BPA Featured Article

The call center is all about quality. Customers call in on a daily basis to discuss questions, concerns, anger and so on. Agents are tasked with resolving said issues in the most effective way possible, while also maintaining a high level of quality throughout the interaction. Agents can’t let a customer know how annoying they’re being and they most certainly can’t yell back at them.

At the end of the day, agents are supposed to be providing quality customer service that will keep consumers coming back for more. But how can call center managers ensure that each interaction is meeting quality expectations? Here are some tips to improve call center quality.

Revamp the hiring process. This should go without saying, but one of the most important contributors to a successful call center is having the right people working there. Managers need to make sure that they’re hiring representatives with the right set of skills. They need to be personable, driven, patient, and, above all, ready to help customers. From there, managers can worry about training and quality assurance. If the right agents are working in a call center, it’s never going to produce quality experiences.

Implement 3rd party remote call monitoring. Call monitoring is a must for any call center. It management to record every single call that occurs and listen to them at a later time. This is great for training purposes, as managers can play the recordings back for agents to show them what they did well and what they need to improve on. However, it also allows managers to listen in on calls in real time. So, if agents get stuck with a particularly difficult customer, agents can use features that come with the 3rd party remote call monitoring system—like whisper—to help agents get through the call. This way, managers can ensure quality during the call, and then use the recordings to train for quality purposes.

Review KPIs. Which KPIs have the biggest impact on your business? If you don’t know, then that’s a problem that needs to be resolved quickly. Meeting standard KPIs allows businesses to achieve their goals which, in this case, is quality assurance. Call abandon rates, monetary cost per call, first call resolution stats, wait time and call completion rate are all KPIs that directly reflect the quality of customer experience.