Call center quality assurance (QA) monitors and evaluates agent performance, ensuring that their service complements customer and company needs.
By filling in a QA scorecard, teams can identify development opportunities. They may also measure the impact of training by tracking these scorecard results as a metric and monitoring it over time to benchmark performance.
5 Benefits of Call Center Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is much more than an initiative to benchmark performance. By engaging in QA, contact centers can:
1. Understand How Agent Performance Relates to Customer Satisfaction
Contact centers build quality scorecards through satisfaction research, assessing the impact of individual agent behaviors on customers. As a result, scorecards should correlate with customer satisfaction scores. If this is the case, contact centers can pinpoint improvement opportunities that enable agents to deliver better customer service. For this reason, it is best practice for QA and coaching teams to collaborate, ensuring that agents receive consistent advice that results in happier customers.
2. Conduct Root-Cause Analysis
QA allows operations to uncover performance and knowledge gaps, with scorecards providing granular information about every interaction. The more conversations monitored, the more likely these inconsistencies will reveal themselves, and performance improvement opportunities will come to the fore. Fortunately, many QA systems now analyze parts of the scorecard across every interaction through speech analytics innovation. As such, contact centers can uncover the true scale of performance issues.
3. Enhance Remote Agent Management
If a remote agent is struggling, it is sometimes difficult to tell if it is due to technical difficulties, distractions, or other reasons. Call and contact monitoring help uncover these issues and possible fixes. Also, with automated QA, companies can monitor agent performance in real-time. So, if they endure a succession of low-scoring contacts, supervisors can step in and support them. Having a quick conversation or offering them a five-minute break may improve future performance and safeguard wellbeing.
4. Engage Agents with Performance Improvement
By scoring calls and funneling these back to agents, they can monitor their performance over time. Having these statistics available on their desktops motivates them to improve and spot trends themselves to self-learn. However, agents must feel as though the scoring is fair for this to be successful. Alongside calibration sessions, offering agents the opportunity to challenge their scores and review contacts with an analyst helps here. It also reaffirms performance expectations.
