All successful contact centers are known to prioritize 2 things, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. This means providing the best customer service at the lowest operating costs possible. That’s where a quality assurance department comes in. A well-structured QA process can help remove inconsistencies, improve agent performance, and increase customer trust. A call center quality assurance framework is non-negotiable to maintain accuracy and security within interactions. Let’s start with why that is the case.
The Importance of Quality Assurance in Call Centers
A call center is primarily centered around people and their conversations. This means that there is a lot of room for unpredictability and for things to go wrong. Here’s how a quality assurance process stops that from happening.
Ensures Consistency Across Customer Interactions
Quality Assurance (QA) systems define standard procedures within a contact center. This includes procedures for agent interaction, feedback loops, and even departmental collaborations. Think of it as the accountability enforcer within the contact center. This ensures that there is a degree of consistency in all customer interactions. With the do’s and don’t clearly defined, you lower the risk of miscommunication or incorrect information making its way to the customer. QA ensures service quality is prioritized at all times, which in turn provides the confidence necessary to scale operations.
Enhances Customer Satisfaction
QA analysts can identify and correct errors in real-time. They accomplish this by monitoring key customer-centric metrics like First Call Resolution (FCR) rates, Average Handle Time (AHT), and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT). By analyzing these metrics, analysts can derive key insights about customer experience and how to improve it.
Better Agent Performance
Quality assurance processes help enforce accountability but they can also can provide constructive feedback to your customer service agents. As a manager, you can use this QA feedback to train novice agents in the most essential skills. For experienced agents, feedback can highlight areas for improvement and gaps in their training. From here, coaching and development programs can be created to improve customer service quality across the board.
Maintains Compliance with Industry Standards
Compliance is often an operational requirement in certain industries and countries. In such cases, data security, confidentiality, and regulatory adherence (PCI-DSS or HIPAA) are non-negotiables. Any infraction here opens the company up to fines and legal repercussions. Quality assurance ensures that agents follow the required protocols so you can securely continue operations.
Provides Actionable Insights for Continuous Improvement
QA analysts can also identify process inefficiencies and customer pain points confidently. They constantly study metrics, listen to call recordings, and compile valuable insights. Such deep insight into customer behavior, allows the manager to optimize workflows and improve the level of service provided by their agents.
Aligns Service with Business Goals
From a long-term perspective, QA contributes to the bottom line as well. It’s the core reason for its existence. By keeping the values and goals of the organization front and center, QA ensures exceptional service with minimal churn and improved customer loyalty. This can bridge the gap between frontline operations and strategic business initiatives. If the QA process keeps the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) at a healthy level, the business can grow confidently. This is primarily because you understand your bandwidth, and the resources required to deliver a good customer experience.
The importance of quality assurance can not be overstated. As you will see in the next section, QA metrics have a strong overlap with contact center metrics in general. This re-emphasizes that quality assurance isn’t a subset of contact center operations but it is a key part of contact center performance as a whole.
Key Metrics and KPIs for QA Success
Below is our list of quality assurance metrics, which can help you monitor and improve quality assurance practices in your contact center.
First Call Resolution (FCR)
Both customers and agents love straightforward resolutions. Having a quick resolution reduces the friction between customers and agents. That’s why QA must track first-call resolution (FCR) rates. A high FCR rate means that agents have all the right resources to close support tickets on the very first customer call. This improves customer satisfaction and overall operational efficiency, by enabling agents to handle more customers. That being said, it’s a surface-level metric, and you need to look at other metrics to form a more holistic picture of customer experience.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
The average time spent on handling customers also gives an insight into the operational efficiency of a contact center. This is AHT or the Average Handle Time. This time frame includes both the time spent on customer interaction and any post-call work that the agent performs. A lower AHT can suggest that the agent is efficient in their job, but speed must not come at the cost of quality. That’s where our next metric comes in to clear the air.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score is the most transparent, short-term metric to gauge the quality of service provided. Typically post-call surveys are used to collect these customer satisfaction levels. It comes in the form of a score or rating. This can help measure the effectiveness of agent performance on the individual level and the process level. Combining FCR and AHT rates with customer satisfaction levels gives a more holistic picture of customer service quality.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score measures long-term customer loyalty. While CSAT is collected at the end of a call, NPS is usually collected periodically through email or in-app interactions. If you are a contact center, you likely have access to this data. If you work exclusively with calls, your clients can provide this to you. A high NPS along with a high CSAT means that you are providing high levels of customer service both in the long and short term.
Quality Monitoring Scorecards
Using the metrics above, you can create quality monitoring scorecards for your agents to rate them on communication, compliance, and problem resolution. The purpose of collecting this data is to turn it into actionable items for your agents. These scorecards can be a great medium for you to offer constructive feedback to your agents and ensure high service quality across the board.
Predictive Analytics
Lastly, we have predictive analytics. Several tools on the market help you predict call trends and consumer behaviors using historical data. These can help you anticipate future requirements and fine-tune your processes to meet these requirements. These are good to have, and not necessary for small-scale operations.
To understand these metrics and their impact on contact center performance, check out our post-Call Center Performance Metrics and KPIs for Managers and Clients
Actionable Steps to Build a High-Impact QA Department
Now let’s go over the specifics of building a high-impact quality assurance department at your contact center. With these steps, you’ll know how to set expectations for your team and how to run a successful QA department.
1. Establish Clear Objectives
- Align QA with Business Goals: Start by identifying what business goals your QA department supports. The reason behind quality assurance is to improve customer satisfaction scores and increase operational efficiency. Improving regulatory compliance is also under the QA’s purview. With these goals at the core of your operations, you can then begin working on the micro aspects.
- Set Measurable Targets: To boost CSAT scores, you need to set measurable KPIs for your agents. This could mean focusing on metrics like First Call Resolution and Average Handle Time. The targets set for your agents must be realistic and actionable. Clearly define what a successful interaction looks like.
- Regularly Reevaluate Goals: Conduct periodic quality assurance audits to align your department with the goals of the business. Remember, contact center quality assurance is a dynamic process that changes with the business goals and customer demands. You must be agile and adapt as required.
2. Design a Robust QA Process
- Map Out the Workflow: When setting up a QA department, start by creating clear workflows for call monitoring, feedback, and agent performance reports. Assign roles for monitoring and feedback delivery within your department. Empower the people in these roles with the right tools. If these processes are already in place, you need to audit each step of this process to make sure that it’s efficient. There are several tools available for automated reporting and real-time agent feedback. A dependable tool can give feedback to agents as soon as it is needed without waiting for lengthy evaluations.
- Assign Dedicated QA Roles: Build a team of QA avengers around yourself. This includes QA analysts, team leads, and calibration managers to ensure that the process is properly managed and always fulfills its business goals. Depending on the scale, you may need people with multiple skill sets who handle QA along with other responsibilities. The main goal is to cover the breadth of roles at the start and scale up as needed.
3. Build a Knowledge Base and SOPs
- Create a Centralized Knowledge Base: Imagine an encyclopedia that contains all the relevant information that a customer could need along with FAQs and SOPs(Standard Operating Procedures) for your agents. Better yet, it comes will a search function as powerful as Google. That’s what a knowledge base is. Several tools on the market can help you get started with one. If you don’t have a centralized knowledge base, building one out should be one of your top priorities.
- Collaborate with Leadership and Training Teams: When building out the knowledge base, make sure that you work with leadership and other stakeholders. Have them contribute to specific aspects of your knowledge base. Alongside the knowledge base, integrate the SOPs into agent onboarding and continuous learning programs.
- Keep the Knowledge Base Updated: A knowledge base should also be updated periodically. As you create new policies and collect customer feedback, make sure that your agents are aware of these updates. Assign a team or person to oversee, manage and implement these new updates.
4. Implement Calibration Sessions
- Schedule Regular Calibration Meetings: Calibration meetings are sessions between QA analysts, management and team leads to ensure evaluation criteria are applied consistently across the board. Different stakeholders can share key trends, common complaints, and quality standards under their purview.
- Standardize Scoring and Feedback: Scoring agents and the feedback given should be a standardized practice. Along with real-time feedback, there should be monthly and quarterly sessions that help agents understand what job success looks like. With scoring and feedback clear, agents know what they need to work on.
- Identify Coaching Opportunities: Calibration sessions are not a one-way street. When you speak to agents, you can hear their issues and spot opportunities for agent development. That way you can create coaching sessions and training modules to close any knowledge or skill gaps. Coaching opportunities can be used to specifically target empathy, technical knowledge, and problem-solving skills.
Tools to Enhance QA Performance
By now, we have established that quality assurance is a major part of contact centers. So let’s see what tools you can use to make your call center operations more efficient.
Essential Low-Cost Solutions
CallMiner: CallMiner is a cost-effective solution that offers basic call monitoring and speech analytics. It gives real-time call data that can help you analyze customer interactions, identify trends, and improve agent performance.
Zoho Desk: This is a user-friendly tool that lets you create customer support tickets that come with QA tracking inbuilt. Zoho can also be used for multichannel communication and performance reports. It’s a multi-functional tool for small contact centers that want to track agent interactions and customer feedback.
Enterprise-Level Tools for Established Centers
Verint: A specialized tool for workforce optimization and call quality monitoring. Verint provides you with detailed insights into agent performance, compliance, and customer interactions. It’s the perfect tool for large organizations with complex QA needs.
NICE inContact: This advanced platform gives AI-driven insights and real-time analytics. It can predict customer needs and provide agent improvement tips through complex data analytics.
Balto: Balto is an AI-driven tool offering real-time live call coaching. It provides immediate guidance to agents, helping them address customer issues swiftly. This improves overall call quality.
Phonely.ai: A Voice-AI tool that answers phone calls and uses AI agents to address customer queries. It also offers self-help options and intelligent call routing to reduce customer churn and improve FCR rates.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Quality assurance is essential for customer success. However, with other priorities, QA sometimes does not get the attention it deserves. Below are some common challenges you may face while establishing and maintaining your QA department and its processes.
Challenges for New Centers
- Securing Leadership Buy-In: One of the first challenges is convincing leadership about the importance of a structured QA process and its impact on agent performance and customer satisfaction. Without leadership support and relevant funding, improving QA processes can be difficult.
- Setting Up QA with Limited Resources: Most new centers operate on shoestring budgets, which makes it difficult to acquire the best tools and the right talent. Establishing an effective QA department can become difficult with limited resources.
Overcoming Challenges at a New Center
- Start Small: Begin with manageable KPIs like FCR, AHT, and CSAT are always a good starting point for contact center quality assurance. Best practices to improve these numbers should be your priority. Basic tools like CallMiner and ZohoDesk are more than capable of monitoring these metrics and providing relevant feedback to your agents. With time, you can scale your operations as required.
- Build a Business Case: To get leadership buy-in and possibly mitigate resource challenges, build a business case for quality assurance. Make leadership understand how QA can help improve customer retention, reduce churn, and improve overall efficiency. Highlight how a knowledge base built using collaboration can be an invaluable and evolving resource for the company.
Challenges for Established Centers
- Agent Resistance to Feedback: In larger contact centers, incumbent agents may become resistant to QA feedback. This is especially the case when they feel that the process is overly critical or the feedback isn’t constructive. It can often lead to stagnation and lowered agent performance.
- Handling Data Overload: Large contact centers deal with large amounts of data. This can get unmanageable very quickly. Without the right tools and proper investment, analyzing this data and extracting insights can become challenging and inefficient.
How to Overcome Challenges at an Established Center
- Foster a Positive Feedback Culture: Focus on solution-oriented feedback rather than simple criticism. Use tools for real-time coaching during live calls. This is to make the agents feel supported rather than judged. Calibration sessions can also ensure that the feedback that the feedback offered is fair and consistent across all agents.
- Automate Reporting and Use AI: Using tools like NICE inContact and Verint can help automate data analysis and reporting. Using AI agents from Phonely can also streamline operations by controlling the customer journey, thereby reducing the reliance on data for every single call.
Conclusion
A contact center can not flourish without a quality assurance department in its place. It’s foundational to delivering exceptional customer service and improving operational efficiency. The key to building a successful QA department is aligning yourself with the organization’s business goals. These goals often include greater customer satisfaction and better agent performance. Always set clear objectives and get the right tools to extract metrics from everyday processes. Make sure you have a dependable feedback loop in place, so nothing gets lost in translation. Use knowledge bases and calibration sessions to improve the quality of resources available. With the right priorities and leadership support, you are on track to build a high-impact department.
