Best practices for quality monitoring

As businesses increasingly differentiate themselves based on customer experience, quality management becomes an important measure to ensure contact center touchpoints with customers are consistent with the brand promise. By aligning agent performance and customer expectations, quality monitoring software allows contact centers to capture and review customer interactions, ensuring they deliver an outstanding customer experience.

Before you implement or update your quality monitoring program, be sure you’re following these best practices.

1. Create unique evaluation forms for your business

While it’s easy to create a one-size-fits-all call scorecard for your entire organization, customer expectations, company objectives, and success metrics often vary by program and channel. Therefore, one best practice for call quality monitoring is to develop unique evaluation forms for major relevant scenarios.

For example, you’ll likely want to evaluate agents using different quality monitoring criteria if they are addressing a first-time customer concern, upselling products, or following up post-purchase. You’ll also want to evaluate agents differently based on channel, like phone call, social media, and chat.

Agent evaluation forms should include a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures. An agent’s soft skills, like the agent’s politeness, professionalism, and empathy, are common qualitative metrics. And operational objectives, like using the standard greeting, fully resolving the customer’s issues, and cross-selling products, are typical quantitative or objective measures.

Once you’ve created unique call quality monitoring evaluations based on program and channel, be sure to review your criteria on a regular basis to ensure they remain relevant as customer expectations, business needs, and technologies change.

2. Define quality from the customer’s point of view

As you create scorecards based on a predictable process with defined standards of quality, be sure that you’re defining quality from the customer’s perspective. It will be difficult (if not impossible) to create a loyal customer base who proactively recommends your firm to their friends if there is a disconnect between your measures for success and their expectations.

For example, it may take a little longer to complete a call or chat when the agent takes the time to build rapport with the customer, show empathy by listening carefully to their concerns, or help them complete a task step-by-step. But because these actions drive customer loyalty and Net Promoter Score, contact centers focused on customer experience make those efforts a priority. However, if the agent scorecard awards points for shorter transaction times, it is at odds with the customer’s expectations of a quality contact center interaction.

3. Watch for trends and opportunities

The best modern-day quality monitoring programs allow contact center managers to collect and report on key metrics at the agent, team, or location level. This makes it easy to identify trends, quickly resolving growing issues and seizing active opportunities. Robust reporting and aggregated results help identify specific training needs, keep everyone on the same page and aligned to the metrics that matter, and can even foster friendly competition.

Plan to evaluate a certain percentage of interactions each month and ensure you have an appropriate sample that represents the collective work of each agent. Because features like speech and text analytics can analyze 100 percent of your company’s interactions with customers, be sure to use this technology to the fullest to enable evaluation across a diverse sample of your call volume.

Providing your agents with self-evaluations and real-time quality monitoring insight through dashboards makes them more invested, engaged, and open to input. Complete the circle by providing feedback using a coaching approach with an emphasis on working together to ensure each agent and team meets their goals.

4. The best technology by itself is not enough

Just like the telephones and computers your agents use to help customers, world-class quality monitoring and management software is simply another technological tool. Although it can help lead to high quality results at your contact center, success requires more effort than simply installing an application or program.

Ensure your contact center is set up for success by investing in the training and development your agents need to deliver a positive experience that delights your customers and has them singing your organization’s praises.

5. Regularly review (and fine-tune) your approach

Ensuring all evaluators are using a consistent approach to rate interactions is an important part of a quality monitoring program. While quantitative metrics are usually black and white, qualitative metrics are subjective based on each appraiser’s perspective. To calibrate your program, have all assessors rate the same call. If you see a wide range of scores for a specific metric, dig in more deeply. Close the gap by understanding each evaluator’s perspective, setting clearer expectations, and providing additional training.