Quality Monitoring

An essential aspect of customer service, quality monitoring helps companies ensure that their customer interactions meet the highest standards. 

Below, we explore the significance of quality monitoring, discuss key metrics and best practices, and delve into the benefits it brings to the contact center ecosystem.

What is quality monitoring?

First things first: What is quality monitoring? Quality monitoring is the process of recording and reviewing interactions between agents and customers to evaluate conversations, achieve quality assurance, and improve agent performance. 

The quality of calls is measured with KPI metrics like average handle time, first call resolution (FCR), and many others.

Quality monitoring can be done in 3 ways:

1. Through a manual quality assurance process;
2. With specialized software, combining multiple tools;
3. With an entirely automated process through contact center AI.

Why is quality important when monitoring in call centers?

Quality monitoring is a critical piece of ensuring optimal customer service. An efficient and effective QM process can yield:

1. Enhanced agent performance and high-performing workforces: Quality monitoring provides insights into agent performance and identifies opportunities for improvement. By using scorecards and call quality monitoring, supervisors can evaluate agent soft skills and adherence to quality standards. Regular calibration sessions help align agent evaluations and ensure consistency in evaluations across the contact center. Ultimately, quality monitoring helps coaches effectively target coaching to produce a high-performing workforce overall.
2. Personalized agent coaching: Accurately monitoring interactions results in customized quality tips tailored to every agent’s strengths and weaknesses. This results in concentrated efforts instead of generalized, low-input coaching attempts.
3. Reduced agent turnover: When agents have clear insight into their performance, expectation and goal setting becomes more transparent. This is easily achieved using a quality monitoring scorecard. QM reports promote transparency across departments and reduce agent turnover due to differences.
4. Reduced risk: Quality monitoring unearths compliance issues, loopholes in workflows, and low process adherence—as well as proactively mitigates any legal risks. This saves an organization from possible lawsuits and saves unwarranted and expensive legal fees.
5. Optimized workflows: Monitoring using call recording and speech analytics enables companies to identify areas where workflows can be optimized. By analyzing random calls and using workforce management tools, companies can identify bottlenecks and streamline processes for improved efficiency.‍
6. Enhanced customer satisfaction: Since quality monitoring significantly improves an agent’s performance by providing them with personalized coaching notes, these sessions in real time automatically translate into increased customer satisfaction.

Best practices to build an excellent quality monitoring program

There are a few tried-and-true steps to build an excellent QM program. These include:

Build a team of experts

Assemble a team of quality analysts and coaches specialized in training agents on various soft skills, compliance, process adherence, and more.

Define key metrics

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess customer interactions. Metrics like average handle time (AHT), first-time resolution, and customer satisfaction are essential for evaluating agent performance and identifying areas of improvement.

Design scorecards

Based on KPI metrics like FCR, AHT, call arrival rate, and others that measure an agent’s ability to listen and resolve issues, detailed scorecards are a data-driven method to evaluate progress over a longer duration.

Different processes require performance metrics. An agent handling inbound interactions will be evaluated differently from one handling outbound interactions. So, adding detailed columns will segregate these calls and focus the quality monitoring to show the right results.

Leverage automation and tech integrations

Technology that leverages automation and AI can turbocharge quality monitoring processes. For example, Observe.AI’s Auto QA automatically records and analyzes 100% of customer interactions, then shows AI-powered insights and analysis based on specific moments throughout the interaction so supervisors and agents can boost performance and drive faster results. And since the automation rules can be fully customized to your specific criteria, it’s not a rigid black-box system that can’t be updated. Your contact center QA and operations teams can test, fine tune, and calibrate the automation technology to achieve maximum impact.

Conduct regular calibration sessions

Calibration sessions, in which supervisors and quality management teams meet and review reports together, help ensure consistent evaluation across the contact center. By aligning evaluator interpretations and scoring, companies can maintain uniformity in quality monitoring.

Train and coach agents effectively

Invest in comprehensive training programs to equip agents with the necessary skills and knowledge to deliver excellent customer service. Ongoing coaching and feedback based on quality monitoring data can further enhance agent performance. Additionally, any excellent and positive customer interactions discovered during quality monitoring should be distributed as learning resources to all agents.

Training and coaching are additional areas where a solution like Observe.AI can really shine. Thanks to the ability to monitor 100% of calls and produce deep AI-driven insights into each conversation and agent’s performance, Observe.AI empowers QM teams to prioritize and pick the right conversations for review, while supervisors and agents can focus on parts of each conversation that need attention or have the highest potential to drive change.

At the end of the day, quality monitoring is a crucial part of the contact center ecosystem, directly impacting the customer experience. By implementing a robust quality program, companies can continuously evaluate customer interactions, improve agent performance, optimize workflows, and mitigate risks. And by adhering to best practices and leveraging the power of quality monitoring data, businesses can drive success in today's competitive market, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and business growth.