For too long, QA processes have relied on random sampling and call recordings. For too long, contact centers have spent more time scoring calls than actually improving them.
We think it’s time to take a step back and consider three facts about what’s considered best-practice in Quality Assurance for contact centers:
- The QA process misses the vast majority (95-99%) of calls.
- It’s subjective and repetitive.
- It happens way too late to be effective.
Meanwhile, agents aren’t supporting customers like they could; or even worse, losing them to competitors. Tiny sample sizes and call recordings aren’t going to change that.
Let’s explore why.
1. QA Teams Are Missing 99% of Calls
Let’s say your QA team scores two to eight calls per month, per agent. That’s fairly typical for contact centers today. That only equates to roughly 1% of your entire call volume that month.
What’s happening on the other 99%? Probability says more mistakes that cut into your bottom line and missed opportunities for customers to better understand your company’s value.
If QA is going to source better insights from customer conversations, we need a QA system that scores 100% of calls.
“We’ll make almost 5,000 calls in a month. We’re only able to pull 108 of those. If we were able to see more, there’s a lot of trends we can start to catch early and coach on those.”
— Contact Center Supervisor, Universal Account Servicing
2. QA Is Repetitive and Subjective
As the old saying goes, variety is the spice of life. People crave variability. Yet QA today is the exact opposite: Grab a call recording, listen, and decide if what the agents said checks the boxes on a scorecard. Rinse and repeat, often for hours on-end.
When people get bored, they make mistakes. Or, their judgment when scoring calls loosens so they can move on to the next project. When that’s happening day in and out, it’s hardly fit to use as a standard for improving conversations.
A better QA system allows teams to analyze patterns and trends in calls, rather than making them scoring machines.
Usually if I get a score, I have to spend a lot of time trying to go through the different categories and picking up and listening to the call in order to see where the opportunities are.”
— Customer Service Supervisor, Leading Insurance Provider
3. QA Happens Too Late
Another hypothetical situation: You listen to two call recording reviews per month. The calls took place weeks before you could listen to them. Any opportunity to fix a mistake on that call is long gone.
If QA teams aren’t hearing mistakes until weeks later, that’s a lot of customers walking away from calls feeling frustrated with your company before you would ever know.
Why are we gambling with customer relationships when we could be tracking calls right as they’re happening? An effective QA system automatically scores calls while they’re happening and makes scores available as soon as they’re over.
We’re Changing QA Forever
Rather than relying on small, random samples of calls to gauge agent performance, QA should be done in real-time and give 100% visibility into all calls.
That’s why Balto built Real-Time QA. Users can score 100% of calls and create unlimited scorecards. QA scores instantly populate when calls end. And with Real-Time QA Scorecards, there’s no subjectivity to scoring a call: Users set the criteria, and Balto’s AI does the work for you.
That’s how QA can lead to real results. If you’re ready to see how automatically scoring calls in real-time can translate to better conversations, clicking here and schedule a demo.
