3 Strategies for Golden Call Quality Assurance

Think of call centers as “customer happiness” manufacturing plants.

Now imagine that every call made is another product shipped.

Well, just like other manufacturers, call centers need to ensure the products they’re putting out are of the highest quality.

If they don’t, customers will get a disappointing experience – and that could mean the call center responsible loses that contract.

So how do call centers maintain high-quality output?

Through call quality assurance.

We’ll detail some of the best strategies for call quality assurance in just a moment, but first, let’s take a look at the definition.

What Is Call Quality Assurance?

Call quality assurance is when quality assurance (QA) specialists and/or managers closely monitor and evaluate the quality of all calls within a call center.

This includes listening to agents’ performance while speaking with customers, listening to customers and how they respond to agents and how tasks are handled after a call ends.

But QA specialists may sometimes go further and look at a call center’s operations, processes, KPIs, and anything else that gives a gauge on how well the call center is running and how productive its employees are.

All of these components can impact the quality of calls with customers.

It is the job of QA specialists and managers to make sure that every customer is treated fairly and their requests or complaints are resolved quickly and appropriately.

To do that, call centers need to implement specific strategies for call quality assurance.

What are the Best Strategies for Call Quality Assurance?

While this list isn’t exhaustive, the following strategies are some of the best that call centers can use to improve call quality assurance.

Give All Agents Quality Assurance Evaluations

The mantra here is simple:

QA for everyone!

Every single agent should receive a quality assurance evaluation, regardless of how long they’ve worked for the call center, how good their numbers are or what their reputation is.

It doesn’t matter if they’re a top performer or an underperformer, every agent can improve. But they won’t improve if their calls aren’t analyzed like everybody else’s.

Underperformers will obviously benefit much more from QA coaching because they’re probably committing many errors that need correction.

But top performers need reinforcement that what they’re doing is correct, and in some cases, a second opinion regarding their processes can make them that much better at their job. That’s why even Olympic athletes still have coaches in their corner.

Get Customer Feedback

It’s sometimes difficult to determine whether or not an agent or call center is performing properly.

So why not just ask the customers themselves?

Getting customer feedback is simply one of the best ways to know if the quality of calls is high or not.

And if a call center was going to use just one type of survey, we would recommend the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey.

The NPS was first introduced in a Harvard Business Review article, The One Number You Need to Grow.

Here’s how Top Net Promoter Scores work:

Businesses (or in this case, call centers) send out a survey asking a single question:

“How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend, family member, or colleague?”

Then a call center provides customers with a scale of 1-10 for their answers.

All answers with a 9 or 10 are your promoters.

If call centers are consistently getting low scores, especially in the 1-5 range, then there’s definitely a problem with the service being provided.

So while NPS won’t tell call centers what the problem is, it will make clear how much people enjoy speaking to service agents.

Roleplay Calls with Supervisor Help

Roleplay is crucial for knowing how and when to say certain things, how to resolve conflicts, and how to remain cool and calm on calls.

Even more important, it’s an opportunity for agents to work through their sticking points and bad habits. And a way for other agents to see where they may go wrong and how to correct course in the moment.

The best way to host roleplay calls is to have one agent be the customer and another be the agent. Give the agent 10 minutes to review the situation they’ll be addressing when speaking with the customer (i.e., the customer is calling to cancel their service).

Make sure a supervisor or manager is listening to the interaction as it happens.

After the role play is complete, provide in-depth feedback to the person playing the agent.

This exercise will help reinforce new, positive habits and behaviors and root out ones that cause inadequate quality assurance.

How to Improve Call Quality Assurance [Case Study]

If call centers are interested in seeing exactly what it takes to improve call quality assurance, then we have just the case study for them.

Read this case study on First Collection Services and their experience using TCN software to see how higher-quality assurance was achieved.

Inside the case study, call centers will discover:

• The 4 elements that improved agent efficiency and productivity (while cutting redundancy).
• How First Collection Services reduced customer complaints and created faster issue resolution.
• And much more.

Get a FREE copy of the case study on First Collection Services today!