Call centers have come a long way from the days when they were simply banks of desks and scores of employees answering phones.
Companies began to realize the importance of that first point of contact, taking a more modernized approach to customer service with greater investment to gain a more in-depth understanding of their customers’ needs. Call centers were revamped, with increased training and customer data analysis.
As with so many other aspects of customer service, call centers can also be subject to different methods of monitoring to analyze areas for improvement. By applying call center analytics, you can gain a clearer understanding of customer needs and the capabilities of your call center team. You will learn more, through customer feedback, about the products and services on offer.
Here, we will explore the various options for call center monitoring software and analytics, how these tools have grown in sophistication in recent years, and why they are important. We will also consider the types of actions that can be monitored and the pros and cons of different practices.
What are call centers important?
There is only one source of communication in a call center; the telephone. There are also contact centers that provide options for additional channels of communication, such as email, live chat, and other websites and apps.
The three most common types of call centers are inbound; handling a large volume of incoming calls from customers or outbound centers; where agents call out on behalf of an organization, or blended call centers, which handle both.
A call center represents an essential offering of a business’ customer service. In a world where 82% of U.S. customers say they would drop a company after a poor customer service experience, this isn’t a feature of your business that you can afford to be below standards.
Your customer service is a part of your company where you can truly put in the effort and the investment to stand out from the rest, and your call center is a key part of that. It may present the only opportunity you have for direct interaction with your customers. If your call center takes on other forms of communication like live chat and emails, it will be even more globally accessible - and under potential scrutiny as the face of your business.
What is call center monitoring?
Making observations and evaluations of your call center is critical to understanding performance and identifying areas for improvement. This is what’s known as call center monitoring. Here are a few key steps to take for efficient call center monitoring.
Observing and evaluating
This can be done in a variety of ways, including reviewing calls, checking real-time data for queues and call times, researching customer feedback and pain points, and evaluating the performance of customer service representatives.
Key indicators
You can evaluate the performance of your call center over time by analyzing customer satisfaction, pulling out analytics data in call quality reports, and activity reports that contain data on each customer service representative to widen the scope of your evaluation.
Feedback and improvement
Implementing channels of feedback by meeting with your customer service representatives, reviewing specific performance indicators and call transcripts, and providing feedback. It’s also important to clearly communicate areas of improvement.
Using your tools and resources
You can take action to reduce customer pain points based on evaluation and feedback. Make changes to your staffing and department sizes, your agents’ schedules, and availability. Put more agency in customers’ hands with self-service menus and increased automation.
Call center quality assurance in 2024
Implementing a robust call center monitoring system brings many benefits for the department and your business as a whole. You will have more optimized quality assurance in place for your call center. Your agents will feel more empowered and equipped to handle customer issues, meaning a reduction in escalated calls. There will be a strong system in place for training new or existing call center agents, meaning consistent quality across the board. You will collect better feedback on customer needs and expectations, which can be transformative for your business.
Call monitoring software can be applied to allow a monitor to provide assistance to an agent during a live call, through what is known as call whispering. Call barging is also made possible, with software allowing a monitor to join a call and speak directly to a client. It’s also possible to record calls to be reviewed later for quality or training purposes. If you’ve ever dealt with a call center, it’s likely that you were informed ahead of time that your call will be recorded. A business that has the ability to record calls can evaluate quality based on KPIs, expectations, or other specific metrics.
Call center reporting vs. analytics
You might have heard the phrases ‘call center reporting’ and ‘call center analytics’ used interchangeably. The truth is that there are key differences between the two.
Reporting is often the first step in a rigorous analytics process, where raw recorded data is converted into simplified reports or summaries. It provides the presentation of data in a clearer, more accessible way. However, analytics goes one step further in providing actionable insights and observable improvements.
Analytics is typically based on identifying specific trends in reports and summaries. It’s related more to the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of call center practices while establishing a path to greater success.
Why data analysis is important for call center monitoring
The application of detailed and valuable analytics is crucial for modern business practices in many different areas, which is no less true of call centers. Using data to drive decision-making processes is a sign of a well-run, competent business.
However, it’s essential that businesses understand the type of data that they seek. You will need to outline the specific metrics you want to track in advance to help you more effectively identify ways to enhance the customer experience of your call centers. This process will increase your customer retention and maintain customer satisfaction, and in turn, help to increase your company’s bottom line.
Data analysis can provide plenty of insights, among them the performance of customer service agents, specific customer behaviors, and trends over time. Managers can gain real-time insights into how calls are handled and see if there are any issues that need working on. Analytics can also help you piece together the bigger picture, to see if there are any cost-saving opportunities or a need to streamline operations.
Types of call center reports
A wide and diverse range of reports can be generated from call center data that can equip you with key information about your business.
These reports might cover key metrics like first call resolution, which is a customer service rep’s ability to resolve a problem during the first call with a customer.
Then there is the average wait time indicator, telling you how long your customers spend waiting in the queue or for a call back from the operator.
You can explore the ‘adherence to schedule’ report to measure an agent’s productivity against their specific schedule and use that to guide your expectations.
Another report, one that you might already be familiar with, is for measuring customer satisfaction. This is a common metric across multiple industries and tells you how happy a customer might be with your service or product.
No matter what the report details, you will need to ensure that the metrics are represented by exact formulas that can be relied upon for further analysis in the future.
How to monitor call center performance
Only with a rigorous and effective monitoring framework can your call center become a valuable source of customer feedback and a reliable feature of your customer experience.
Quality assurance
You will need a strong quality assurance team. This team typically comprises senior staff and high-performing agents with a good understanding of your business and its expectations. They will be responsible for establishing a quality assurance framework, informed by their experience and skills.
Performance indicators and standards
Breaking down your customer calls into a set of behaviors, goals, and benchmarks for success will help to more easily assess what qualifies as a successful customer call - and what doesn’t. Consider common KPIs and metrics to apply here.
Introduce monitoring tools
There is a variety of monitoring software that can support you. You can use call recording software for quality assurance and evaluation, generate grading rubrics to establish success metrics in customer calls, and use text and speech analytics software to break down and categorize interactions.
Carry out assessments
Once you have your metrics in place and the reports start flooding in, you can begin analyzing the data and assessing the performance of your customer service representatives against your set indicators. You may be able to identify common problems and consider how to improve efficiency.
Implement training and skills
Building an accurate picture of your customer service team via monitoring and reports comes to nothing if you don’t identify and embark on improvements. You can begin training programs, introduce new tools and resources and support your team so that there are clear goals for development.
Call center monitoring metrics
What are some of the key metrics you need to introduce to measure the success of your call center teams? Before proceeding further, you need to identify the difference between metrics your customer service representatives can or cannot control and improve, and whether they can be held accountable. Monitoring indicators related to speed can be useful, but a fast call doesn’t necessarily mean a customer’s issue has been satisfactorily resolved. This is why a balanced combination of metrics is the most effective way to monitor performance.
For example, average handle time is a standard indicator. Learning how much time an agent spends interacting with a customer is helpful, but it may be counterproductive if agents end calls too quickly and make the customer feel rushed. This single metric encompasses average talk time, average hold time, and average after-call work time too. All of these indicators measure an agent’s efficiency in dealing with customers.
Then there is quality monitoring, where an agent is evaluated on multiple factors related to customer interaction. This can involve monitoring call control, where Quality supervisors measure an agent’s control and proactivity. Quality supervisors may also be interested to know if agents did everything in their power to follow policy and procedure in resolving issues.
Customer satisfaction is a general metric that agents have a reasonable degree of control over. The respect and empathy demonstrated by agents significantly contribute to customer satisfaction and is entirely dependent on the agent themselves.
The benefits of monitoring call center performance
There are tangible benefits from monitoring call center performance, both for your business and for ensuring the happiness of your customers.
Customer service representatives will have the opportunity to learn more about their roles with a clear path of development, provided there is a structured framework for assessment in place. Monitoring can also establish a clearer line of communication between agent and manager, meaning a steady source of feedback and, ideally, an open channel for questions and ideas. This dialogue can make an employee feel more valued within the organization and help boost productivity.
For managers, monitoring helps the business as a whole to develop crucial customer insights that can serve other areas of the company, such as marketing. Of course, monitoring, first and foremost, benefits the customer experience side of the business, by ensuring that call center teams can identify problems and customer frustrations with greater ease. Managers will find it easier too, to address inefficient procedures and look to make structural improvements.
Customers benefit from enhanced quality of customer service as their issues are solved with greater responsiveness than ever before. They will find greater consistency in interacting with the call center, as no matter which member of the team they speak to will be guided by the same robust framework.
Finally, for the business itself, a high-performing call center, driven by effective monitoring, can be an amazing boost for brand reputation. So many customers expect call centers to be tiresome or frustrating that finding one that functions efficiently and solves their problems will contribute significantly towards customer loyalty and satisfaction.
How to make monitoring work for your business
The increasing sophistication of call center quality assurance and monitoring is a real asset to customer-facing businesses. You can make a great deal of corrections to enhance your call center performance.
Listening to past customer calls can help you steer your business toward demonstrating greater empathy and respect for customers. If you discover that one of your agents isn’t going far enough in presenting human qualities such as empathy, consistency, and dependability, you can implement training, so this approach becomes second nature to your team.
Your call center insights can also optimize your company’s goals. The more you monitor, the more data you will amass regarding your customer issues and the types of problems that most frequently appear. You can target these types of issues specifically and try to bring about faster resolutions to boost efficiency.
Customer feedback is a great, direct way of achieving these insights. You can even take onboard feedback regarding your business services or products and consider improvements. Collecting your agent reports can help you identify common customer pain points and bottlenecks. Overall, this will inform your business in making long-term operational improvements.
Considering how to monitor call center performance is an essential part of enhancing customer experience and ensuring that, across the board, your business is providing a consistent customer service offering. Implementing a solid framework of assessment based on key metrics will help you raise standards in a collaborative way. This unified, organizational improvement will help to develop the confidence and satisfaction of your customers, and they will reward you with loyalty. Ultimately, that core of loyal customers will also serve to boost your revenues - the bottom line for any business!