring
- Performance management and coaching
- Learning management and training
- Employee engagement tools
Conclusion
Quality Assurance in a call center can be a breakthrough process to optimize and enhance your call center performance. It is a systematic process that benefits all the stakeholders of the business.
It’s not complex to create a quality assurance framework as you can see from our earlier section. The core components of a call center QA like defining evaluation metrics, performance monitoring, feedback mechanism can overcome the challenges of high turnover rate, inconsistent performance and more.
Moreover, there are many developed tools available specifically for call center quality assurance. Select the best match and start your QA journey today. Let us know in the comments if you need more details.
