Quality monitoring

What is quality monitoring?

Quality monitoring is the process of monitoring interactions between contact center support executives and customers to evaluate conversations and improve agent performance. 

The quality of calls is evaluated on KPI metrics like average handle time, first call resolution (FCR), and many others. Find a complete list here.

Quality monitoring can be done in three ways:

1. A manual process
2. Uses specialized softwares combining multiple tools
3. Completely automated with contact center AI.

Why is quality important when monitoring in call centers?

1. High-performing workforce:
   Quality monitoring accurately builds an agent's performance reports and provides clarity on areas of improvements. This helps coaches effectively guide agents to maximize individual outputs collectively building a high performing workforce.
   
   
2. Personalized agent coaching:
   Accurately monitors interactions resulting in customized quality tips tailored to every agent’s strengths and weaknesses. This results in concentrated efforts, instead of generalized, low input coaching attempts.
   
   
3. Reduced agent turnover:
   When agents have clear insight into their performance, expectation and goal setting becomes more transparent and much easier. This is easily achieved using a quality monitoring scorecard. QM reports promote transparency across departments, and reduces agent turnover due to differences.
   
   
4. Lower legal issues:
   Quality monitoring unearths compliance issues, loopholes in workflows, low process adherence and proactively mitigates any legal risks. This saves an organization from possible lawsuits and saves unwarranted and expensive legal fees.
   
   
5. Enhanced customer satisfaction:
   Since quality monitoring significantly improves an agent’s performance by providing them personalized coaching notes,  these sessions in real time automatically translate into increased customer satisfaction.

Best practices to build an excellent quality monitoring program:

1. Build a team of experts:
   Assemble a team of quality analysts and coaches specialized in training agents on various soft skills, compliance, process adherence, etc.
   
   
2. Design scorecards:
   Based on KPI metrics like FCR, AHT, call arrival rate, and others that measure an agent’s ability to listen and resolve issues, creating detailed scorecards is a data-driven method to evaluate progress over longer duration.
   
   Different processes require performance metrics. An agent handling inbound interactions versus outbound interactions will be evaluated differently. So, adding detailed columns will segregate these calls and focus the quality monitoring to show the right results.
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3. Acknowledge good performance:
   It is important to acknowledge agent achievements in feedback sessions to keep the overall morale on a positive plane. Even criticism should be handled in a delicate way and doled out constructively.
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4. Save important recordings:
   Any excellent and positive customer interactions discovered during quality monitoring should be distributed as learning resources to all agents. This is a simple, yet highly effective, peer-to-peer learning tip.

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