Satisfying customers over calls, live chat, and email support is more important than ever today. Many customers are just one bad interaction away from parting ways with a brand. It makes improving and maintaining the quality of call center customer service crucial for the long-term success of a company. That’s where quality assurance helps you.
Good quality assurance helps a company bridge the gaps in its quality of service. Now with more companies investing in customer service, the support factor is starting to become more crucial than price and product. Check out these 8 ways to improve your call center quality assurance:
Hire or Assign a QA Officer
Improving your customer service starts with hiring someone for QA. It is generally better to promote someone from within the team for quality assurance. It is because they have a better understanding of your customers and their expectations.
Hiring external QAs at different times can also help you. External auditors may help you further understand where your customer service could use improvement. But it is generally best to have external auditors at a later stage after you have an in-house QA team.
Create a Performance Checklist
To have a proper idea of an agent’s or a team’s performance, you need to decide on factors to evaluate their performance. Therefore, it is important to create a performance checklist. It is best to involve your team to curate the performance checklist. Their involvement will create a sense of ownership in your team. Also, you will have realistic performance expectations this way.
Promote Self Evaluation
As mentioned earlier, the involvement of your team in creating a performance checklist goes a long way. You can promote a culture of self-evaluation. Your agents will be able to self-evaluate and find areas with room for improvement on their own. Your QA officer can engage with agents to provide further feedback.
With your agents getting clarity about performance, they are more likely to cover their shortcomings sooner. Your QA manager can set a frequency of weekly, biweekly, or monthly meetings with the team to discuss their progress.
A major benefit of introducing a culture of self-evaluation is lesser evaluation disputes. Both your QA manager and your agents are more likely to be on the same page. If there are still such instances, encourage discussions and allow agents to present their cases.
Record Call Interactions
One of the best ways to see the performance of your agents is to listen to their interactions. Call interactions are crucial to improvement because a lot of customers reach out to a company through audio calls. You can improve customer support quality by listening to the live calls of every agent.
Other than listening to live calls, calls are often recorded for quality assurance. Also, different software applications allow recording screens along with calls. This way, your quality assurance team can have better insights into an agent’s performance.
Monitor All Support Channels
Today, businesses often prefer to leverage multiple channels for customer support. More companies are adopting an omnichannel support strategy to unify support operations. So, the quality of customer interactions across these channels should be monitored as well.
In fact, it is best to pay individual attention to every channel. Evaluate the performance of your agents at every stage against the set KPIs. This way, you will have overall better customer service regardless of the channel.
Conduct Mock Calls and Other Interactions
Besides recording interactions and calls with actual customers, your QA team can also conduct mock calls. Senior agents can help with this evaluation by acting like customers on different communication channels. Such exercises can help you with feedback and conducting training sessions.
It is best to not let the customers know about such testing. The outcome of such tests can help your team in measuring efficiency, satisfaction rates, first-contact resolutions, and other aspects.
Be Transparent About Contact Center Performance
When you have an active QA and your team is striving to improve performance, sharing the results can add to the team’s motivation. It is advisable to share collective performance metrics of contact center performance like CSAT, NPS, AHT (average hold time), and FCR.
Other than motivation, such transparency can nurture team spirit among employees to achieve better stats in the next quarter.
Set Performance Based Incentives
Rewarding your team for good performance can keep your employees motivated. You can set performance targets and rewards for achieving them. Apart from setting rewards for the whole team, another thing you can do is set individual incentives for improving wherever there is room for it.
By following these tips, you are likely to see boosted performance in a contact center.
