11 Tips to Improve Quality Assurance of your Call Center
Learn how to improve quality assurance of your call center with a variety of techniques that go beyond ordinary quality control.
These tips range from quality teams with little money to invest, to those that can invest a lot.
1. Create a form that uses items by concept.
If most of the items on your form have responses like:
- Yes or no
- Correct or incorrect
Try swapping the items to:
- Very good, good, regular or bad.
Or other answers that have various ways of evaluating the agent.
But why?
That way, you will be able to separate exactly the very good agents and the good ones, from the fair ones, and the bad ones.
This will already be a big step for you to do improvement projects for the fair and bad, and professional growth projects for the good and the very good.
2. Use different forms for different customer service channels and operations.
It is very important to customize the forms following the service channel.
The items of a phone form in many cases do not fit into the items of chat and vice versa, for example:
- Voice tone
- Do you convey confidence in what you say?
- Leave the phone call on mute without notifying the customer?
In the chat form, it would have to be something else, like:
- Is the conversation objective?
- Did you use words that are not safe? Example: I think, probably, etc.
- Leave the customer waiting more than X minutes without returning the contact?
By separating the forms, you will be able to find the opportunities for improvement and the positive side of each customer service channel.
3. Use a tool that lets you know everything the agent did during the service.
Many things happen to agents beyond what is said or written in a customer contact, particularly in operations that are working from home.
- Register in the system incorrectly
- Searching the knowledge base for information incorrectly
- Access nonwork sites
- Using the cell phone during service
- Perform non-service tasks
All of this undoubtedly impacts the way the agent works, causing a lack of attention and, as a consequence, a drop in the quality of attention.
There are several ways to prevent this from happening and one of them is screen recording, available in CYF Quality … With it you will know exactly what the agent was doing when:
- They asked the customer for a moment.
- Wrong information was passed
- Demonstrated inattention to care
- Suspicion of fraud
This is a great feature for the quality team to have a nearly 360-degree view of the service being evaluated.
4. Stop evaluating by sample
Evaluating by sample, as you already know, makes many good and bad things bypass the eyes of the quality team.
In general, quality teams evaluate between 0.5% and 1% of contacts.
Even in a scenario considered small, 10,000 calls per month, the numbers are impressive, with around 500 contacts tested, “missing” 9500 calls.
Can you imagine how many problems could have occurred in these other contacts?
Therefore, the quality team must have technology that helps to optimize the searches of these calls and offer the monitors, especially the important contacts, to evaluate.
Get started with a voice or text analysis tool to find out which calls were problematic or what opportunities existed. Leave the effort of the monitors to the contacts that really matter.
We have exclusive content on the benefit of Speech Analytics in Call Centers.
Objectively, in addition to helping the quality team, it will also automatically identify:
- Complaint signals
- Suspicion of fraud
- Classification of reasons for contact
- Most pronounced words
- Quiet time vs. talk time
- Silence blocks in the middle of the call
- Reasons for Silence Blocks
- Automatic filling of a quality assurance scorecard
- Voice speed
- Dissatisfaction
- Possible mood swings
- Correct greeting
- Confirmation of data
- More assertive sales scripts
5. Apply coaching on the agent only on bad scores.
Do you apply feedback in 100% of the evaluations?
If the answer is no, focus on that first, use a system that optimizes feedback to the point where it applies to 100% of evaluations.
Now in case you already do this, my advice is:
Apply feedback electronically to agents with good scores and give feedback in person or by video call with low scores, focusing coaching and learning efforts on those agents who really need it.
If you already use CYF Quality, we have a feedback flow that automates all of this.
You will set up a minimum score and the agents that were above the minimum will receive feedback electronically and those below will receive feedback from their supervisor. Simple like that. 😃
6. Allow dispute
If your goal is to improve the quality of your call center, one of the main pillars is that the agents understands that they are the most important point in this process…
Therefore, at the time of feedback, I suggest you allow the dispute. In this way, you will know which agents are most interested in getting a good score and, in addition, you will create a culture of interaction between agents and monitors.
Once the dispute is cleared, it is extremely critical to measure disagreements that are valid versus unfounded.
Valid ones are those in which the answer was accepted by the quality team, resulting in a change in the evaluation score (to a higher one).
The unfounded are those in which the answer was denied by the quality team, without modification on the final evaluation score.
7. Study frequently the items with the greatest number of faults in your operation.
Have an easily accessible report where you can extract the items with the highest number of failures, such as the failure report found in CYF Quality.
With it, in a few clicks you will know exactly the items where your agents fail the most.
In addition, you will be able to do a Pareto analysis (also known as the 80/20 rule), where you will basically have to focus your training and coaching efforts on the items that represented 80% of the total failures.
8. Train only the agents who need it, that is, the agents who have failed the most on the key points of your form.
Many companies apply training to all agents, and this is very demotivating for good agents.
Imagine that they train you for something that you already know how to do … Boring, right?
Therefore, along with the report that will show the number of failures, you will need to know exactly which agents fail the most within each item.
Thus, we can define specific training to help those agents who are having the greatest impact on our operation.
9. Create a culture of learning
We know that developing organizational cultures is very difficult, but… If there is no well-defined training and coaching process, the quality team will only measure the quality of customer service, and will not actually improve the quality.
To create a culture of learning, there are several ways:
- Do coaching on the feedback
- Frequent training for agents with many failures.
- Fixation exercises
We created a new function called knowledge game for CYF Quality, it works in a simple way …
You’ll create questions within your form items, and as you evaluate, the questions will automatically be sent to agents.
The difference with this feature is that it will only trigger questions for items the agent failed on, and not all questions.
Thus creating a very strong culture of learning and fixation.
10. Compare your NPS to the quality
The NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a satisfaction survey that is carried out with customers who speak with your call center …
What happens a lot are high quality ratings and low NPS.
This can happen for several reasons:
- Lack of independence of agents to solve problems.
- Lack of training for agents
- Quality team evaluating in a simple way and "take it easy"
The fact is that having an NPS that does not follow the quality index is a bad thing and should be studied more calmly to understand the real reason why this happens.
11. Cultivate the professional growth of agents.
One of the ways to improve the quality of your call center is to keep agents motivated
To accomplish this feat, you will need to work with some more complex strategies, such as:
- Set short, medium and long term goals
- Create growth schedules
- Reward agents who achieve defined goals
Here are some ideas…
1. By opening supervisor, quality monitor, and other job vacancies, agents with the best quality index in recent months will have the opportunity to compete.
2. Reward agents who maintained a 100% quality index for the month.
3. Create a ranking of agents by quality index and make a gamification, to promote a healthy dispute about the quality of the service.
Conclusion
Several techniques mentioned in this content require you to quickly access your team information, so if you are not already using a quality assurance software, request your CYF Free here.
Improving the quality of a call center is not such an easy task, since it involves many people to change the mentality …
Many of these techniques require an effort to implement, so strive to create a culture in your call center that, in the near future, will be rewarded for your efforts.