TIPS & RESOURCES

Wondering how you can guard against bad customer calls in your call center? This is where call center quality assurance comes in. Read on to learn about it

What is Call Center Quality Assurance

We’ve all been victims of a bad customer service call. You wait forever on hold. The call center agent you finally talk to seems disinterested and doesn’t understand your issue. The call becomes combative as your frustration grows. In the end, you’re more upset after the call than you were before it.

Not ideal for customer satisfaction. So, how do you guard against these types of calls happening in your business’s call center? That’s where call center quality assurance comes in. This article will go over the steps you can use to implement quality assurance and ensure the best possible interactions for your customers and your employees alike.

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The Basics

Before we go into how you can optimize your call center quality assurance, it’s worth answering one key question—what is call center quality assurance?

Put as simply as possible, it’s the steps you take to make sure your call center is running as smoothly as possible. To do this, you need to set up certain systems that will help you analyze your call center.

KPIs

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are the first analytical tool you should be using to implement call center quality assurance. KPIs are objective measurements that can help you paint a picture of how your business is performing. They generally fall into one of three categories:

Financial – Financial KPIs are often the first numbers you’ll hear about in business. After all, they tell you the situation in regards to money. Numbers relating to revenue and profit fall into this category.
Customer – These metrics focus more on the consumer side of things and reflect the behaviors of your customers. Customer acquisition cost is an example.
Process performance – This evaluates how different elements of your business are running. So, you may use this to show how many of your products are made incorrectly. You can also use these KPIs to show how long a certain process (like a phone call) tends to take.

When dealing with call centers, there are certain key KPIs that you can focus on to get a sense of just how smoothly (or not) things are running:

Answer time – How long do your customers spend on hold before getting to talk to someone? If this KPI is trending high, it may be time to hire more staff or find a more efficient way to deal with customer needs and how to answer customer service calls.
Call duration – Once customers reach a call center agent, how long does the call take to resolve the customer’s issue? If the average handle time call center number is too high, it may be a sign that your agents need better training. Too low, and it may show a lack of engagement.
First call resolution – Are customers forced to call your center multiple times before they receive a satisfactory resolution to their issue? This can show poor customer service, or it might be a sign you need more customer outreach to educate them about your product.
Customer satisfaction – If you’ve ever called customer service, you’ve probably been asked to complete a quick survey. Responses to surveys like this can provide a window into the subjective feelings of your customers.

Call Monitoring

When you hear the words quality assurance, did your mind jump to the automated message telling you someone may be monitoring your call? The reason that message is so ubiquitous is that analytics alone can’t tell a whole story. To get a feel for how your call center is operating, you need to listen to calls.

This quality monitoring allows the center manager, call center QA analyst, or quality assurance specialist to hear both sides of the conversation and objectively evaluate how a call went to ascertain the QA scores of the agent performance. Sometimes, a bad call may be the fault of an employee, but sometimes you just find a customer who can’t be satisfied. By listening to numerous calls, you can get a better sense of what’s really happening while ensuring quality standards are being met.

Why Quality Assurance is Important

By using a combination of analytical tools like KPIs, subjective tools like customer and employee surveys, and first-hand quality monitoring you can get a real sense of how your call center is performing. But does this quality assurance really matter? Will it fundamentally change anything about your business? There are a few reasons it might:

Customer satisfaction – Keeping your customers happy may have more benefits than you realize. The old rule is that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one. In addition to that, customer retention and learning from how they buy lets you better serve them and better target new acquisitions, driving your outreach costs down.
Employee satisfaction – When you know what’s going wrong, you can better implement systems to fix it. Giving your employees the technology and training they need to serve your customers will help them do their jobs and lead to better employee and customer retention. And that will lead to even better customer or answering service in the future.
Information – Every customer interaction is an opportunity to learn about your product. This is equally true in retail as it is in healthcare. By knowing what your customers are thinking you can better adapt all your systems to better fit their needs.

Quality Assurance through Nexa

Often the first step in quality assurance is making sure you have the right team working on every part of your business. That’s where Nexa can help. We’re experts in customer service and work in a variety of industries from automotive to eCommerce. Whether you need help with sales or need help booking appointments, Nexa has the tools and the expertise you need to keep your customers happy.