Contact center agents bear the great responsibility of managing customer service issues on a steady basis. One of the best ways for contact center managers to ensure that agents are providing the best service possible is to monitor the quality of their interactions with customers, yet some contact centers do not take a thorough approach for determining best practices. So how should managers monitor for effectiveness?
In order to really understand agent-customer interactions, it’s important to closely monitor all the calls recorded, not just a random sample. Analyzing just a few randomly selected calls will not provide substantial data or provide an in-depth view of agents’ performance across customer service calls. By using a speech analytics system that records all calls and monitors call quality in real-time, managers may gain a comprehensive view of these calls to better train agents and devise strategies for better customer service.
Analyzing average call handling time is certainly important for offering efficient customer service in a timely manner. However, many contact centers place too much emphasis on this metric, believing a quick call resolution is a priority as it allows agents to move faster to the next customer in the queue. While aiming to offer efficient service, agents should never undermine call quality and take the proper time to resolve an issue in order to prevent a customer from having to call back or reach out to the company on yet another channel. For this reason, it’s once again important to analyze all calls to properly analyze the quality of individual agents’ interactions with customers—it may be that agents with longer average handling times may be making a good effort to resolve an issue, resulting in critical brand loyalty and customer retention.
Asking agents to give their feedback regarding practices that work well for them, communicating concerns they may have about customer service calls, or even offering suggestions for writing customer service call scripts can also help contact center managers gain a broad view of how calls can be better monitored for quality. In addition, when preparing evaluations of agents during the monitoring process, explain expectations to agents beforehand so that they know what kind of behavior they should be striving for. Is it important to wrap up a call in under five minutes? Should the agent always verbalize to a customer that there will be a follow-up call once a case is closed? Keeping agents informed will allow them to perform at their best with a clear focus on your company’s customer service priorities.While there are many ways to monitor call quality, it’s always important to view the contact center as a team of agents and managers who can deliver excellent customer service when working together. Rather than taking a random approach to analyzing calls, shifting the focus to monitoring globally, involving agents in the process, and addressing the needs of the customer are all key to stellar customer service and continued loyalty. Learn more about contact center solutions for efficient call quality monitoring at www.vocalcom.com.
