Call Quality Monitoring – The Key to Ensuring Exceptional Customer Experiences

A Salesforce study reports that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.

According to Microsoft, 61% of customers stop engaging with a brand after a poor service experience.

Companies with active quality monitoring programs report a 30% improvement in customer satisfaction scores – Forrester.

What Do These Statistics Say?

These statistics stress the importance of customer experience in the growth of any organization.

When it comes to the call center, where the primary mode of communication is voice, it becomes imperative to measure the call quality.

What is Call Quality Monitoring?

Call Quality Monitoring helps you measure the quality of interactions between your agents and your customers. It focuses on the following:

• Are your agents being polite?
• How good are their communication skills? Are they able to understand what the customer wants and deliver them?
• How good is their resolution efficiency? What percentage of the queries were resolved on the first attempt? How well are they able to direct complex queries to the right individuals or departments?
• Do they adhere to the scripts provided to them? Especially when it comes to compliance needs.
• What are the customer satisfaction scores, and do they get measured after every interaction?

With intelligence, you are able to analyze your voice calls in real time to measure compliance issues, misselling, sentiment detection, and feedback.

It also provides you opportunities to barge as a supervisor and handle tricky situations.

Why Is Call Quality Monitoring (CQM) Important in a Call Center?

This is the gold standard when it comes to ensuring that the agents adhere to standards expected by customers and organizations alike. It helps you ensure that there is no compromise on the customer experience.

Here are a few reasons with real-world examples.

Customer Satisfaction Improvement

A telecommunications company noticed that agents handling technical issues were too technical in their communication with customers.

They were suffering from the curse of knowledge.

After monitoring calls, the organizations provided the agents with simpler and conversational scripts. This change led to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction scores.

Training Needs Identification

A financial services company understood that their agents were not adept at upselling and cross-selling during routine calls.

They weren’t able to spot opportunities during regular interactions, and they ended up leaving a lot of money on the table.

They understood the needs by monitoring calls, and they decided to put together an upselling and cross-selling training.

After implementing targeted workshops, they were able to increase their upselling and cross-selling conversions by 30%.

Agent Performance Enhancement

A retail company understood that their agents weren’t consistently asking for feedback from their customers after every interaction.

This was a missed opportunity to build rapport with their customers.

The retail company decided to automate the feedback process by sending out a text and an email right after every interaction with the customer. This was besides teaching the agents to seek feedback from the customers.

These initiatives led to a 15% improvement in customer retention and repeat business.

Compliance Risk Reduction

A healthcare insurance provider monitored calls to ensure agents were adhering to HIPAA guidelines.

They identified instances where agents were casually discussing sensitive information inappropriately. This was a red flag.

They retrained all the agents and reduced these occurrences by 40%, which significantly lowered their compliance risks.

Continuous Improvement

An e-commerce company’s quality monitoring program revealed frequent delays in resolving refund issues.

This was making their customers lose confidence in their brand.

The company redesigned its process, which reduced its refund resolution times by 70%.

This boosted the overall efficiency and customer confidence in their brand.

How Do You Measure Call Quality?

It includes a mix of both qualitative and quantitative measurements. Here are a few ways to look at it:

Scorecards

What metrics would you look at while creating scorecards?

• Is the tone polite, and is the communication understandable?
• How fast are issues resolved? Does it take just one interaction or multiple interactions?
• Does the script comply with standards and regulations?
• Does the agent show empathy?
• Does the agent exhibit active listening skills?

A food delivery service company implemented scorecards to improve empathy in their communication. This resulted in customers being heard and valued, thereby improving the resolution rates.

Call Recording Analytics

Only 2% of the calls ever get analyzed, and the remaining 98% lie in storage servers. This is a lot of data and knowledge that organizations are missing out on.

With an automated analytics tool that analyses voice and text, you can identify strengths, areas of improvement, misselling, and compliance issues.

A bank wanted to offer self-service channels for their customers to reach out to them and reduce the burden on human agents. However, they didn’t know where to begin their self-service journey. Analysis of voice recordings threw up all the repetitive queries. They started by automating repetitive queries through self-service channels.

This reduced their calls by 80%, allowing their agents to focus on complex queries.

Customer Feedback Surveys

Gather direct feedback from customers through post-call surveys or net promoter score (NPS) ratings. You should push notifications for customers to respond with a couple of clicks to your surveys. The notifications can be in the form of text and voice broadcasting.

With voice broadcasting, they can even provide qualitative feedback easily.

A tech support company used NPS scores to tailor their support responses, which improved their resolution rates by 20%.

Live Call Monitoring

Imagine your supervisor being available to barge in your calls when you are interacting with customers.

Your supervisor can directly jump into the call and address customer queries, or the agent can pull in their supervisors directly on the call.

A banking call center’s real-time monitoring helped them reduce their escalation rates by 35%.

What Are the Good Practices to Follow While Monitoring Call Quality?

The most important aspect of call quality monitoring that you should understand is this: You are not monitoring call quality to police your agents; instead, you are doing it proactively to ensure that you provide exceptional customer experiences. Your focus should be on coaching, mentoring, and training and not on critiquing.

Some good practices to look at include:

Define your objectives – define what quality means for your organization. Accordingly, you define your call quality monitoring criteria.

Involve agents – they are the front-line of customer service, and they would see opportunities invisible to people who don’t have their feet on the ground.

Involve them in defining metrics and providing feedback, and you would thank yourself for making your agents own the call quality of your organization.

Employ real-time tools – this would allow you to resolve issues in real time before it becomes too late. Leverage AI and real-time monitoring tools to do this.

Track the right metrics – don’t be hung up on metrics like Average Handling Time (AHT) and First Call Resolution (FCR); instead, focus on whether the objectives of the customers are met. You should focus on balancing quantity and quality.

Recalibrate and improvise – ensure consistency in measuring call quality by aligning all the stakeholders on scoring standards and criteria. Be ready to change based on your customer needs.

Provide contextual feedback – always offer actionable and example-driven feedback to help agents understand and improve.

As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets improved.”

Call Quality Monitoring is all about continuous improvement, customer-centricity, and excellence.

By leveraging the practices mentioned in this article, call centers can ensure that every customer interaction enhances their brand value and reputation while quietly building loyal customers and revenues.

It not only enhances customer satisfaction and experiences but also boosts the morale of agents significantly.

So, raise a toast to call quality monitoring and offer exceptional customer experiences.