Quality Monitoring top tips for contact centres

Call quality monitoring (QM) has become common practice in almost all UK contact centres, with agents’ calls being monitored and evaluated by their supervisors or quality specialists. But is your contact centre receiving real value from your quality monitoring programme?

With this blog post we aim to offer a few tips on how to do get the most out of your quality monitoring efforts and deliver results.

Quality monitoring processes and consistency:

Big problems can arise when it comes to quality monitoring consistency. How do you know your supervisors are scoring calls correctly and in a consistent manner across the board?

Without a consistent approach your data can get skewed leading to wrong performance indicators. Moreover, agents can become incredibly demoralised if they feel they are not being scored equally and fairly. That’s where calibration comes in.

Auditing and calibrating allows contact centres to find some sort of consistency within the process. For example, the Quality Assurance team can re-evaluate calls and compare their results with the original evaluation. If both evaluations are within 5-10% difference of each other, they are to be considered acceptable. If however, the evaluations are significantly different, it is clearly necessary to establish a common benchmark.
For more information on Calibration, you can download ‘An Instrumental Guide on Calibration’.

Develop and maintain evaluation forms

Evaluation forms are at the heart of a good quality monitoring programme and when compiling them, you need to ask yourself:

• Am I asking the right questions?
• Am I getting the required results? i.e. output which leads to a continuous coaching and development plan for my team
• Does the scoring mechanism allow agents to provide an ‘outstanding’ or ‘WoW factor’ service not just an ‘average’ or ‘satisfactory’ service?

Evaluation Dispute Process
Give agents the opportunity to dispute their evaluation if there is any aspect they are unhappy with or feel does not reflect their work. The dispute process is extremely important in giving the agent the opportunity to have their evaluation revised by another person whilst further empowering them to take ownership of their own quality of work. Being able to dispute an evaluation promotes a fair and caring environment, where agents are encouraged to take ownership and consequently become more engaged with their work.

Agent Synergy Sessions

Synergy sessions involve groups of agents, team managers, CSMs and trainers listening to calls together to discuss call-handling techniques and evaluate the quality of the call. These sessions help reinforce quality standards and allow new and experienced agents to share experiences, best practice, advice and ideas. They also provide a natural way to cross-skill agents from different departments. Studies have shown that agents attending regular synergy sessions achieve anywhere from 5% to 20% higher quality scores than the overall contact centre.

Recap

In order to create a successful quality monitoring programme contact centres must be able to:

• Capture agent calls for quality monitoring purposes.
• Evaluate and score these calls against call evaluation standards.
• Produce and analyse meaningful quality monitoring reports for the various levels of the business.
• Improve the service provided to customers by utilising learnings from Quality Monitoring reports

For more information on Quality monitoring, download our report on ‘How Contact Centres are using Quality Monitoring’.