Call center evaluation forms are an essential tool for monitoring call center quality and agent performance. The forms, which are also known as QA evaluation forms and are pre-made templates that QA analysts fill out to score agents on calls and ultimately evaluate performance, can identify areas for improvement, provide feedback to agents, and improve customer satisfaction and business success.
These forms score the call on a wide variety of moments throughout the conversation—from call openers and closers, to soft skills around empathy and professionalism, to compliance and process adherence.
These forms are a critical piece of the quality management process for call centers. They’re key to driving great agent performance and, in turn, a world-class customer experience.
However, much of the time, the potential of these forms is locked in time-consuming, random manual processes.
Below, we illuminate the challenges of call evaluation forms and share best practices for creating and using these forms so you can streamline your QA workflow and boost your agents’—and, ultimately, the entire call center’s—performance.
When done right, call center evaluation forms have the potential to transform your call center’s performance. How?
Results of call evaluation forms can:
Despite the potential impact of agent evaluation forms, they’re often not done properly. Why?
Call centers typically only monitor 2% of calls because the process is tedious, manual—with agents physically listening to calls—and chaotic. In most cases, evaluations take 1.5x to 2x the length of the call.
That means QA agents are filling out evaluation forms based on tiny, random work samples, resulting in incomplete and/or inaccurate insights and conclusions.
On top of that, the process is also spread across a ton of tools and services, and QA analysts are forced to juggle those various services. That translates into not enough evaluations being completed per agent.
Further, it’s challenging to monitor the impact of evaluations and know if the evaluations and coaching programs built around them are driving change across agent performance.
When designing a call center evaluation form, it's important to include key elements that are relevant to your call center’s specific needs. These elements may include call scoring, active-listening skills, problem-solving abilities, and upselling. Additionally, using a template can help ensure that you include all necessary elements and standardize the form across your contact center.
Here are some tips for designing an effective call evaluation form.
Designing and using a flexible template allows you to ensure a consistent QA approach and saves your QA analysts time and headaches. It also allows you to customize your form for your specific business needs.
You want to make sure that your evaluation form provides useful and relevant feedback for your agents and managers. Observe.AI’s no-code Evaluation Form Builder lets you create new evaluation forms quickly, align them to specific interaction types (e.g., voice calls or chat), and customize questions and scoring logic to fit your business parameters.
Meanwhile, the Form Testing feature lets you simulate the evaluation experience prior to launch so that you can ensure the right form, scoring, and grading structure are being implemented. This process also surfaces any errors or gaps before the evaluation forms go live.
Using an actual call recording to validate results is critical—and significantly easier when forms and the QA process is automated. Conversation intelligence software ensures that 100% of calls are monitored and analyzed, meaning evaluations are based on actual data and can be validated quickly and easily with real transcripts.
Call calibration sessions are a key part of the process to ensure accuracy. We always recommend working with a vendor who allows you to refine the machine and calibrate its AI, like Observe.AI—not a black box software.
Include both objective and subjective questions and avoid leading or biased questions that may skew results. Reporting and analytics will allow contact center leaders to get a holistic view of how the contact center is operating, as well as the individual agent over time.
It’s also important to get agent feedback on evaluation forms and process. By delivering feedback directly to agents and allowing them to either acknowledge or dispute their scores, you can continue to refine your process and build trust with agents by opening up a critical line of communication.
Identify the most important KPIs (like customer sentiment, AHT, Dead Air, etc…), for your agents and call center, and then map your evaluation forms to the behaviors that achieve those desired outcomes.
It’s easy to create unwieldy evaluation cards to monitor every little item, but it’s important to remember that overarching goal is to promote the types of agent behavior that will ultimately drive positive business results.
To use call center evaluation forms effectively, it's important to track metrics like call volume, call duration, and customer satisfaction, and to identify areas for improvement. Here are some tips for using evaluation forms to improve call center performance:
Evaluation forms are a key tool to help managers monitor agent performance and track progress over time.
Results of call monitoring forms can:
Getting timely feedback is critical to improving the contact center agent’s performance. But agents often don’t get 100% of QA feedback, or they receive it late—during a coaching session. On top of that, sometimes the QA feedback is inaccurate or doesn’t share the whole picture because it’s based on incomplete information and a random, minuscule sample of calls.
To that end, call centers need to implement a feedback loop: a two-way process that involves both the agents and supervisors being offered a fair chance to share feedback and drive improvements in the quality monitoring process.
This is one of the reasons Observe.AI offers users the option to share QA results directly with the agent. The agent can then acknowledge receipt of the report and related feedback, as well as raise disputes when they don't agree with a certain evaluation or a score. This helps calibrate between agents and managers while building more trust among agents, their evaluators, and their supervisor.
When agents don’t execute calls consistently or handle objections well, it results in missed opportunities across the board.
Agent evaluation forms can be used to identify strengths and areas for improvement in agent performance. And automation and AI can boost this process. For example, Observe.AI’s Score Breakdown summarizes agent performance on any evaluation, while Section-level Scores lets managers view agent performance scores across each section of the evaluation form without having to do manual calculations. That means managers can easily see which sections agents are having trouble with and target coaching to those areas.
Results of the call evaluation form can also help agents recognize and reward top-performing agents, including which behaviors lead to optimal performance, to encourage continued success.
Unfortunately, most of the time evaluation forms are hampered by tedious, manual processes; poor-quality, incomplete data; and no ability to customize the forms or update results.
This is where Auto QA and conversation intelligence come in. Auto QA uses AI to review 100% of agent-customer interactions quickly and accurately, and provide contextual and actionable feedback to improve agent performance.
By enabling you to review more calls and evaluate more agents in less time—all with a streamlined evaluation and feedback process—Observe.AI better equips your QA teams to deliver more efficient and rich call audits, which ultimately boosts both EX and CX.
Meanwhile, Observe’s Real-Time AI can augment post-call QA and coaching workflows by letting AI assist agents on live calls with scripts, prompts, call notes, and live supervisor monitoring. You can create custom, real-time experiences that ensure script adherence, improve agent skills, and make them more productive while handling customer calls, so agents hit every box on the evaluation form.
Supervisors can monitor live call trends, access live transcripts, and view real-time data insights.
As a result, everything from sales and compliance to conversion rates and retention are improved—as well as those evaluation scores.
Ultimately, call center evaluation forms are a critical tool for monitoring call center quality and agent performance. By creating and using evaluation forms effectively, call centers can improve performance and customer satisfaction. Just remember to include key elements in your evaluation forms, use them consistently and regularly, and take action based on the results. By following these best practices, call centers can achieve success and improve their bottom line.
With Conversation Intelligence, you can automatically analyze 100% of customer conversations to get valuable insights about agent behavior and customer requests.
Observe.AI makes evaluation scorecards easy with our no-code form builder and QA interface. With Auto QA, you can leverage automation to make scoring calls a breeze, driving better agent behavior with Real-Time AI.
See conversation intelligence in action. Schedule a demo.
