Does your team have room to improve in the area of call quality? Regardless of how well-trained they are and the quality assurance steps you take, there is always room for development and improvement. Creating a call quality monitoring checklist is an essential first step toward achieving excellence and achieving superior results with each call. A call quality monitoring checklist establishes expectations for your front-line agents as well as their supervisors. By analyzing call center data, you can measure performance in each area.
The Quintessential Call Quality Monitoring Checklist
Regardless of whether your call center provides live technical support, sales assistance, or other essential services, several uniform guidelines apply and should be included in your checklist.
1. Answer Calls Promptly
Your customers’ experience with your call center begins as soon as they dial your phone number. How many rings does it take before they reach a live person? Do they need to go through an excessive number of automated steps before they can talk to someone about their issue?
While answering calls promptly is linked to how your automated system is structured, wait times are dependent on call volume if your call center is staffed properly and how efficiently your team works. By decreasing the average handle time per call, the initial wait time is reduced.
2. Identify and Clarify the Caller’s Needs
The customer’s reason for calling should be identified immediately. This ideally should be done before the caller must provide identifying information, such as his or her name and account number. By identifying the customer’s needs first, the call center rep can determine up front if the call should be transferred.
This essential step plays into the total customer experience because it affects the total call time and potentially their need to repeat the same information to multiple people. Because it may reduce total call time, it enables your call center team to work more efficiently.
3. Provide One or Several Solutions
Your call center reps should be trained to analyze specific scenarios and to understand all available options the customer has. For example, if a customer is unhappy with the item he or she purchased, the rep may offer a refund or a replacement. Your team should be empowered to offer suitable solutions without placing the customer on hold.
While many calls are completed to-script, others are unique and may require your reps to think on their feet. Ongoing agent development is one way to improve in this area.
4. Avoid Long Hold Times
Call center reps place customers on hold for various reasons. For example, they may not know how to handle a situation and ask their supervisor for assistance. Tracking down a supervisor and explaining the situation can take several minutes, and these minutes can seem frustratingly excessive to customers waiting on the other end of the line.
In addition to creating frustration for your customers, long hold times create longer initial wait times for incoming callers. The entire operation will be bogged down if each item on the call quality monitoring checklist item is not consistently crossed off.
5. Provide Conclusion for the Issue
Depending on the nature of the call, your team must create a conclusion for the issue. One example is by providing the customer with a transaction number for payment. In some cases, disclosures must be read before the call can be ended.
These final steps typically are compliance-based as well as service-oriented. Your team may be trained to handle numerous situations, and each situation may require a different conclusive step. Sales teams, for example, usually have a “win” signal at the end of their call quality monitoring checklist. If that phrase is said, managers know that there is a higher likelihood that a sale was made on that particular phone call.
6. Inquire About Additional Needs
Reading a disclosure or completing other conclusive steps finalizes the issue at hand, but the customer may have additional needs. By inquiring about additional needs before concluding the call, your team ensures that your customer has been fully served and is satisfied with the outcome of the call.
7. Soft Skills
In addition to everything above, you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the necessary soft skills. These include the following:
- Didn’t talk too fast
- Used active listening
- Used empathy
- Held control of the conversation the entire time
- Didn’t go off topic
To the left, you’ll see a quick recap of everything covered above! If you’d like to print this out, email rowen@Baltosoftware.com and he’ll sent it over.
Using the Call Monitoring Checklist to Cover All of the Bases
Whether you adopt this call quality monitoring checklist or adapt it to your specific needs, ensuring uniform compliance with every call is seemingly impossible with your current operational structure. Since it’s impossible for managers to monitor every call and fill out a checklist objectively, technology has evolved to provide automatic call monitoring checklist solutions.
Artificial intelligence can be used to observe every call. The program can provide real-time suggestions and reminders to your team through voice recognition and by learning from your company’s top performers. For example, if a rep is preparing to end a call without reading a disclosure, the A.I. platform generates an immediate reminder. Live call monitoring checklists automatically check off each key element of the call on the agent’s screen, allowing them to keep track of what they have covered and reminding them if they miss any checklist items.
Through this program, supervisors can also view each rep’s call quality monitoring checklist and be alerted immediately if an issue develops. This provides your company with an extra layer of oversight and protection that can potentially save valuable time and resources down the road. Separately, call quality monitoring checklists can aggregate data over any period of time to capture ongoing trends and monitor rep progression in specific areas of their calls.
You cannot oversee every call that comes in, but you can provide your team with the support and live training opportunities they need to be successful in their positions. Contact Balto today for a product demonstration. You’ll have the opportunity to see Balto’s live call quality monitoring checklist in action.