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Call center quality assurance
What it is, why it matters & how to do it right
Learn all you need to know about call center quality assurance, including how RingCentral can help you get it right.
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The level of support and overall experience your call center provides to customers is vital. It’s essential to maintaining a good relationship with them and keeping a positive reputation amongst your clientele.
How, though, can you continually ensure that the quality you need is delivered at every touchpoint? How can you be certain that all your customer service agents are meeting the necessary standards? And if they’re not, what are you going to do about it?
That’s where call center quality assurance comes in.
Having an effective call center QA framework is crucial, but before you can get there you need to know the fundamentals.
So, let’s take a look at what call center QA is, why it matters, and how you can get it right in your call center.
What is call center quality assurance (QA)?
First things first: what is call center quality assurance? QA in call center operations covers all the processes involved in ensuring you’re continually meeting and improving performance standards.
QA in a call center typically involves monitoring and evaluating your team based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks that you have set. Different businesses have different goals, so you have to make sure that your KPIs are aligned with your particular objectives.
During the QA process, you’ll review the way your team handles customer interactions, gaining insights into customer satisfaction levels and identifying agents who need extra help. It’s about spotting problems and making the necessary adjustments to improve service quality.
QA vs QC (quality control) and QM (quality management)
When looking into quality assurance for call centers, you’ll probably also come across a couple of other similar phrases—quality control (QC) and quality management (QM). So, what’s the difference?
As mentioned, call center QA relates to monitoring and improving customer interactions to ensure the highest standards are maintained and KPIs reached. QC, meanwhile, relates to tracking operational activities. So, think about things like agent attendance and punctuality or the efficiency of internal workflows.
QM, meanwhile, is sometimes used as a synonym for QA, but can also refer to the combination of both QC and QA in a call center.
The importance of quality assurance in call center operations
Asking “why is QA important in a call center?” is like asking “why is quality important in a call center?”. Quality assurance is critical to any call center because it’s the only way to continuously improve the service offered to customers—and consumers will always expect the best.
Let’s look at the ways quality assurance—when you get it right—can improve the way your call center operates:
- Strengthening your support team: QA helps you find areas of improvement for your team and allows you to strategize effectively when coming up with coaching and training sessions.
- Improving customer experience: With a stronger team, your call center will provide your clients with better assistance. That results in better interaction with customers and higher retention levels.
- Refining business goals and processes: With consistent QA, you’ll be able to anticipate the needs of your customers, allowing you to adjust your business goals and procedures to accommodate them.
The benefits of call center QA
Call center or contact center quality assurance brings many benefits to your business, enabling you to oversee continuous improvement and exceed customer expectations:
Better customer satisfaction
If you can deliver consistency and quality across all interactions, you’ll see a greater level of customer satisfaction.
When callers don’t have to wait in lengthy queues, and when they receive efficient and friendly assistance from call center agents, their customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS) are likely to be higher.
Plus, they’re likely to stay loyal to your business, helping you to build long-term customer relationships. And they’ll also praise your customer care to others.
Improved first contact resolution rates
Call center QA involves providing effective coaching and the right tools to help agents do their jobs. This means they’re better placed to handle customer issues quickly and effectively—resolving them during the first interaction wherever possible.
With proper training and technology, callers won’t have to repeat their information to more than one agent or call a second time about the same issue. Whichever agent takes the call, they’re equipped to handle it.
Enhanced agent performance and skill development
A key component of call center QA is ongoing coaching. Managers can monitor agent performance to find out who needs to brush up their skills, and then deliver personalized feedback and training where it’s needed.
When agents feel supported and have opportunities to develop their skills and careers, they’re more motivated and engaged—which means they’ll always do their best to assist your callers. In short, happy agents = happy customers.
Shorter call handling times and lower operational costs
By using QA to measure and improve call center metrics like first contact resolution (FCR) and average handle time (AHT), you’ll reduce the amount of time that customer support agents spend on each call or on each issue.
The shorter the call, the less it costs your company. Agents can quickly move on to the next customer, handling more customers per shift. This operational efficiency leads to cost savings.
What are some challenges of call center quality assurance?
While vital, quality assurance in a call center is not without its difficulties. Here are some common problems that QA specialists and compliance managers encounter and have to overcome:
- An overwhelming amount of data
- Misinterpretation of data
- The amount of time needed to monitor and analyze calls, emails, or chats
- Pushback from agents who enjoy their privacy
- Outdated software that doesn’t offer a lot of useful features
It’s also common for businesses to outsource their call centers. That’s a valid option, but it does come with its own set of challenges when it comes to maintaining QA.
First of all, BPO (business process outsourcing) companies have different ways of defining quality. When choosing a BPO to outsource your call center to, you need to make sure they’re living up to your own standards. Although the specific metrics would depend on your needs, you can keep these general factors in mind as you look for the best partner for your business:
- Reliability: Can the BPO deliver on their expected key performance indicators?
- Efficiency: Can the BPO resolve customer concerns effectively?
- Promptness: Can the BPO maintain deadlines and keep to a consistent schedule?
Components of a call center QA process
Call center quality assurance can be manual or automated. Let’s take a look at what’s involved:
Manual QA
The traditional way to run a call center quality assurance process is to do it manually. This allows for an important human element, which is valuable when you want to evaluate more complex interactions and customer feedback.
In a business with high call volumes, humans can’t possibly monitor every single call. This is why call centers use sampling—taking a sample of interactions, measuring the metrics, and using those to get a picture of overall performance.
Call monitoring
Call center quality monitoring involves QA specialists or supervisors looking at the sample of calls. They use pre-defined criteria to assess agent performance—ability to remain professional, stick to a script if required, and demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of the product or service. They also evaluate customer satisfaction levels.
Samples are often random, although there may be times when supervisors want to focus on a certain type of call—such as those with dissatisfied customers, or conversations with new agents.
Quality scorecards
Quality scorecards are another method for assessing agent performance during customer interactions. QA specialists use a consistent framework, assigning a numerical score to each element and adding it up to an overall total.
Agents are evaluated on things like the greeting they gave the caller, whether they demonstrated active listening, and how well they solved the issue.
Scorecards often assess the agent’s adherence to a script and whether they asked the caller to verify relevant details for account access, as well as their post-call documentation.
Feedback and coaching
QA specialists look at the scorecards and the findings from monitored calls, and provide feedback to the agents, highlighting what they did right or wrong. They’ll praise good practice and suggest areas for improvement where needed.
And they’ll provide coaching to make sure all agents have the skills to deliver high-quality interactions.
If your call center platform has a live coaching tool, supervisors can intervene in difficult calls to help turn them around.
Quality assurance metrics
Call center QA involves measuring and analyzing various metrics relating to the quality of customer interactions.
These include:
- Metrics based on efficiency and agent performance, such as FCR, AHT, average speed to answer (ASA), and call transfer rates
- Metrics based on customer feedback, such as CSAT, NPS, and customer effort score (CES).
By tracking these metrics, managers can spot bottlenecks and areas for improvement, as well as checking how well the call center’s QA initiatives are working.
Call calibration
To ensure that evaluation and scoring practices remain fair and consistent, QA teams meet for call calibration sessions on a regular basis. In these meetings, they look at the sample calls they’re reviewed recently, and agree on standards to make sure all calls are assessed in the same way.
This means that no matter which QA specialist reviews a call, the agent in question will be judged on consistent criteria and receive the same feedback.
Quality assurance reporting
As well as giving feedback to individual agents, QA specialists also produce regular reports to share with management.
These reports set out the agent performance data from call monitoring and scorecard results, with analysis of the key metrics. They also highlight call quality trends and areas for improvement, helping call centers to offer the right training and implement the right processes.
Automated QA
If you’re looking to streamline the QA process, automation is the way to go. By using automated QA tools, you’ll save time and reduce the potential for human error—and you’ll be able to scale quality assurance as your business expands and call volume grows.
Instead of evaluating only a sample of calls, you’ll be able to monitor, score, and analyze them all automatically, across all your channels. Automated tools also provide deeper insights into customer sentiment by using speech analytics and natural language processing (NLP).
These tools can spot when a customer is becoming frustrated, even if they haven’t expressed it directly, and also monitor agents’ tone of voice as they respond. You can even set up the system to flag any problems in real time, so that managers can step in if needed.
Data from automated tools gives you a better idea of customer needs and pain points, as well as recurring issues. It’s easier to see trends and opportunities for improvement.
How to create a call center QA framework
The first step in ensuring effective quality assurance in a call center is to build a QA framework. A QA framework is the system used by your call center to collect performance data and measure quality of service.
Creating such a framework involves establishing the metrics that define good quality service for the call center and determining the methods for collecting data on how agents are performing against these metrics.
Let’s start by looking at the various types of frameworks and how you might implement them in your call center:
Types of QA framework for call centers
There are three types of frameworks for QA in call centers, and you can base your own model on any of them. They are not mutually exclusive, however. Good call centers use a combination of all of them to manage QA on different levels of the organization.
Let’s look at each type to help you see how you can implement these in your call center:
Operational QA framework
An operational framework deals with QA on the day-to-day level. It measures how well your call center teams are performing at their daily tasks. These are the common issues that an operational QA framework tries to address:
- Who are the weakest performers, and what systems can be implemented to improve them?
- Are quotas being met? If not, what can be done to achieve it?
Usually, data is collected through periodical evaluation and daily monitoring of goals. The downside of the operational QA framework is that solutions are only on the micro-level. It can show immediate short-term results, but it has low potential for long-term improvement since it doesn’t address root causes.
Tactical QA framework
A tactical framework looks at the bigger picture type of concerns that affect customer service. It’s concerned with improving the overall quality of service by identifying and addressing the root causes of low call center performance.
Some of the issues tackled by a tactical framework include:
- What’s causing low performance, and how can it be improved?
- Are there any knowledge gaps in the system?
- Is there a problem with the organizational workflow of the team?
The solutions to these issues are on the mid-level. It requires restructuring and retraining your team. You may not be able to observe the effects as immediately as you would with the operational framework, but it can make your team stronger in the long run.
Strategic QA framework
The strategic QA framework is established at the top-level of the organization. Its primary concern is to make sure that your call center team aligns with your overall business goals and helps improve your net promoter score (NPS). Your NPS measures how loyal your customers are to you and how likely they are to recommend your business.
To improve your NPS, here is what a strategic framework focuses on:
- What are our business goals? How does customer service fit into those goals?
- How can we improve customer loyalty and brand reputation with customer service?
- How is employee success defined and rewarded in our call center?
These questions are very broad, and they define the culture, standards, and goals of your company. This is why a strategic QA framework is used for finding long-term solutions to organization-wide problems.
Creating your framework
To create a useful call center quality assurance framework, you need to answer these three questions:
- What KPIs and metrics do you measure your agents against?
Look at the needs of your business and determine the most relevant KPIs. There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to choosing KPIs.
For example, a call center that receives hundreds of calls per day might be inclined to focus on the average handling time (AHT) of a call center agent. Another might prefer to prioritize customer experiences, so they will likely focus on first call resolution (FCR) or customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
Of course, the best call centers aim for a well-balanced framework that takes both speed and service into account.
- How will you monitor, measure, and analyze these metrics?
You can employ any number of methods to monitor your performance and analyze your data. In the early days of call centers, managers had to rely on manual methods to collect data and measure performance. Some of the traditional methods included:
- Paid surveys
- Custom scorecards
- Telephone mystery shoppers
- Manual recording and monitoring call sessions
Obviously, these are not easy to maintain consistently. But nowadays, products like RingCX from RingCentral come packaged with AI-powered quality management and analytics tools that automatically collect data and present them in a simple, easy-to-understand summary.
That means you don’t have to rely on manual labor or third-party QA software to do your analysis for you. It’s easy to monitor calls in real-time, as well as mapping the customer journey and collecting data at every touchpoint.
- Based on the data you’ve collected, what steps will you take to improve customer interaction?
Once you’ve collected and analyzed the data, consider what steps you could take to implement a strategy that would improve your customer service.
Do your agents have a high AHT? They might need further training to develop relevant skill sets. Do your customers prefer to contact your business through other channels? Employing an omnichannel contact center solution like RingCX is the way to go.
Call center quality assurance best practices
Creating an effective call center QA framework and learning how to improve quality assurance in a call center in general can seem like a difficult task. Given its importance to your business and your customers, however, it’s worth the effort.
To help you on your way, here are some tips and best practices for improving the contact center quality assurance process:
- Monitor goals and performance consistently.
- Decide who’s responsible for reviewing calls
- Use the right call center quality assurance software.
- Hold regular, personalized coaching sessions with your team.
- Establish a consistent penalty/reward system.
Monitor goals and performance consistently
Don’t create a QA framework and then sit back, thinking your job is done. Effective QA is a continuous and iterative process. You need to ensure that your call center stays ahead of changing market trends, increasing consumer demands, and your competitors.
When you created your framework, you’ll have decided on your KPIs and how and when to track them. Make sure you stick to the plan. Regularly monitor calls and other customer interactions and continuously look for ways to improve.
Consistency is the key here. If you have more than one person reviewing customer interactions, make sure they’re all evaluating calls in the same way. For example, always listen to the entire call to get the full picture of how it went.
When there’s a problem, it’s important to understand why it happened by drilling down into the root causes. You should also document the process and record your analysis to avoid making the same mistake in future. Holding periodic quality assurance audits will help you to identify potential issues.
Don’t be afraid of updating or tweaking your goals themselves. Call center operations are fluid, and you may find that the objectives—and therefore the metrics to track them—set down in your framework become less relevant. Adapt and improve your QA framework accordingly.
Decide who’s responsible for reviewing calls
To ensure that the monitoring process remains consistent, it’s important that everyone knows who has what responsibilities and who to report to.
It’s a good idea to appoint someone to head up the QA team, with ultimate responsibility for making sure processes are followed and quality standards upheld.
Call center managers are often involved in QA, as they have the advantage of close relationships with their agents—but managers have other tasks that take up their time. QA specialists, on the other hand, can devote all their attention to quality assurance as their top priority.
You can also involve individual agents in the quality assurance program. Peer-to-peer monitoring helps them to learn from each other, and is especially useful for new hires. And by encouraging agents to review their own calls, and identify strengths and weaknesses, you’ll make them feel more accountable for their performance.
Set up a timetable for call monitoring and analysis, and stick to it. If you’re using manual methods, you might look at a certain number of calls per day, per team, or per agent.
Use the right call center quality assurance software
Continuously monitoring performance across your call center as part of the QA process may seem like an onerous task.
Once upon a time, that was certainly the case. Call center managers and supervisors could only monitor their agents' calls by sitting next to them as they handled them, for instance. Fortunately, modern solutions for quality assurance in call centers have changed all that.
With the right call center quality assurance software, you can trust your system to record all your calls automatically, and to give you a range of call monitoring options. You can also reduce the time and manual efforts spent on quality assurance reporting.
And thanks to the recent evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), the ways in which the right software can support QA don’t stop there.
RingCX, for example, has RingSense AI built in, meaning you can get automated scoring, transcripts, and summaries of all customer interactions. In short, everything you need for efficient ongoing quality assurance in your call center.
It’s also important that your contact center software provides a strong foundation for your quality assurance efforts. A solution such as RingCX makes it easy to communicate and collaborate as a team, and to offer seamless omnichannel customer service.
Hold regular personalized coaching sessions with your team
Quality assurance for call centers isn’t all about software solutions and data. There is, of course, a crucial human element in the shape of your agents and teams. They should never be overlooked or underestimated.
To ensure standards are met and KPIs achieved, regularly train your agents to give them everything they need to perform. You’ll have already chosen agents who possess the right skills—empathy, problem-solving, clear communication—but you can always enhance these as well as providing training on new tools and workflows.
Thanks to the insights you can draw from built-in analytics, like those available from RingCX, you should be able to pinpoint individual strengths and weaknesses of each agent. Build your coaching sessions around these and you’ll have the recipe for success.
Types of training
There are various models for agent training, so it’s up to you to find the most suitable one in each case.
Some people respond better to classroom-based sessions, while others prefer one-on-one training. Remote agents could complete online modules to improve their skills.
For call center agents, it’s useful to train them on the different types of customer persona so that they can adapt their tone and conversational style accordingly.
They’ll also need to focus on active listening, backed by customer sentiment analysis from your AI tools. And, of course, they’ll need in-depth knowledge of the product or service the company provides.
Establish a consistent reward system
As well as training your teams, you also need to reinforce with them the importance of maintaining standards. That’s where establishing a consistent reward system comes in.
You need to incentivize good practice and discourage bad habits across your teams. One way to do this may be to offer prizes like extra time off or even a cash reward to your top performing agents.
Gamification can help to incentivize agents to perform better. For example, you could be transparent with agent scoring and display a leaderboard that inspires them to self-improve. Make sure you give constructive feedback to everyone and let them know they’re valued.
When establishing your system, what’s important is that it’s consistent and fair for everyone. Being able to rely on the accuracy of your measures of agent performance, then, is paramount. Fortunately, RingCX can help you here, too, thanks to reliable and automated agent scoring powered by AI.
Feedback works both ways
You also need to be open to receiving feedback from agents, if they disagree with your assessment or if there’s a discrepancy between their self-review and the official one.
Talk through the issue—if they think they acted correctly in a certain situation, find out why. Then suggest ways in which they could have handled things differently.
It’s also important to encourage agent participation when you’re discussing process improvements. The people who follow these processes every day are best placed to spot obstacles and gaps. Use metrics to show agents how their ideas are working.
Develop a customer-centric culture
A key part of successful QA in call centers is the creation of a customer-centric culture. This starts at the top and involves every single employee knowing and understanding why customer happiness is so important.
Everyone needs to be aware that the call center is a vital cog in a much larger machine, and that customer service quality really matters to the business as a whole. (In fact, your quality assurance insights are super-helpful for sales reps, marketers, and product developers).
With a customer-first attitude—and the right tools and processes in place to facilitate positive interactions—an improvement in quality assurance metrics will surely follow.
Technology that can streamline a QA workflow
By taking advantage of smart technology, you can optimize your QA processes, making life easier for agents and boosting satisfaction scores and customer retention.
Automatic call monitoring
Instead of you selecting a sample of calls, this technology is capable of monitoring all interactions simultaneously.
The AI-powered RingCentral RingCX lets you monitor calls from different devices via the app. Managers and coaches can look at the live data on a dashboard and listen in, whisper, barge in, or take over calls. They can also review calls afterward.
Automatic call recording
Recording calls means that managers can review and score them later, and identify common trends.
With RingCX, you can record calls automatically or on demand—but you should always inform customers that you’re recording for quality assurance purposes and get their consent.
Automatic QA scoring
When you automate QA scoring, you not only save time and resources but you can also ensure that all agents are reviewed consistently and fairly with no human bias. RingCX can deliver AI-generated scorecards after every conversation.
Speech analytics
AI tools can detect customer sentiment and alert agents and managers when a call is going south. They also highlight keywords such as objections and competitor mentions, which helps you to identify themes.
RingSense for RingCX even shows you the top moments of customer frustration for each call. Thanks to machine learning, the tool gets smarter the more data it analyzes.
Live agent assist
One of the goals of quality assurance is to improve FCR rates, and live agent assist tools are a great way to give agents the information they need to resolve issues quickly.
As well as pulling in answers from a knowledge base, agent assist tools can suggest the best responses to difficult questions or objections.
Call summaries
Automatic call summaries and transcripts are also a great time-saver when it comes to post-call workflows—and agents can focus fully on listening to the customer as they don’t have to take notes during calls.
Supervisors can instantly view the highlights without having to listen to entire calls. RingCX generates summaries with recommended action items after every interaction.
Using RingCentral’s quality management features to optimize your contact center’s workforce
We’ve already talked about many ways in which RingCX, RingCentral’s omnichannel contact center solution can help with quality assurance in call center operations.
That’s not the only solution RingCentral offers, however. For enterprises with more comprehensive contact center needs there’s also RingCentral Contact Center.
RingCentral Contact Center comes with powerful quality management features that can elevate your call center QA strategy. Here are just a few of those tools:
- Voice and screen recordings: These allow an administrator or supervisor to record an agent’s interactions with a customer. It can also record interactions conducted through other channels such as chat, social media, or email, allowing for a more holistic view of the customer’s concerns.
- Customizable dashboards: These let you organize your dashboard to display the most important information to you first. With it, you’ll be able to quickly review your team’s performance and quickly identify your highest and lowest performing agents or campaigns.
- Scoresheets: Once you have your recordings and have selected an agent to review, you can use the scoresheets tool to quickly assess an agent’s performance. You can customize these QA scorecards according to your team’s KPIs.
These are only a few examples of what you can do with RingCentral Contact Center. There are also performance management and analytics tools that can give you firmer control over the quality of your team’s service.
How can you get the best call center quality assurance?
Your business goals determine the best call center QA solution for you. Positive customer experiences are always the desired outcome, but every business has a different way of going about it.
You have to consider some things, like what your business does, what you want to do for your customers, and the best way to do it. When you consider your choices for QA, keep some of these questions in mind:
- Does your call center QA framework cover all of your areas for improvement?
- Do your metrics and methods align with your business goals?
- Are customer stories about and responses to your brand improving through your current QA framework?
- Does your call center QA framework have robust data security?
These questions cover the basics. Your business will have different specific needs that you have to figure out. Try to consider what kind of experience you want to provide for your customers. Then, put yourself in their place and imagine what they would need to get that experience.