In a call center where hundreds of calls are taking place simultaneously, quality control is essential to ensure customer satisfaction rate and experience stay high. Long term growth of every business depends upon how happy its customers are. That’s why call center executives are on the front line of delivering customer happiness and building or breaking brand reputation.
To ensure your call center services match and better exceed your customers’ expectations, you must have an adequate quality monitor mechanism in place. In a constantly evolving environment of customer expectation and ever-increasing demands from consumers, it can be challenging to make them happy and convert your customers into loyal fans.
However, with a bit of extra work and by taking care of call center executives’ most common mistakes, you can be well on your way to raising the bar of your customer experience and setting new standards for your industry.
Without further ado, let’s quickly go through quality monitoring mistakes you must avoid in your call center:
Hang Ups: 10 Call Center Quality Monitoring Mistakes That You Need To Avoid
Relying on tickbox reviews
Monitoring the quality of calls is a challenge, and it requires attention to detail to ensure that 100% of calls are being taken at the highest level of service.
Ticking boxes—when it comes to reviewing calls— often leads to an erosion of quality service.
How?
Well, with ticking boxes, it becomes more important to know if a question was asked at all rather than how it was asked.
Following scripts is an essential way to ensure consistency across the team, but it can also lead to robotic and formulaic customer service if followed blindly.
To do a quality check of your call center services in the modern age, you may need to throw out the tickbox review approach and engage in a qualitative review process to ensure that the tone of agents is valued as highly as the content of the scripts.
Improper feedback loops
Communication in a call center is essential. After all, your call center executives’ main role is to communicate over the phone line all day long.
Whilst call center agents are communication experts, team leaders who are off their phones may not have the same communication skills.
Communication within your teams is just as important as communication with your clients. If team leaders cannot deliver feedback to their team members in tactful and constructive ways, this feedback may never be incorporated into the action. Ensure that team leaders deliver criticism and feedback in a balanced way that keeps the team making positive changes.
Working without breaks
There are always going to be a few difficult clients. And those heated calls can take a toll on your team. It’s natural for emotions to roll over from one call into another if team members aren’t motivated to take a breath.
Call quality can be nosedive when employees move too quickly between clients, and frustration or anger bleeds from a previous call.
Now, you might ask: How to keep my staff cool, happy, and motivated?
Well, it’s simple: Encourage your call center agents to take small breaks.
Empowering your staff to take breaks between difficult calls can allow for an emotional reset. That means that when they’re back on the line, they can offer the best customer service and ensure that a satisfying call takes place.
Negativity burnout
Call center work is not an easy job. It can be very tough on team members. Dealing with difficult calls a day in day out can be emotionally taxing, and there’s often an unclear career development trajectory for team members working on the phone.
This is a dangerous combination that can lead quickly to employee burnout. And when your team members are exhausted, call quality is going to suffer.
Team leaders need to manage burnout by fostering positive environments where appreciation and incentives for good work take center stage. Ensure that a clear trajectory of career progression is articulated to your team members. This can give them a big-picture perspective that translates into great energy for customer service.
Using scaled evaluation
Quantitative measures of quality tend to lead to complacency amongst staff. Using a sliding scale of quality control, say measuring call components on a scale of one to five, can be a shortcut to understanding call quality, but it must be recognized that this is a blunt tool.
What’s more?
If your team leaders don’t take action with a rating of four on the scale, team members won’t be motivated to reach a five. Providing the highest quality calls should be the aim of any call center. So, this kind of sliding scale can be antithetical to the mission of quality calls.
If you’re using sliding scales for quality monitoring, ensure this is balanced with personalized performance measures to ensure that team members strive for excellence.
Poor training materials
To provide high-quality calls and generate customer satisfaction, your team needs to be trained to the highest standard. And in a constantly evolving market, it’s a mistake to think that your training materials can be static.
Training manuals and trial runs for new staff are an essential way of getting team members on board, but only those are not enough. Those training materials are quickly outdated as customer expectations evolve.
Training should be a regular activity and not a one-time process. To achieve regular training for your call center staff, you can take the help of interactive tools, arrange sessions with veteran call center executives, and frequently upgrade your training materials.
Interactive tools, as well as close mentorship from veteran staff members, will ensure that team members are trained to the highest level. Periodically revisiting your training practices will ensure you keep up with market expectations.
Workplace without focus
If your team members can’t concentrate on the calls they’re on, the quality will suffer, and customer satisfaction will fall.
Most call center setups don’t make team member concentration a priority. If you have been part of a call center, you must be familiar with desks packed together, team members talking over each other, and a wealth of distractions in the environment.
Finding ways to enable your team members to concentrate on calls will ensure that customers feel heard, and this will translate into great call quality.
Even partition walls can bring privacy and a sense of peace to your team members, ensuring they can concentrate on providing great service to your customers on every call.
Using excessive technology
Technology is a boon until used mindfully and in the right way. It’s easy to get excited about the potential that new technology will bring to a business and new software that can streamline quality monitoring and data analysis processes.
However, many call centers have made the mistake of becoming over-reliant on technology, making staff redundant, and depersonalizing the workplace.
A call center’s ultimate product remains the communication between team members and customers. This personal interaction suffers when the cold tools of technology surround it.
For example, if you are forcing your callers to talk to your robots rather than connecting them with a human agent, you’ve got a problem to fix.
Finding a balance between technology and personalized communication will ensure that call quality remains high, and customers put the phone down feeling satisfied with the service they’ve received.
Prioritizing scorecard evaluation
Scorecards are a fantastic way to get at-a-glance monitoring information on team members’ performance, but they are a reductive approach to a personalized process.
Evaluating team members exclusively through scorecards is a shortcut that will damage call quality.
Why?
Well, a scorecard never gives a holistic view of the overall performance of your team members.
Use scorecards only to guide feedback that is individualized to team members’ specific qualities and faults.
Complacency with low satisfaction rates
Problematic processes in quality control monitoring will translate to low customer satisfaction. This is to be avoided at all costs. Yet, many call centers are complacent about low customer satisfaction rates.
Depersonalized quality monitoring processes mean that quality monitoring outcomes are disconnected to customer satisfaction, and ticked boxes count for ratings better than real-world customer reports.
Quality monitoring in call centers must stay customer-centered. A conceptual shift that prioritizes quantitative monitoring tools will ultimately lose sight of the true measure of quality calls i.e., customer feedback.
Conclusion
In a call center, quality monitoring is essential to maintain high standards on every call. This is an evolving task as customer expectations are always changing, and each day brings new challenges for team members to adapt to.
Ensuring that team member training is dynamic and responsive to this environment enables them to provide quality calls every time.
Depersonalizing feedback may seem like a shortcut, but it’s a reductive strategy that loses sight of call center goals. Individualize feedback and generate environments where team members can truly focus on providing great service. Quality will be assured.
About the author: Katherine Rundell is a customer service writer at Write My Essay services. When she’s not optimizing customer service provision, she loves to be out in nature, hiking trails with her two German Shepherds.