Call Center Quality Management: A Complete Guide

0:00

0:00

1.0x

“This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.”

If only the general public knew the work that went on behind the scenes of those words! As a QA manager or specialist, you spend hours listening to call recordings, grading agents, and maintaining standards for your industry and organization.

But your job is so much more than recordings and scores. Its impact is crucial to the success of the call center, the satisfaction of your customers, and the performance of your agents.

Given the importance of your role, it makes sense to do everything you can to optimize your work. Below are some best practices for call center quality management that’ll help you perform at your best.

What Is Call Center Quality Management?

Call center quality management, also known as quality assurance, monitors, reviews, and improves every interaction between call center agents and customers.

QA specialists listen to call recordings and grade the interaction based on a set of criteria, including but not limited to industry policies, legal standards, and client requirements. The goal is to maintain compliance and consistency and ensure that the client is happy with the service your agents provide.

Why Is Call Center Quality Management Important?

Improves Customer Satisfaction

Call center quality management is all about analyzing what’s working, and what isn’t, in the hopes of improving the customer experience. When you do QA right, you’ll see your customer satisfaction metrics improve.

Helps With Agent Career Development

QA managers are often tasked with coaching call center agents. In one-on-ones, you can review calls with your agent, identify their strengths, and create a plan for improving upon their weaknesses.

On top of that, QA helps you identify your star agents, which comes in handy when deciding whom to promote to management positions.

Ensures Compliance With Industry Standards and Laws

QA specialists are in charge of ensuring that the call center maintains compliance with the rules and regulations of your industry and jurisdiction. Things like HIPAA and GDPR may need to be taken into consideration in every agent-customer interaction. Failure to ensure compliance can have legal consequences for your call center.

Guarantees Consistency

Especially as your call center scales, maintaining consistency will be a challenge. Your job as QA means you’re in charge of creating and maintaining a set of standards to ensure a consistently good customer experience, no matter how large your team grows.

Improves Productivity

By monitoring calls, QA finds inefficiencies, too, and helps cut those down so your agents can improve their workflow, decrease AHT, and increase productivity.

Quality Assurance Tools at Your Disposal

The following tools will all be available in the proper call center management software.

• Call monitoring allows you to listen in on live calls without being heard.
• Call whispering lets you talk to the agent during a live call without the customer hearing. This is useful for providing advice and guidance to save an agent who needs a little help at the moment.

• Call barging allows you to speak during a live call so that both the agent and customer can hear you. Use this sparingly, only in cases where it’s the best way to salvage a call that’s gone wrong.

• Call recording is a must in call center quality management. The right call center software will do this for you.

• Agent scripts ensure consistent and accurate information is communicated to every caller.

• Post-call surveys give you meaningful data on the quality of a call because it’s directly from the mouth of the customer.

• Speech analytics is a burgeoning field in quality assurance. It uses AI to listen for certain words and phrases (programmed by you). It can assist you in doing your job, since you won’t have to listen to every second of every call.

15 Call Center Quality Management Best Practices

1. Use a Noise-Cancelling App to Improve Call Quality

Whether working from home or in an office, background noise can derail a customer service call. Thankfully, there’s an easy fix: Install a noise-cancelling app like Krisp. It takes just a minute to do so, and once it’s turned on, Krisp will automatically detect and eliminate noises that shouldn’t be there, such as traffic, keyboard clicks, and barking dogs. 

Noise-cancelling software ensures the best audio quality for every call your agents take.

2. Invest in the Right QA Software 

While every call center needs the right call center management software, every QA needs the right QA software to optimize your work. The right software depends on your needs, but here are some features that you might find useful:

• Create custom scorecards
• Define and measure KPIs
• Use speech and text analytics
• Access performance data
• Provide rewards to agents

3. Create a Good Scorecard

The scorecard is the measuring stick for your agents, so it needs to be clear, effective, and consistent. Typical call center QA scorecards have Yes/No questions along with a scale (such as from 1-5) so you can provide an actual “grade.”

What metrics should the scorecard include?

• Average Handle Time (AHT): This is a standard metric for call centers, but it comes with a caveat: Sometimes providing quality service takes time, and agents who don’t rush the caller end up getting dinged for AHT when the quality of service was excellent.
• Compliance: Depending on the industry, your call center must follow a set of rules and regulations to remain compliant. It’s essential that your agents abide by these standards to avoid negative consequences.

• Accuracy: Is the agent providing accurate information to the caller? 

• Professionalism: Does the agent greet the customer in a friendly manner? Do they keep calm even when the customer seems frantic or frustrated? These are the things to consider when grading professionalism.

• Communication skills: Does the agent practice active listening? Are they clear in their instructions? Effective communication skills are key to call center quality management.

4. Don’t Skip Calibration Sessions

You calibrate a device to ensure that it’s measuring accurately and consistently every time. That’s why QA holds calibration sessions. You can do this once a week or once a month, but the goal is to verify consistency—meaning that if three different QAs score the same call, those scores should be the same (or pretty darn close). If they’re not, something is off in the way you grade, and that needs to be addressed.

5. Ensure Agents Know What’s Expected of Them

In the same vein of calibration, make sure agents know what’s expected of them. Having a miscalibrated scorecard is one way to confuse them (because they can never get the right score), but there are other things that are confusing. Here are some quality management mistakes to avoid:

• Not having a defined way of grading calls
• Not making your grading process transparent
• Not providing clear or meaningful feedback
• Changing the way you grade without notice to the agents

6. Know Procedures and Policies Like the Back of Your Hand

Your job in QA is to ensure procedures and policies—within your organization, industry, state, and country—are followed. That, of course, means you need to know what the procedures and policies are.

It’s also crucial to stay up-to-date on these, as they can change. Attending regular trainings can keep you abreast of any changes in laws and regulations that might affect your trade.

7. Provide Coaching to Your Call Center Agents

Contrary to popular belief, QA doesn’t just sit behind their desk finding things wrong with call recordings. A major part of your job is to coach your agents. Take the time to sit down with each agent, one-on-one, regularly. You can review one of their call recordings together and note where they did well and where they could improve. Create a plan with them, and check in on their progress. This helps with their career development and builds rapport with them as well.

8. Automate Quality Assurance Tasks

Leverage automation tools to handle routine quality assurance tasks, such as automatically scoring calls based on predefined metrics. This reduces the manual workload on QA teams and ensures consistent evaluations across all customer interactions.

9. Do Something Fun to Break Up the Monotony of Listening to Call Recordings

In QA, you’ll be listening to a lot of call recordings; there’s no avoiding it. To break up the monotony, you might find it useful to handwrite notes, go for a walk, doodle, or rake a little desk Zen garden.

10. Don’t Sacrifice Customer Service Quality for Better QA Metrics

As a QA specialist, you’re under pressure to please multiple stakeholders—upper management, call agents, the client, and customers. Unfortunately, sometimes those stakeholders’ desires are at odds with each other.

For instance, agents feel the pressure to keep call times short, but often, quality customer service requires time and patience. Don’t get so hung up on AHT that you pressure your agents to rush callers, ruining the customer experience.

11. Get Good at Giving Critical Feedback

A significant portion of your job involves pointing out areas of improvement, and not everyone takes critical feedback well. The key is knowing the fine line between inspiring someone to do better and discouraging someone from doing their job.

• Practice empathy. Empathy is more than just feeling what someone else feels; it’s an openness to the other person’s perspective, a desire to learn more about what their experience is. So if you notice that an otherwise competent agent keeps scoring low on their scripts, it’s worth asking them why they feel it’s necessary to veer from the script. You might find that the scripts are ineffective or redundant or that the agent is trying to be more human by personalizing each interaction.

• Contextualize the criticism. Telling someone they did something wrong is demotivating; telling them why what they did isn’t helpful and what they can do instead is much more likely to elicit a good response. Provide as much context as you can to make the critical feedback make sense for the agent. Instead of saying, “You need to stick to the script,” it’s more helpful to say, “We developed these scripts after many weeks of discussion and testing, so we trust that these are the most effective words to use on your calls. When you stray from the script, it makes it difficult for us to ensure a consistent customer experience. If I’m missing something, though, I’d be open to hearing your feedback.”

• Rely on relationship building. Your words carry more weight when the agent knows you care about them. Everything you do outside of the scorecard matters. Coaching and words of appreciation will show your agents that they’re more than a grade. So when it comes time to deliver negative feedback, they’ll know you’re doing it because you care.

12. Use Real-Time Reporting and Analytics

Real-time data is essential for effective call center management. By accessing live reports on call volumes, wait times, and agent performance, you can make quick adjustments to improve operational efficiency. Tools like CloudTalk provide such analytics to help track performance and make data-driven decisions.

13. Don’t Forget to Praise and Reward Your Agents

QA gets a reputation for being Negative Nellies who nitpick and point out everything wrong. Sure, a major part of your job is to spot errors so they can be corrected. But spotting excellence so it can be rewarded is important too! It’s a huge component of employee motivation; without it, you’ll end up demotivating your agents to the point they do a worse job.

Instead, find ways to reward agents for doing things right. For example, Playvox has an option where you can reward agents with Karma points, which they can then use to redeem gifts in your online store. playvox.com/lp/call-center-quality-assurance/ 

14. Encourage Self-Assessment by Agents

Encouraging agents to review their own performance fosters accountability and self-improvement. Providing access to their own call recordings or chat logs, along with QA feedback, allows them to learn from mistakes and enhance their skills.

15. Adopt a Continuous Improvement Mindset

Call center quality management should be an ongoing process. Regularly revisit your KPIs, training programs, and feedback mechanisms to ensure they evolve with industry standards, customer needs, and technological advancements. Continuous improvement ensures your call center remains competitive and effective.

Quality Monitoring Technology for Call Center Quality Management

Maintaining high-quality service is essential for ensuring customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. To achieve this, many call centers rely on advanced technologies that streamline monitoring, improve agent performance, and enhance overall communication. Below are four key types of technology that can significantly improve call center quality management.

1. Call Recording and Analytics Tools

These tools allow managers to record and review calls to assess agent performance. By analyzing interactions, call centers can identify areas for improvement and provide tailored feedback. Real-time analytics also provide insights into key metrics like average handling time and customer satisfaction.

2. AI-Powered Speech Analytics

AI-driven speech analytics tools analyze customer-agent conversations for tone, sentiment, and keyword identification. These insights help improve customer service quality by identifying trends, customer pain points, and opportunities for agent coaching.

3. Cloud-Based Call Center Systems (e.g., CloudTalk)

Cloud-based systems, such as CloudTalk, offer integrated quality monitoring features. These systems provide high-quality call recordings, real-time performance tracking, and advanced AI features like IVR and power dialers to streamline operations. CloudTalk’s ability to integrate with CRM and helpdesk systems makes it an all-in-one solution for managing quality across multiple customer channels.

Key features

• High-quality calls with guaranteed latency and minimal jitter

• Smooth workflow with our Intelligent call-routing tools

• Callback feature that redials the number until connected with the agent

• Redirecting calls during busy hours or when outside the office

• The call masking feature keeps your personal number private

Pricing

Starter – $25/month
Essential – $30/month
Expert – $50/month

4. Speech Analytics and Transcription Software

Advanced speech analytics tools can analyze customer-agent conversations for tone, sentiment, and key phrases. These tools provide insights into customer satisfaction, common issues, and agent performance. Krisp’s transcription software can also assist in converting voice interactions into text, making it easier to review calls and extract valuable information.

Key Quality Management Challenges in the Call Center

Call center quality management comes with its own set of unique challenges that can impact both agent performance and customer satisfaction. From high turnover rates to technology integration issues, here are some of the key obstacles that call centers face in delivering top-notch service.

Inconsistent Agent Performance

One of the most significant challenges in call centers is maintaining consistent agent performance. Agents may struggle with meeting quality standards due to varied skill levels, lack of training, or personal factors, making it difficult to deliver a uniform customer experience across all interactions.

High Turnover and Agent Retention

Call centers often face high employee turnover, which impacts the quality of service. New agents require extensive training to reach the level of seasoned professionals, and constant onboarding can strain resources, affecting overall service quality and consistency.

Lack of Real-Time Monitoring and Feedback

Without real-time monitoring and instant feedback, it’s challenging to correct performance issues as they occur. Delayed feedback can result in repeated mistakes, leading to poor customer experiences and lower satisfaction scores.

Technology Integration and Usability Issues

Many call centers use multiple platforms that are not always seamlessly integrated, which can create inefficiencies and hinder quality management efforts. Agents may struggle with outdated systems or have trouble navigating between different tools, affecting their productivity and service quality.

Handling High Call Volumes and Spikes

During peak times or unexpected surges in call volumes, maintaining quality standards becomes difficult. Agents may rush through calls, leading to mistakes, longer resolution times, and diminished customer satisfaction.

Ensuring Consistent Compliance with Regulations

Call centers must adhere to industry regulations, such as data privacy laws and compliance standards like GDPR and HIPAA. Ensuring that all agents consistently follow these regulations can be challenging, especially in larger teams or multi-location setups.

Managing Remote or Hybrid Teams

With the rise of remote and hybrid work models, maintaining quality across geographically dispersed teams is a new challenge. Remote agents may face different environments, technical issues, or varying levels of support, all of which can affect their ability to provide high-quality service.

FAQs