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Contact center agents are often the first point of contact a customer has with your company, so there’s a lot of pressure to make a good impression. However, modern call centers can be difficult to monitor, especially when your agents are working remotely.
Understanding how your customers feel about the first touchpoint is key to quality assurance (QA). The following strategies will help improve overall quality and enhance your ability to measure the results of changes you implement.
1. Gamification
If done well, gamification can improve employee engagement in a number of ways, with some studies showing Increase production efficiency by 50%These include contact center teams, whose agents often manage repetitive tasks and can benefit from out-of-the-box motivational strategies.
Gamification uses the fundamental principles of video games to quantify work outcomes. Regardless of the metric used, the goal is to enhance social learning and increase engagement in mundane tasks.
It works by creating friendly competition within a team’s operational workflow. While it doesn’t turn their work into a game, it feels pretty close to one, especially if there are prizes.
Let’s say you want to increase the number of outbound calls your agents make and the number of inbound calls they answer. With a workforce management system equipped with gamification features, you can track each agent’s progress toward their goals.
It also shows your agents a daily results screen with points, badges, progress bars, benefits, winners, etc. In short, it’s a bit like running an “employee of the month” competition based on measurable performance.
To be successful, gamification needs to include a few important elements.
Clear benchmarks
Encourage daily incentives with clear benchmarks to measure progress. You can use whatever incentives you think work best for your team, but it’s important that competition doesn’t overshadow actual customer support. If you grade advisors based on how many calls they miss, they may start ignoring the current caller and moving on to the next one as quickly as possible. Gamification can work well, but the results you see depend on how you set up your system.
Regular communication
You need to ensure there is a feedback loop so that advisors understand how their work contributes to achieving goals. You can offer bonus points through additional training or one-to-one coaching sessions. You can even provide additional resources to reinforce company policies.
Focus on improvement
The most important thing is not to leave people behind. The purpose of a gamification strategy is not to eliminate laggards and embarrass them, but to encourage everyone to participate as a team. Make sure you make it clear to all employees that this is about improvement, not perfection.
The right tools
In the contact centre, gamification is technically possible without software, such as putting a progress bar on the wall in the break room – but to keep the modern workforce engaged in the system, you need something they can find on their phone or laptop.
2. AI Workflow
Your quality assurance workflow has many functions, each with its own performance metrics. These metrics take time and effort to collect and report to your team leaders, and must be done regularly if you want them to improve their strategies.
One of the great things about using AI to automate your QA workflow is that it’s easy to gather deep performance insights. Rather than relying on your team to collect data (and risking clerical errors that even the most experienced humans can make), the system does all the work for you.
Automated workflows can also support performance by tracking both soft and hard skill metrics, such as:
- efficiency.
- patience.
- polite.
- Correctness.
- on time.
With this type of employee performance data, AI can create models and reports that help managers strategically improve QA. This helps them understand the overall core performance of the team, as well as individual strengths and weaknesses.
However, it’s important to treat this data with caution. Over-reliance on AI could actually work against call centers if the software they use can’t be customized. Many businesses are using a combination of VoIP phone systems, AI analytics, and other advanced solutions to increase their competitive advantage and reduce labor costs.
3. Active listening training
You know the importance of training contact center agents to handle calls, and your training materials probably place a heavy emphasis on courtesy. But a related skill that is often overlooked is teaching employees how to be empathetic. In a market where customer relationships drive profitability, this is an important skill to develop.
Active listening training is a set of principles your agents can follow when speaking to others. It’s proven to improve the quality of communication between speakers. In a call center, this means more customer engagement and better conversion rates — plus, it makes everyone feel better overall.
The concepts of active listening training include:
- Learn how to focus.
- Provide feedback to the caller.
- Recognize and acknowledge emotions.
- Don’t jump to conclusions.
- Practice empathetic responses.
Active listening training can enhance the contact center etiquette you may already be teaching. It’s a way to reinforce the concept that your agents are actually talking to people, not just customers.
4. Customer Journey Map
Customer journey maps provide a visual representation of how customers interact with your contact center. They take into account not only objective facts, such as whether a customer purchased an item, but also the customer’s needs and opinions throughout their entire interaction with your business.
Journey maps answer important questions about what customers want to accomplish, how long they spend, and what or who they interact with. Knowing these answers can help you improve interactions based on actual experience rather than guesswork.
The focus is on better understanding your business from the customer’s perspective, an often overlooked aspect of contact center QA.
You can’t properly respond to customer concerns if you only focus on the moments when they interact directly with your call center. Other factors (also known as “backstage” interactions) are equally important, such as the questions they ask after the call, the newsletters you send, and the feedback surveys you provide them with.
Your map should include what happens before, during, and after an interaction with your business. Once you understand the entire journey, you’ll be better able to guide future customers to the best solution.
5. Agent Participation
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s not as common as you might think. Agencies will benefit greatly if they are actively involved in developing their QA strategy, rather than just being told what to do.
While many QA strategies require team leaders to listen to agents’ calls and then give feedback, this isn’t the only approach. For example, you could invite agents to listen to calls with their leaders so they can evaluate the feedback together and come up with improvement strategies on a level playing field.
Such strategies allow advisors to reflect on their own performance, encouraging them to take personal responsibility and take ownership of their own development process. Personal responsibility increases advisor engagement, which has been shown to increase customer responsiveness, improve productivity, and even Profit increased by 21%.
This approach also reduces stress on managers and helps prevent leadership team burnout.
6. Continuous Benchmarking
Benchmarking is a great way to see how your contact centre compares to other similarly sized contact centres. You can also see how you compare to the best contact centres in your industry.
While benchmarking is common, it’s not always done well. Many companies view it as a one-time deal. Instead, it should be viewed as an ongoing process that goes far beyond one or two metrics.
After evaluating performance in one area, you should move on to another to get a better picture of the overall situation. Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) can make a huge difference. You and your team need to determine which combination will give you the best insights to improve service quality.
Common KPIs to track include:
- Customer satisfaction rate.
- Service Level.
- First call resolved.
- Agent turnover rate.
- Average processing time.
It’s best to use workforce analytics software so that you don’t focus too much on quality assessment and neglect maintaining it.
7. Survey
Surveys are the most common strategy for evaluating agent performance and improving QA. It’s as simple as asking your customers to give you direct feedback and then taking action based on the information you get.
However, you still need to organize the data you collect – whether through paid questionnaires, random calls or mandatory phone monitoring. It’s not enough to just send out a questionnaire. You should take the time to understand what the results mean.
Sometimes that means digging deeper and spending more time analyzing the data. If you use surveys as opportunities for growth, coaching, and additional training, they will be more valuable than if you use them as a disciplinary tool.
By demonstrating a commitment to QA and sharing data in a positive way, you can build employee loyalty.
Key takeaways for contact centres
Contact center QA can be complex. It involves quantifying and qualifying many moving parts, such as the customer’s emotional experience, the agent’s strategy, and the team leader’s tactics.
When you put it all together, it feels like trying to do a crossword puzzle while skydiving — and then your phone rings.
But with the right strategy and software, quality assurance can become part of your daily operations and have a significant impact on your agencies, your clients, and your bottom line.
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