Want to learn how to establish a quality program for your call center? Read on (or you can jump ahead with the links below).

What is quality assurance in a call center?

What’s the importance of QA in a contact center?

Advantages of call center quality assurance program

How does quality monitoring work in a call center?

Best practices for quality managers to improve call center QA

Call center quality assurance (QA) is a means of ensuring high-quality customer service interactions and call center performance. Call center QA procedures and tools help managers watch out for issues and continuously improve customer experiences.

Also known as quality management (QM), the QA process involves monitoring and evaluating the efficiency of call center agents. It's done by setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measuring how each representative against them.

It’s common for organizations to use call center software to automate the data-gathering and analysis aspect of operational performance. But that doesn’t mean you need to rely solely on solutions like this. You still need humans to interpret the information and apply the changes necessary for improving interactions throughout the contact center. It’s the team leaders or QA specialists who determine the best strategy for meeting established quality standards.

The QA process is a key component of proper contact center management. Not only does it ensure team members perform according to set standards, but it also helps optimize workflows to make them easier to adhere to.

Think about how healthcare professionals regularly undergo training to stay up-to-date with best practices so they can offer the best patient care possible. Similarly, the QA process:

• Improves customer experiences by standardizing communications and interaction protocols leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention
• Strengthens your customer support teams by systematically training current agents and new hires alike to develop necessary skill sets
• Makes performance management within your call center more efficient

Additionally, contact center quality assurance can help you discover areas where money and resources are being wasted. For example, unmanageable call volume, agent downtime, and long call queues can cost you customers. The QA process spots these issues, allowing you to develop an effective workflow, increase agent productivity, and reduce costs.

Establishing a call center quality assurance program brings several benefits that boost your business and build an environment that satisfies not only customers but managers and agents too. On top of increasing efficiency and reducing costs, QA can also drive customer retention and increase profit. These and other benefits of quality assurance give you the ability to:

• Reinforce business goals and values
• Address customer feedback
• Identify and resolve customer service shortfalls
• Improve customer engagement, experiences, and retention
• Enhance employee experiences and satisfaction
• Foster collaborative workplace environments
• Increase productivity
• Establish systems for regular data collection and analysis for developing data-driven strategies
• Support agent training and development

So where do you start?

As with any other venture, this can be a tough question to answer. But it’s even more challenging when you’re talking about quality assurance. Understanding how to develop a useful QA framework is essential for successful implementation. With several possible KPIs and QA methods, you need a robust strategy. There are three crucial elements to consider when building your framework:

1. The KPIs and metrics used to measure agent performances
2. How to monitor and analyze these metrics
3. How to create data-driven strategies that will improve customer interaction and the efficacy of service representatives

Let’s take a look at the first point.

With several metrics and KPIs available, you need to analyze your business requirements so you can determine and pinpoint which ones you’ll need to track and measure.

For instance: if you get a lot of calls on a daily basis, you may want to keep an eye on average handling times. Alternatively, you might want to look at first call resolution (FCR) to improve customer experience.

Now let’s look at the second point: monitoring these metrics.

There are several call center software tools you can use to collect and analyze data. These are great for continuous and real-time call monitoring and recording, with dashboards showing performance metrics. But there are other ways of assessing agent performance:

• Paid surveys
• Agent scorecards
• Mystery shoppers/customers

Finally, let’s get into developing and implementing data-driven strategies.

Consider the information you got from tools and services. What does it tell you about your operations? Where does it say you’ll need to drive improvements? For instance, if an employee’s call quality is dipping, you could provide personalized coaching sessions to boost agent engagement.

This step is dependent on solid data collection and analysis; so if you get the previous step right, this final piece will fall into place.

Remember, a good call center balances speed with effective service. When choosing or developing your QA framework and methods, focus on creating a well-rounded strategy that drives improvements in all areas.

Types of QA frameworks

There are different ways to approach creating QA frameworks. They boil down to three main types: operational, tactical, and strategic.

These frameworks represent different areas of focus. We highly recommend combining them to create a more rounded strategy for raising your benchmarks and boosting customer service quality. Businesses typically start with the operational framework and incorporate the tactical and strategic frameworks as their QA program grows.

Operational

An operational framework is the foundation of most QA programs. It deals with call center performance on a day-to-day level and spots common issues such as:

• Ineffective agents
• Whether or not monthly quotas are hit and daily KPIs are met

Under this structure, the focus is on measuring short-term metrics and regular evaluations. It’s often conducted by direct managers and is a cost-effective, easy method to assess and improve performance.

This is perfect for organizations that don’t have the resources for QA specialists who can carry out in-depth analysis. But because this framework focuses on making short-term improvements, it tends to only address the symptoms and not the root causes of the problems. For this, we need to take a tactical approach.

Tactical

A tactical framework looks at the root causes affecting employees and customers. It aims to improve the overall quality of service by finding underlying issues like:

• Problems with workflows and processes within the organization
• Skill and knowledge gaps, as well as other reasons for low performance
• Causes for high employee turnover

Instead of dealing with individuals, it monitors and improves teams and workflows over more extended periods of time. That is to say, tactical schemas measure similar metrics but use monthly and yearly data analysis to make and observe changes.

Investing in longer-term strategies means you can focus on ensuring growth and scalability for call centers, through activities such as agent training. It takes longer to get results through a tactical framework, but it ultimately helps build sturdier and more resilient customer service teams and departments.

These first two frameworks concentrate on improving agent performances and workflows over the short or mid-term. But what if you want to cultivate long-term strategies to address organization-wide issues and address larger business goals?

For this, we need a strategic focus.

Strategic

A strategic framework focuses on long-term, organization-wide goals. It ensures that your contact center team aligns with your company’s objectives and increases customer retention by improving KPIs like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). These give you a sense of the impact your customer service activities have on sales—meaning targeting them can drive customer loyalty.

Unlike the previously discussed QA frameworks, this one concentrates on addressing company culture, standards, and goals in the following ways:

• Understanding business goals and how customers fit in with them
• Looking at long-term strategies to improve customer loyalty and brand reputation
• Encouraging positive working cultures
• Inviting and listening to agent feedback
• Finding ways to reward high-performing employees and teams

A strategic framework is a pinnacle of developing a solid QA process, in that it builds on organizational and tactical strategies. So you might want to master the other two approaches before getting into this one.

Involve agents in the development of the QA program

Agents are the frontliners of your call center. They interact with customers daily, which means their perspectives on improving customer satisfaction, experiences, and customer service quality are valuable. Additionally, they can highlight workflow issues to improve conditions for remote workforces, enhance contact center management, and promote workforce engagement.

By making them stakeholders of your QA program, you gain helpful insights into developing better quality assurance call center processes, give agents a key role in workforce optimization, and foster a collaborative working environment. It gets them on board with the program, making it easier for them to buy into new QA processes.

Regularly reach out and listen to agent feedback. Involve them in planning, developing, and implementing aspects of your QA program. You can make it a regular part of your QA process, and following up on their feedback could be the difference between success and failure.

Make it a point to mention how agents can benefit from your QA program during the onboarding stages to ensure they integrate seamlessly into the organization.

Share team knowledge and experiences

The QA process works best when agents collaborate and their managers to find opportunities to enhance the call center quality program.

For instance, call center teams might analyze call recordings to find patterns, such as frequent customer issues or concerns. It could be done manually or through tools like speech analytics and QA software.

By sharing this information as well as other knowledge and experiences with other teams, they can resolve issues quickly and ensure each agent has the resources and skill sets to address customer concerns. It increases FCRs (first call resolutions) and reduces average handle time, improves customer satisfaction, and revenue.

This can be essential to remote workforce management, for which constant communication and shared information makes up for the distance.

Ensure consistent quality monitoring

One of the core tenets of quality assurance is consistent monitoring and evaluation. Regularly assessing the status of individual, team, and overall organizational performance lets everyone know:

• How the company is doing
• Where to focus strategies so operations can be improved
• What the root causes of issues are

Holding calibration sessions can help get everyone on the same page and ensure individual agents align with business goals and standards. For these sessions to be useful, you must evaluate as many interactions as possible, as agent performance can vary day-to-day. There are different ways to do this:

• Random sample monitoring
• Targeted monitoring of high-value clients or unhappy customers
• Continuous automated monitoring of metrics, such as sentiment analysis
• Agent self-assessment using scorecards

By using multiple evaluation methods, you improve your QA scores and evaluations. It lets you provide feedback and constructive criticism to service reps. All this improves their productivity and overall satisfaction.

That being said, you must remember that quality monitoring is a collaborative process—this means you also need to listen to agents during the feedback sessions. QA scores and evaluations only tell half the story. If agents disagree with a score, hear them out and see whether what they have to say can improve your quality program.

Personalize agent training programs using metrics

Every agent has unique strengths and weaknesses. By measuring key metrics like FCR or average handling time and looking at CSATs, you can identify where agents excel and where they’re struggling. It allows you to create personalized training plans to boost individual agent skill sets and performances.

Additionally, it ensures you’re not wasting time teaching employees techniques and methods they’ve already mastered. This supports their development better, gives them a sense of achievement, and is more likely to drive improvements in their workplace practices.

Use gamification to encourage quality improvements

Agent engagement and loyalty are important to call centers—they go hand in hand. When you increase agent engagement, your teams are likely to feel more fulfilled. This reduces employee turnover and provides you with agents who stay with you for a long time, and who can help drive quality improvements in the long run.

One way to get your reps to feel immersed in company goals is gamification. It’s an approach that regularly recognizes and rewards employees for their performance. It doesn’t even have to be all that complicated. For instance, you could share QA scores and evaluation data using a leaderboard. It encourages accountability and challenges agents to take the top spot.

In the table below are some common company goals and the gamification techniques you can use.

Include omnichannel experiences

When creating your QA program, you must focus on boosting your customers’ experiences. Every training program and metric must be geared towards providing enhanced customer experiences.

With customers using social media to reach out to support teams, it's necessary to understand how this affects your QA.

For instance: public transport users often tweet customer service reps to resolve ticket problems. Ensure your quality assurances takes your omnichannel approach into account when identifying customer issues and strategies for improvement.

Look for quality assurance specialists

Call center managers and team leaders already have a lot on their plate, with daily workflow operations taking up most of their valuable time. Asking them to add performance management and a comprehensive QA program can make things even more difficult for them to excel at their core functions.

That’s why hiring a QA specialist as soon as you can is recommended. These professionals can alleviate workloads and introduce best practices to get the best out of your team. QA specialists are experts in identifying operational improvements by monitoring calls, leading coaching sessions, and personalizing training sessions.

It’s a long-term strategy to drive your quality of service. You can offset the cost of hiring them through agent efficiency improvements, increased customer and employee retention, and fewer wasted resources.

Create a QA schedule and stick to it

Consistency is essential to ensure quality in your contact center’s operations. Building a QA schedule lets you define when your evaluations, calibration sessions, and training programs happen. It makes it easier for you to continuously improve, establish regular benchmarks, and make timely decisions.

For instance, scheduling agent training ahead of new product announcements or launches prepares them for customer concerns and queries, driving FCRs and customer satisfaction.

The quality assurance process ensures smooth call center management and consistently high quality of service. It helps organizations assess and improve employee performance and workflow processes, as well as reduces waste of resources.

To develop and implement a solid QA program, you need to choose and build call center QA frameworks that help create a rounded strategy for raising benchmarks and boosting the efficiency of the customer service quality assurance protocols themselves.

Look to both your customers and your agents for valuable insights when doing this. They’re the ones involved in the regular interactions throughout your call center. They have hands-on perspectives on the workflow and customer issues that potentially hinder your success. Encouraging regular feedback and a collaborative atmosphere makes highlighting areas of improvement, especially when working with remote workforces, painless.

Finally, create a QA schedule to conduct consistent evaluations that drive quality improvements. Consider the tools you have at your disposal, and invest in call center software to track KPIs and metrics to ensure you’re hitting your business goals.

Want a contact center solution with analytics capabilities that can support your QA program? Check out 8x8!