Contact center agents are usually a customer’s first point of contact with your business, so there’s a lot of pressure to leave a good impression. However, modern call centers can be difficult to monitor, especially if your agents work remotely.
Understanding how customers feel about that first touch point is what quality assurance (QA) is all about. The strategies below will help to improve overall quality, and also level up your ability to measure the results of the changes you implement.
1. Gamification
When done well, gamification can increase employee engagement in many ways, with some studies showing as much as a 50% productivity increase. This includes contact center teams, whose agents often manage repetitive work and could benefit from out-of-the-box motivation strategies.
Gamification quantifies work-based achievements using the basic principles of video games. Regardless of the metrics used, the goal is to reinforce social learning and increase engagement during otherwise mundane tasks.
It works by creating friendly competition in your team’s operational workflow. While it doesn’t turn their work into a game, it can feel pretty close to it, especially if there are prizes involved.
Say you want to increase the number of outbound calls agents make and the number of inbound calls they answer. With an employee management system that’s equipped for gamification, you can track each agent’s progress towards your goals.
It will also show your agents a daily results screen with things like points, badges, progress bars, gains and winners. Simply put, it’s kind of like holding an “employee of the month” competition based on measurable performance.
To succeed, gamification needs to include a few important elements.
Clear benchmarks
Encourage daily motivation with clear benchmarks to gauge progress. You can use whatever incentives you think will work best for your team, but it’s important that the competition not overshadow the actual customer support. If you’re scoring agents based on the number of calls they miss, they might start neglecting their current caller to move on to the next one as soon as possible. Gamification can work well, but the results you’ll see depend on how you set up the system.
Regular communication
You need to make sure there’s a feedback loop so that agents know how their work is contributing to goals. You can offer bonus points with extra training or one-on-one coaching sessions. You can even provide extra resources to reinforce company policies.
Focus on improvement
The most important thing is not to leave people behind. The point of a gamification strategy isn’t to weed out the stragglers and embarrass them, but rather to encourage everyone to play as a team. Make sure you’re clearly articulating to all employees that this is about improvement — not perfection.
Proper tools
In a contact center, gamification can technically be implemented without software, such as by having the progress bars on the wall of the break room — but to get modern employees engaged with the system, you’ll want something they can pull up on their phone or laptop.
2. AI workflows
Your quality assurance workflow has a lot of functions, and each of them has its own performance metrics. These take time and effort to collect and report to your team leaders, and it also has to be done regularly if you expect them to improve their strategies.
The great thing about automating QA workflows with AI is how easy it is to gather in-depth performance insights. Instead of relying on your team to collect data — while also risking clerical errors from even the most experienced people on the job — the system can do it all for you.
Automated workflows can also support performance by tracking metrics around both soft and hard skills, such as:
- Efficiency.
- Patience.
- Courtesy.
- Correctness.
- Punctuality.
With this kind of employee performance data, AI can create models and reports that help managers strategically improve QA. This helps them see their team’s overall core performance, in addition to the strengths and weaknesses of individuals.
However, it’s important to be careful with this data. Over-relying on AI can actually be detrimental to call centers if the software they use isn’t customizable. A lot of businesses are using combinations of VoIP phone systems, AI-enabled analytics and other advanced solutions to dial up their competitive edge—and to dial down their labor costs.
3. Active listening training
You know the importance of training contact center agents to handle calls, and your training materials probably put a lot of weight on courtesy. But an often-overlooked related skill is teaching employees how to be empathetic. In a market where customer connection drives profitability, it’s an important skill to develop.
Active listening training is a set of principles your agents can follow when talking to others. It’s been shown time and again to improve connection quality between speakers. In the context of a call center, this means more customer engagement and better conversion rates — plus it also just makes everyone feel better in general.
The concept of active listening training includes:
- Learning how to pay attention.
- Providing feedback to the caller.
- Recognizing and acknowledging emotions.
- Holding off on hasty conclusions.
- Practicing empathetic responses.
Active listening training can augment the contact center etiquette you’re probably already teaching. It’s a way of reinforcing the concept that your agents are actually speaking to people—not just customers.
4. Customer journey maps
Customer journey maps visualize how customers interact with your contact center. They not only take into account the objective facts, like whether or not the customer bought something, but they also consider the customer’s needs and perceptions throughout the entire interaction with your business.
Journey maps answer important questions about what customers are trying to accomplish, how long they’ve been at it and with what or whom they’re interacting. Knowing these answers can help you improve interactions based on actual experience as opposed to guessing.
The point is to get a better grasp of how your business looks from the customer’s perspective, which is an often overlooked aspect of a contact center QA.
You can’t possibly properly respond to a customer’s concerns if you’re only focused on the moments where they directly interact with your call center. The other factors (aka the “off-stage” interactions) are just as important, such as the queries they make after the call, the newsletters you send out and the feedback surveys you give them.
Your map should include the before, during and after of interactions with your business. Once you see the whole journey, you’ll be much better equipped to guide future customers to the best resolution.
5. Agent participation
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s not as common as you might think. Agents will benefit a lot more by actively participating in developing QA strategies rather than just being told what to do.
While a lot of QA strategies involve team leaders listening to their agents’ calls and then giving them feedback, that’s not the only way of doing it. You can invite the agent to listen to the call with their lead (for example), so they can evaluate the feedback together and come up with improvement strategies on a level playing field.
Strategies like this can get the agent thinking about their own performance in a way that encourages personal responsibility and ownership of their own development process. Personal responsibility encourages heightened agent engagement, which has been proven to increase customer responses, level up productivity and even increase profits by as much as 21%.
This method can also reduce stress for managers, which helps prevent burnout in your leadership team.
6. Continuous benchmarking
Benchmarking is a great way to see how your contact center measures up to others of a similar size. You can also see how you stack up against the best of the best in your industry.
While benchmarking is pretty common, it’s not always done well. Many companies treat it as a one-and-done deal. Instead, it should be treated as a continuous process that expands well beyond one or two metrics.
After evaluating your performance in one area, you should shift to another to get a better view of the bigger picture. Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) can make a world of difference. It’s up to you and your team to figure out what combination will provide you with the best insights for improving service quality.
Common KPIs to track include:
- Customer satisfaction rates.
- Service level.
- First call resolution.
- Agent turnover rates.
- Average handle time.
It’s best to use workforce analytics software so you don’t end up getting so caught up in the assessment of quality that you neglect to maintain it.
7. Surveys
Surveys are the most common tactic for assessing agent performance and improving QA. It’s as simple as asking customers to give you direct feedback and taking action on what you learn.
However, you still have to collate the data you collect — whether that’s through paid questionnaires, random calls or mandatory call monitoring. It’s not enough to send out the survey. You should spend time understanding what the results mean.
Sometimes, that means digging deeper and taking more time to analyze the data. If you use surveys as an opportunity for growth, coaching and additional training, they’ll prove more valuable than if you were to use them as disciplinary tools.
By demonstrating commitment to your QA and sharing the data in positive ways, you can build loyalty with your staff.
Key takeaway for contact centers
Contact center QA can be complicated. It involves quantification and qualification of a lot of moving parts, like the emotional experiences of your customers, the tactics of your agents and the strategies of your team leaders.
When you put them all together, it can feel a bit like trying to do a crossword puzzle while skydiving — and then your phone rings.
But with the right strategies and software in place, quality assurance can become a regular part of your daily operations that will have a major impact on your agents, customers and bottom line.