Effective Call Center Monitoring Tips

Every company wants to be more productive. After all, if more is accomplished every day, profits increase, employee engagement grows, and customer experiences improve. It’s all about using time wisely.

In the call center, productivity is one of the greatest and most important challenges. The more efficient your call center agents, the lower your costs as revenue increases. It’s that simple, but it’s not that easy.

Here are two simple but effective ways you can improve your call center monitoring practices:

1. Analyze your call data.

How can a manager effectively monitor their call center when they don’t have trust-worthy data to pull actionable insights from?

Call quality monitoring is all about changing agent behavior and managers need to understand how agents act day-in and day-out, not just basing their entire review and training plan on 1 or 2 calls. Instead of manually reviewing a small sample of calls, managers can improve call center monitoring with a speech analytics system where 100% of calls are automatically recorded AND calls are monitored in real-time.

2. Involve agents when developing the scorecards/evaluation forms used during the monitoring process. 

For instance, define what constitutes a “quality” interaction and the subcategories that are being scored.

How important is script adherence?

How important is handling time?

Will agents be judged on how well they handle escalating calls with frustrated customers?

Providing examples that demonstrate the excellent, average and or poor quality of the behaviors being measured gives your agents a solid base to work from and outlines expectations of performance

It’s incredibly important to make sure that your agents are fully educated on what they are being evaluated for in the first place! A great way to do this is to involve your customer service team in the creation of scoring/monitoring criteria. What makes for a quality customer service call, in alignment with your standards?

? Soft-skills and positioning?

? Adherence to a script?

? The handling of frustrated customers?

? How are calls escalated?

Remember, your customer service team is human too!