Contact center agents are often a customer’s first point of contact 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 if your agents are working remotely.
Quality assurance (QA) is all about understanding how customers feel at that first touchpoint. The strategies below will help you improve overall quality and also increase your ability to measure the results of any changes you implement.
1. Gamification
Done right, gamification can increase employee engagement in many ways – some studies show that productivity can increase by up to 50%. This includes contact centre teams, whose agents often handle repetitive work and could benefit from innovative motivation strategies.
Gamification quantifies work achievements using the basic principles of video games. Regardless of the metrics used, the goal is to reinforce social learning and increase engagement in otherwise mundane tasks.
It works by creating friendly competition in your team’s operational workflow. While it doesn’t turn work into a game, it can feel pretty much like one, especially if there are prizes involved.
Let’s say you want to increase the number of outbound calls your agents make and the number of inbound calls they answer. With an employee management system equipped with gamification, you can track each agent’s progress toward their goals.
It will also show your agents a daily results screen with elements like points, badges, progress bars, earnings, and winners. In short, it's like running an “employee of the month” competition based on measurable performance.
To be successful, gamification must include some important elements.
Clear points of reference
Encourage daily motivation with clear metrics to measure progress. You can use whatever incentives you think will work best for your team, but it’s important that competition doesn’t overshadow actual customer service. If you score agents based on how many calls they don’t answer, they may start to neglect the current caller in favor of moving on to the next caller as quickly as possible. Gamification can work well, but the results you see will depend on how you set up the system.
Regular communication
You should make sure that there is a feedback loop so that agents know how their work contributes to achieving goals. You can offer bonus points with additional training or one-on-one coaching sessions. You can even provide additional resources to reinforce company policies.
Focus on improvement
The most important thing is not to leave anyone behind. The goal of a gamification strategy is not to eliminate stragglers and shame them, but to encourage everyone to play as a team. Make sure you clearly explain to all employees that it is about improvement, not perfection.
Suitable tools
In a contact center, gamification can technically be implemented without software – for example, by putting progress bars on the break room wall – but for modern employees to engage with the system, you’ll need something they can open on their phone or laptop.
2. AI Workflows
Your QA workflow has many functions, and each of them has its own performance metrics. Collecting and communicating them to your team leaders takes time and effort, and it also needs to be done regularly if you expect your strategies to improve.
The best thing about automating QA workflows with AI is how easy it is to gather detailed performance insights. Instead of relying on your team to collect data (and risking administrative errors even from the most experienced people on the job), the system can do it all for you.
Automated workflows can also support performance by tracking metrics related to soft and hard skills, such as:
- Efficiency.
- Patience.
- Courtesy.
- Accuracy.
- Puntuality.
With this type of data on employee performance, AI can create models and reports that help managers strategically improve quality control. This allows them to see the overall performance of their team, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of individuals.
However, it’s important to be careful with this data. Relying too heavily on AI can be detrimental to call centers if the software they use isn’t customizable. Many companies use combinations of VoIP phone systems, AI-based analytics, and other advanced solutions to increase their competitive advantage and reduce their labor costs.
3. Active listening training
You know how important it is to train contact center agents to handle calls, and your training materials probably put a lot of emphasis on courtesy. But a related skill that’s often overlooked is teaching employees to be empathetic. In a market where connecting with customers drives profitability, it’s an important skill to develop.
Active listening training is a set of principles that your agents can follow when talking to other people. It has been proven time and again to improve the quality of the connection between callers. In the context of a call center, this means increased customer engagement and better conversion rates, plus it makes everyone feel better overall.
The concept of active listening training includes:
- Learning to pay attention.
- Provide feedback to the caller.
- Recognize and acknowledge emotions.
- Postpone hasty conclusions.
- Practicing empathic responses.
Active listening training can enhance the contact center etiquette you're probably already teaching. It's a way to reinforce the concept that your agents are actually talking to people, not just customers.
4. Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps visualize how customers interact with your contact center. They not only take into account objective facts, such as whether or not the customer purchased something, but also take into account the customer’s needs and perceptions throughout the entire interaction with your company.
Journey maps answer important questions about what customers are trying to accomplish, how long they’ve been doing it, and what or who they’re interacting with. Knowing these answers can help you improve interactions based on real experience rather than guesswork.
The goal is to better understand what your business looks like from the customer's perspective, which is an often overlooked aspect of contact center quality control.
You can’t adequately respond to a customer’s concerns if you only focus on the moments when they interact directly with your call center. The other factors (i.e., “off-screen” interactions) are equally important, such as the queries they ask after the call, the newsletters you send, and the feedback surveys you conduct.
Your roadmap should include the before, during, and after of interactions with your company. Once you see the entire journey, you’ll be much better prepared to guide future customers to the best solution.
5. Participation of agents
It may seem obvious, but it is not as common as you might think. Agents will benefit much more if they are actively involved in developing quality control strategies rather than simply being told what to do.
While many QA strategies involve having team leaders listen to their agents’ calls and then provide feedback, that’s not the only way to do it. You can invite the agent to listen to the call with their leader (for example), so that you can evaluate the feedback together and propose improvement strategies on equal terms.
Strategies like this can get the agent to reflect on their own performance in a way that encourages personal responsibility and ownership of their own development process. Personal responsibility fosters greater agent engagement, which has been shown to increase customer responses, elevate productivity, and even boost profits by up to 21%.
This method can also reduce stress for managers, helping to prevent burnout in your leadership team.
6. Continuous benchmarking
Benchmarking is a great way to see how your contact center compares to others of a similar size. You can also compare yourself to the best in your industry.
While benchmarking is fairly common, it is not always done well. Many companies treat it as a one-time thing, but it should be treated as an ongoing process that expands far beyond one or two metrics.
After evaluating your performance in one area, you need to move on to another to get a better view of the bigger picture. Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) can make a big difference. It’s up to you and your team to determine which combination will give you the best insights to improve service quality.
Common KPIs to track include:
- Customer satisfaction rates.
- Service level.
- First call resolution.
- Agent turnover rates.
- Average handling time.
It's best to use workforce analytics software so you don't get so caught up in quality assessment that you neglect to maintain it.
7. Surveys
Surveys are the most common tactic for evaluating agent performance and improving quality control. It’s as simple as asking customers to give you direct feedback and taking action based on what you learn.
However, the data you collect still needs to be collated, whether through paid questionnaires, random calls or mandatory call monitoring. It's not enough to just send out the survey. You need to spend time understanding what the results mean.
Sometimes that means digging deeper and spending more time analyzing the data. If you use surveys as an opportunity for growth, training, and additional coaching, they will prove to be more valuable than if you used them as disciplinary tools.
By demonstrating commitment to your quality control and sharing data in a positive way, you can build loyalty with your staff.
Key takeaways for contact centers
Contact center quality control can be complicated. It involves quantifying and qualifying many moving parts, such as customers’ emotional experiences, agents’ tactics, and team leaders’ strategies.
When you put them together, it can feel a bit like trying to do a crossword puzzle while skydiving… and suddenly your phone rings.
But with the right strategies and software, quality control can become a regular part of your daily operations that will have a huge impact on your agents, customers, and bottom line.
