Every organization needs to know how effective their customer satisfaction and employee retention strategies are, because these factors have a huge impact on their bottom line.
Call center monitoring and call center quality monitoring are the two key factors that influence a company's business growth and success.
In any business, relationships are everything, and it's your call center agents who act as the glue to hold these relationships together. It stands to reason then, that call center performance is at the heart of customer experience, and this is where call center monitoring is of the utmost importance.
In this guide we'll cover the ways in which call center monitoring software can be your most valuable tool through the use of analytics. This holds true, not just in quality management, but in ensuring excellent customer service, achieving better employee engagement and agent performance, and realizing your business objectives.
Research firm Nemertes Research found that organizations using third party monitoring solutions like IR Collaborate for monitoring and troubleshooting their call center operations can potentially halve UCC operational costs!
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What is call center monitoring?
Call centers (sometimes referred to as contact centers) facilitate either inbound or outbound calls, or often they handle both.
The process of call center monitoring is designed to track human agent performance, as well as the overall quality of the phone calls themselves. Every customer service call can benefit from call monitoring software, in that its main objective is quality assurance through the continuous collection and analysis of data and feedback.
Call center monitoring is about gathering data pertaining to your call center performance, gaining insight from the data, and implementing changes that are relative to this insight. This encompasses metrics such as:
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Employee efficiency
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Customer experience
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Speediness of execution
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Contact resolution
The size of the (US) call center analytics market is growing rapidly and is expected to continue to expand at an annual growth rate of 19.3% (CAGR) up to 2030.
Call center monitoring goals
Every organization with a call center needs to know why they're monitoring call center performance, for both inbound and outbound calls.
Both call center managers and call center teams need to set goals, so that they know what they're aiming to achieve, whether it's improving customer experience, reducing agent turnover rates, or reducing average call handling time.
Setting goals ensures that you're aligning your customer and employee needs with your business objectives, and not just looking for your agents to achieve numbers. Best call center monitoring practices have a great customer experience at their core, so company procedures should reflect this.
Analytics software like IR Collaborate gathers important contact center data, and proactively monitors contact center systems in real time, providing optimum business intelligence, and helping to prevent potentially disastrous downtime.
Image source: Talkdesk research report
What is call center monitoring software?
Call center software empowers organizations to utilize their call centers to the best advantage by automating key call center processes related to customer service calls. But call center monitoring software serves other invaluable purposes:
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Cost control - Call monitoring helps organizations keep business costs under control through better labor management and automated self service components
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Reduced contact center agents attrition - The best contact center software can help with agent training, increase agent satisfaction. Call monitoring also reduces turnover by equipping them with the right call tools to streamline workflows, automate the most repetitive tasks, and continuously improve communication skills.
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Better customer service interactions - Call quality monitoring will help call agents to improve their skills when it comes to customer queries and customer interactions in general.
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Improved key performance indicators - Call recording software helps improve a call center's performance overall, by reviewing KPIs such as:
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Resolving customer issues faster and lowering Average Resolution Time (ART).
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Raising their Customer Satisfaction Score by improved service.
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Elevating First Call Resolution rates (FCR).
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Improving Customer Resolution Rate, in other words, the number of issues resolved by the agent versus their total number of calls.
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Compliance with laws and regulations - Call center quality monitoring software is also designed to ensure data security and maintain compliance regulations, for example protecting customer financial data, health data, privacy and protection from nuisance calls.
Call quality monitoring software also refers to software that analyzes the actual audio quality of a phone call. Call quality monitoring not only enhances customer experience and helps train new agents, but is the fastest path towards quality assurance.
With IR’s Collaborate suite of solutions, you can get end-to-end visibility of your entire
call center environment from a single pane of glass.
Call center quality assurance and customer satisfaction
Effective call monitoring can make or break an organization. Your quality assurance team is responsible for listening to call quality and evaluating phone calls from a central location during the quality monitoring process.
Additionally, effective call quality monitoring software allows business managers to listen to both live and recorded calls, so they can evaluate call quality, track employee productivity and measure how many calls they are able to handle in a certain time period.
Call monitoring in real time provides actionable insights, enabling call center management to pinpoint areas of improvement for employees and improve customer satisfaction.
Involving your team in call center monitoring
Your call center team is at the frontline, so in order to create successful call monitoring strategies, you’ll need to involve your team in the entire process. Call monitoring is about improving, evaluating, changing, and correcting, but this is a team effort, so everyone needs to have their input.
Give your team a voice
As a call center manager, it's important to communicate in a way that involves your team, and gives them a voice in decisions. This includes allowing participation in the draft of scorecards, call scripts, and evaluation guidelines.
During the evaluation process and training sessions, encourage team members to self-evaluate, or buddy up, or request feedback and help.
Incentivize performance
Providing clear goals and quality standards for your team, and displaying KPI objectives is a great way to incentivize performance. Set a clear link between attaining defined goals, and obtaining a positive result. It's far better to evaluate agents by starting from zero and adding points for good performance, than starting from 100 and deducting points for errors.
Best practices for call center monitoring
The best way to achieve good results for call center quality is to monitor calls with quality call center monitoring tools. Data gathered from monitored calls can help identify existing problems, elevate call quality standards, and help to better handle calls that require more customer service.
Here are some best practices you can incorporate in your call center monitoring strategies.
Set clear goals
With clear goals in mind, you’ll be able to focus on the more relevant data such as
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The number of calls you're going to monitor
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How often
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How you plan to monitor them
Invest in the best monitoring software
The software you use could provide you with analytical features such as:
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Interfacing/Ease of Use: How will the software interface with your system? Will your agents be able to use it easily?
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Scalability: Choose software that will expand easily with your organization.
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Costs: Contact center managers should be mindful of budget, and include teams in the decisions as to what software is needed.
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Customization: Consider your company's business goals and decide if customization and personalization are things that you need.
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Security: Customer data is sacred, and its safety is important. Select a system that provides everyone involved with robust security tools.
Find our how IR Collaborate can help you capitalize on your data through real time analytics and insights
Train your teams
Working with your agents regularly helps to reiterate how important call quality monitoring best practices are. Employee satisfaction is dependent on consistent, comprehensive training sessions, and feedback.
Speech analytics
One effective way to improve productivity is through speech analytics, and almost all call centers worldwide use this technology today.
Speech analytics analyzes voice recordings or live calls to detect audio patterns, emotion, and stress factors in a speaker's voice to gain insights into customer behavior and call quality.
Image source: Call Hippo
Text Analytics
Text analytics focuses on written communication, such as web chats, emails, documents, and social media comments, and in the last few years, text analysis of social media comments have been found to yield valuable information.
Text analytics tools monitor and assign specific values to certain words and phrases, then data mining functions can identify patterns and relationships in the sets of data. helping to pinpoint any issues from the customer’s mindset.
Call center quality monitoring with IR Collaborate
As well as being able to record calls for later evaluation, effective call quality monitoring tools need to be able to see across all domains in real time in order to have full visibility into call quality and agent performance.
Today, a call center might utilize dozens of pieces of technology. To have a monitoring tool for each application is adding unnecessary and unmanageable complexity to the call center infrastructure, and added burden for a call center agent.
A third party monitoring solution like IR Collaborate can help ensure that voice quality, connection, availability, and critical systems are problem-free so you can deliver a superior customer experience.
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Find out how
Monitor, troubleshoot and resolve issues in real-time
For all businesses, time is a valuable commodity and directly relates to a company's bottom line. IR Collaborate can help you fix problems fast to minimize the impact on productivity, revenue and customer experience.
Meet performance goals
With the ability to see inside the entire system, call center monitoring with IR Collaborate can maximize system performance to optimize productivity and avoid costly outages. This ensures you are not only fulfilling customer expectations but safeguarding your company's reputation.
Deploy new technology confidence
Any changes to your organization’s infrastructure can impact end user experience, and in the case of new technology deployments in call centers, it can affect quality standards, how your agents handle calls, and your reputation. Monitoring your new technology with IR Collaborate can give you the confidence that your systems are fully integrated, and good customer service will never be compromised.
Test your voice and video
We already know that customer experience is critical! Your quality standards and KPIs determine the success or failure of every customer call. With IR Collaborate you can have confidence that your call center is delivering the best experience possible with real-time testing, to verify call volume capacity, call quality, performance, stability and resilience.
Contact us today for a customized demo to see how our solutions can help you:
- Deploy new technology with confidence
- Deliver the best customer experience
- Find and fix performance issues fast
- See you data your way and uncover the insights you need to succeed.
