Quality Assurance Best Practices in the Call Center

Quality assurance (QA) should be the cornerstone of your call center management efforts. This is because optimizing QA practices will help to enhance the quality of the service your team provides to their customers, increase their efficiency and reduce wasteful spending. Taken together, the benefits of optimizing your QA practices might just help your team get a leg up on your competition. This blog post will help you do just that. Below are tips, tools and techniques to help optimize your approach to quality assurance in the call center:

• Appoint a QA specialist to create a comprehensive QA program and oversee this process
• Evaluate potential call center agent candidates for essential customer service skills to ensure that they have what it takes to hit the ground running
• Include an overview of quality assurance best practices, as well as how an agent’s performance will be measured and how they will be provided feedback based on their performance in your call center agent onboarding and training
• Engage in silent monitoring of live calls, in vivo observation of call center agents and listen to recorded calls systematically

• Focus your resources on high-value calls as well as routine calls
• Rate these calls using a call scoring and evaluation form and calibrate your ratings with a rating team
• Rate any customer interactions on additional channels (i.e., chat, email, in person, etc.) with similar scoring and evaluation forms and methods
• Incorporate customer feedback obtained from post-call IVR surveys into your QA process
• Assess the performance of each individual agent, team, department and the call center as a whole and provide relevant metrics to all parties with a vested interest
• Create a culture of continuous improvement by requiring peer-to-peer evaluations and self-evaluations of calls
• Include your QA specialist in agent coaching sessions to provide both qualitative (i.e., examples from call recordings, customer feedback, etc.) and quantitative (i.e., scores from evaluation forms) feedback based on the agent’s performance
• Provide concrete examples of how you would like the agent to improve their approach to interacting with callers if needed
• Role play your example with the agent so that they can develop a more comprehensive understanding of this new approach
• Engage in whisper coaching to help guide the agent to success when learning to implement a new technique or approach to interacting with callers
• Create a remediation plan (i.e., shadow a more experienced agent, have a call center manager whisper coach them, engage in self-evaluation, etc.) for agents who consistently fail to make improvements based on your feedback
• Ensure that your QA specialist, customer satisfaction specialist and call center manager meet at least weekly to enhance collaboration
• Supplement your onboarding and coaching sessions with systematic training sessions including the QA specialist, call center manager and customer satisfaction specialist
• Recruit a firm to periodically evaluate your QA process objectively and provide your team with an unbiased feedback and suggestions for improvement
• Leverage call center software with a reporting dashboard that provides the metrics that are of most interest to your team as well as call monitoring and call recording capabilities

Following the aforementioned tips and techniques and leveraging the suggested tools will help you to significantly improve your QA practices in your call center. Doing so will optimize the service your team provides their customers, increase efficiency and help you to get a leg up on your competition. Thus, they are best practices that your team cannot afford to not implement.