So, we thought it would be helpful to share call center quality assurance tips for improving your QA Scores and customer satisfaction:
1. Develop a Clear Quality Assurance Strategy
The starting point for an effective and efficient QA program is to have a clear QA strategy. A QA strategy includes a good understanding of what are the goals you want to achieve and allocating the necessary resources to achieve them. Without a QA strategy plan, you will be less likely to succeed.
After determining your QA strategy goals, you must decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) and behaviors you want to include on the QA evaluation form supporting your strategic goals. You will also need to define what a good quality score is for your call centers and how to measure, benchmark, track, and create agent accountability. Furthermore, it would help if you decided how often you will conduct QA evaluations, provide coaching and develop action plans to improve performance.
2. Quality Assurance Function Ownership
Once the QA strategy has been developed and approved, you are ready to assign ownership to manage the QA function. If possible, a good practice is to have the most successful or one of the top call center managers for QA scores assigned to managing the call center QA function. Having someone specifically in charge of the QA function will help ensure the department will operate effectively and efficiently.
3. Involve Employees in the Development of the QA Program
Involve your top QA-performing supervisors and agents in the development of the strategic goals and determining KPIs, behaviors to be evaluated on the QA form, how many QA evaluations per month per agent, and the number of agent coaching sessions. Agent and supervisor input for the QA function enhances the likelihood that other agents and supervisors will buy into the QA purpose and help make the QA program successful.
4. Explain QA Program During Agent Onboarding
For new hire agents, onboard training includes a module for describing the details of the QA program. The QA module can be delivered online or by a QA evaluator, trainer, or manager in a classroom environment to ensure that new-hire agents understand how the QA program works and its implication for them.
5. Define the KPIs Required and How They Will Be Measured
Define KPIs and how a call center QA team will measure call quality. The standards, KPIs, and scorecards should be aligned with the company’s strategic business goals. For example, at SQM, we highly recommend for the QA evaluation that customers assess their experience for KPIs such as call resolution, satisfaction with the agent, and whether it was a positive CX. The customer assessment can be done by conducting post-call surveys. In addition, the CX KPIs should have higher weighting for importance than call compliance call behavior attributes on the agent scorecard.
6. Determine QA Evaluation Sample Size Required
To ensure an accurate assessment of an agent’s QA score performance, evaluate an appropriate sample size. SQM Group’s research shows that for the call center industry, calls monitored per agent per month, 60% of call centers evaluate five or more calls. Furthermore, “71% of call centers say they coach an agent on four or more calls that have been QA evaluated”.
Using the right sample size helps provides insightful and actionable QA evaluation feedback that a supervisor can use to coach an agent to improve quality scores. If the sample size is too big, it can be overwhelming, or if it is too small, the agent might feel that it is not reflective of their QA performance.
7. Create a QA Coaching Schedule and Stick to It
Most agents feel they do not get enough supervisor coaching sessions, and many of them feel that their supervisor can not help them improve customer satisfaction. Also, it is common for coaching sessions to be canceled because there are not enough agents to answer and handle calls. What agents want is for the supervisor to create a QA coaching schedule and stick to it.
8. Invest in Call Quality Monitoring Software
It’s essential to determine the right call quality monitoring software and to implement them. Below are the indispensable software required for your QA program to work effectively and efficiently for evaluating calls.
Call Recording software records a voice conversation over an audio source. At SQM, we recommend that 100% of calls are recorded. Caller calls can be recorded and stored as a digital file to be transcripted or listened to for playback purposes. Calls recorded are used for conducting QA evaluations, agent coaching, and training.
Text Analytics software is a machine learning technique that automatically extracts valuable insights from unstructured text data. For example, call centers use text analytics to increase the understanding of the customer experience by using text analytics for specific words or phrases to discover satisfaction and dissatisfaction levels. In addition, text analytics can provide insights into customer sentiment and experience trends.
Speech and AI Analytics software analyzes call recordings or live customer calls using speech recognition for quality assurance evaluations. Also, the software is used to identify selling opportunities and track regulatory compliance. Speech and AI analytics software identifies words and analyzes audio patterns to detect customer sentiments, emotions, and stress in a caller’s voice.
Customer Service QA software brings telephony calls, QA, and post-call survey data into fully integrated software for managing customer service data. The customer service QA software tool assists call center agents, and managers in tracking, benchmarking, and improving FCR, Csat, NPS, QA scores, costs, and customer service.
9. Utilize Calls That Achieved High QA Scores for Storytelling Coaching
The use of calls that achieved a high QA Score or Csat for storytelling has a proven track record for helping supervisors coach agents to improve customer service and QA Score performance.
Storytelling assists supervisors in delivering a message in a way that coaches, engages, and inspires agents and helps them understand what great customer service looks like. Excellent customer service storytelling is a communication method to gain agent buy-in. Compelling storytelling can capture agents’ hearts and minds to deliver the intended customer service.
10. Document Your QA Expectations and Criteria
To ensure your agents buy into your QA program, you must document and communicate your QA expectations and criteria to all stakeholders. The documentation gives agents an understanding of what is expected of them to achieve a high QA score and makes the QA program more transparent and fair.
11. Provide Great Scripts for Handling Calls
In a call center environment, the agent’s language significantly impacts delivering great Csat. When Csat improves, the agent’s language in handling calls is the primary source of customer service improvement. A high-performing Csat agent will utilize the right words and phrases for the entire call to deliver a great CX.
The Top 25 call-handling words and phrases are ranked for positive impact to assist agents in delivering excellent customer service. It is essential to emphasize that all 25 words and phrases are important, and each one of the words and phrases can, by themselves, help an agent deliver great Csat. However, it’s vital to stress that call resolution words and phrases are essential for agents to drive great Csat.
12. Allow Agents to Dispute QA Evaluation Scores
If an agent feels that QA evaluation is unfair or inaccurate, they must be able to dispute the QA evaluation score based on a predefined QA dispute process. The QA dispute must be resolved within a couple of business days, and, if necessary, conduct another QA evaluation to replace an unfair or inaccurate QA evaluation.
13. Recognize Your Agents for High or Improvement in QA Scores & Csat
Our experience has been that recognizing agents for high QA scores and Csat is one of the best practices for improving first call resolution and customer service. However, in many cases, agents feel unrecognized for achieving high QA scores and Csat.
At SQM, we believe the Regence BlueCross BlueShield recognition program to be a best practice for recognizing agents for their customer service performance. Regence BlueCross BlueShield’s agent recognition program is called Service Hero.
The Service Hero recognition program is the company’s most successful and longest-running recognition program. The agent service hero program recognizes the agents who provide exemplary customer service. C-level executives determine the agent Service Heroes and give senior executives great insights into CX trying to resolve complex healthcare calls.
14. Use Gamification to Motivate Agents to Improve QA Scores
Gamification enhances the motivation of agents to improve their QA scores and makes the working environment more fun. As a result, higher QA scores and CX behaviors become an ingrained part of the culture and experience within the call center. Adding contests and recognition creates motivated agents that propel your call center to improve QA scores and provide great CX. Agents have more opportunities to use gamification the more world-class calls and high-quality assurance scores they achieve.
For example, an agent can receive additional points from a world-class Csat call or a high-quality assurance score. In addition, many call centers use gamification as part of their training and coaching design. This allows agents to practice, learn by trial and error, receive feedback and recognition, and be coached to improve customer service delivery.
15. Use 360-Degree Feeback to Do the Coaching
360-Degree Feedback lets agents and supervisors get a fuller picture of a CX interacting with a call center. Furthermore, 360-Degree Feedback widens the lens and reduces supervisor bias, providing a clearer picture of an agent’s strengths and weaknesses for the supervisor coaching agents to improve CX.
In addition, 360-Degree Feedback is a method for conducting a customer service QA review for agents to understand their strengths and weaknesses based on evaluating a specific call from multi-raters (e.g., customers, QA evaluators, and artificial intelligence) feedback.
For 360-Degree Feedback using multi-raters to be effective, all raters and technology need to assess the same call from different perspectives. For example, multi-rater feedback assessment of the same call includes conducting post-call surveys to receive customer rater feedback about their CX, artificial intelligence for sentiment analysis, and QA evaluator rater to assess call compliance captured in a CX management software.
