Quality Monitoring Auditing and Calibrations [2019]

What is Quality Monitoring in the contact centre?

Call monitoring in the contact centre is the process of listening to live or previously recorded calls in order to:

• Audit the performance of agents
  improve the service provided
  develop sales or support strategies

Call monitoring allows managers and team leaders to identify problems as quickly as possible, maintain quality standards and improve agent and overall call centre performance. Call Quality Monitoring technology, is call centre software which allows you to go one step further when analysing agent calls. The software includes features and functionality such as automated workflows, customised forms and advanced reporting. The aim behind this technology is to better agent performance and customer service.

For more information on Call Quality Monitoring, check out our article on ‘What is Quality Monitoring’.

How do you quality monitor in the contact centre?

In order to monitor your call quality, you need to record your conversations first. Call recording software enables you to record telephone conversations and provides you with the ability to retrieve, playback, store and share these calls.

You can find more information on call recording in our article ‘What is Call Recording’

How can I improve my contact centre Quality Monitoring program?

There are a number of useful tips on how you can improve your quality monitoring processes in the contact centre, such as:

• Make sure you have the right software
• Define what constitutes a ‘quality customer interaction’ and what you are measuring
• Identify and put emphasis on the anomalies, both low and high performance
• Involve call centre agents, managers and stakeholders in developing scorecards and evaluation forms

However, in order for quality monitoring to work, there needs to be a level of auditing and calibration.

What is Call Monitoring assurance and calibration in the contact centre?

Auditing and calibrating are an important part of the Quality Monitoring process. In order to provide the objective level of evaluation required to accurately evaluate an agent’s call, contact centres rely on Quality Assurance teams to listen to calls and evaluate an agent’s performance, based on company guidelines, their experience and training.
However, no matter how good the quality guidelines and training provided, the uniqueness of individuals and their perception of a call will always produce conflicting evaluation results amongst a large group of Team Managers.
Auditing and calibrating allow contact centres to ensure a level of consistency within an inconsistent process and can be carried out in several ways without having to be complicated or time-consuming. For example, there are three main processes that can quickly clear up inconsistencies and conflicting procedures within call evaluation. These processes consist of:

• Calibration Audits
• Management Standardisation
• Synergy Sessions

Quality Monitoring Calibration Audits

A key step in the process of calibration involves the Quality Assurance team comparing their scoring criteria in order to evaluate if they assessing with the same metrics and to ensure they are not significantly different.
One way to do this is to get the Quality Team to score the exact same interactions and review these scores together in order to exchange ideas and reach an agreement on the final score.
It’s also a good idea to focus on different call types during each calibration session – whether inbound, outbound, sales, etc. – to cover all bases and remove any unnecessary confusion.
However, something to watch out for when carrying out these sessions is that some analysts may score the call that is being calibrated differently based on what they believe to be acceptable but then continue scoring normal calls which are not being assessed during the calibration session, in another way.
In order to overcome this, collect scores for 50+ calls by each analyst and check the likelihood percentage of them ticking a certain box.

For example:

No of Times an Analyst Ticked the Box
_______________________________ = Likelihood of Analyst ticking Box (%)
No of Contacts analysed x 100

Then, compare the percentage of one analyst against the team, for each element, and look for deviations. In the example above, provided by c wenger group, they are looking for deviations of plus or minus 10%.

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An Instrumental Guide on Calibration

Quality Monitoring Management Standardisation

Most advanced quality monitoring systems enable the calibration of a centre’s evaluation skills against a single call. Once all calibrations are complete a meeting is arranged to discuss the results.
All participants should be within a 5-10% tolerance of each other to be considered acceptable.
For quality compliance purposes, all calibration meetings and results should be documented in a calibration log.
Call calibration shouldn’t just happen once; each department should calibrate a minimum of two calls per month.

Quality Monitoring Synergy Sessions

Synergy Sessions are an informal calibration process involving groups of Agents, Supervisors/Team Leaders, Department Managers and other appropriate support staff listening to recordings together to discuss call-handling techniques and to evaluate the quality of the call.
As Brent Bischoff, QM Consultant and Training Expert comment: “Calibration allows you to reach a consensus on what defines good and bad call performance bringing a new level of clarity and accountability to your contact centre”.

What not to do in Quality Monitoring Calibration

A few things to keep in mind during the calibration process:

1. Don’t make assumptions based on small sample sizes. If an analyst has only examined ten calls during the week, do not make any quick assumptions based on deviations. Yet, if they have analysed 50 or more, that will more than likely give them a sufficient amount of data to examine.
2. Don’t forget to include advisors in the process. Involving one or two advisors in calibration sessions can be useful, as it also gives them a greater understanding of how to improve their quality scores and of what is expected from them.
3. Look out for technology that can help simplify the process. For example, when it comes to calibrating quality scores, speech analytics can also be used to provide greater accuracy when detecting keywords such as saying hello and using the customer’s name, etc.