Importance of quality assurance in a call center
For a business to be successful, they need to look closely at every aspect that can affect their overall performance. Objectives and goals, processes, metrics, and KPIs should be met for them to progress.
A good business, above all, takes care of their customers well through improving their products, services, and level of interaction with them. Maintaining great quality in customer service is key to having new customers and retaining existing ones.
Quality assurance in a call center
In a call center setting, quality assurance ensures that every interaction aligns with the business goals and vision. Further, its aim is to improve their team’s service level by identifying customer concerns, improving a product or service, and making their communication process easier.
Why quality assurance is needed
Quality assurance is important in ensuring and maintaining the quality of a call center team.
Preventing mistakes in operation. This helps minimize errors in entering customer data, multiple transfers and escalations, and having bad reviews from customers. This also increases the efficiency of a team and reduce costs from constantly scaling agents.
Monitoring of processes. Call centers receive thousands of calls in a day, depending on their client accounts. Therefore, QA teams make sure that employees follow the processes and meet quotas for their work.
Optimization. QA helps clients to optimize customer service and experience. So, they can decide to streamline their processes more, offer new communication channels to their customers, and re-train and upskill their staff for a new product.
Compliance and legalities. As proof, call centers record each call regardless if a transaction is completed or not. These recordings are also part of their compliance to local and international certifications such as ISO.
QA monitoring procedures
A quality assurance specialist monitors and verifies the call quality for each account. With the team leader and the operations manager, they assess two categories of data to have a better look at the performance of each team:
Customer service metrics
Customer service metrics and KPIs, meanwhile, are the basic standards of a team. These metrics indicate the duration, issues resolved, queueing time, and total workload required in a call over the total number of calls taken in a specific period.
QA assessment
This, meanwhile, is a scorecard agreed upon by the manager and QA specialist rating the quality of each call. They usually test this on a sample interaction to assess the resolution and agent’s professionalism.
Best practices in improving call center quality
Quality assurance helps prevent bad customer experience and improve interactions. Here are some of the best practices in improving the quality of a customer service team:
- Assign a QA team. Above all, create a team tasked to formulate QA guidelines and monitor the performance of the staff.
- Have an overview of QA guidelines. Then, you should be transparent to your staff by posting an overview of the guidelines. This should include the grading standards according to their performance and training.
- Evaluate current applicants. Take part in screening and evaluating call center applicants. So, you can make sure that they have essential customer service skills for their work.
- Utilize online tools. Make use of online tools such as call center software, CRM, and screen monitoring tools in monitoring. These will be helpful especially when an immediate concern from the agent rises.
- Ensure that the team follows compliance guidelines. Lastly, several countries and institutions require compliance guidelines when interacting with customers. These include:
- Do Not Call lists
- Consent to call recording
- PCI DSS
Finally, the business should impose strict monitoring measures to avoid further complications in the operation.
