7 Overlooked Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices

Call center agents are typically a customer’s first point of contact with your company, so there’s a lot of pressure to make a good impression. But modern call centers can be difficult to monitor, especially if your agents work remotely.

Understanding how customers experience this first touchpoint is the essence of quality assurance (QA). The following strategies will help improve overall quality, as well as your ability to measure the results of changes you make.

1. Gamification

When done well, gamification can increase employee engagement in a number of ways, with some studies showing a 50% increase in productivity. This is especially true for contact center teams whose agents often do repetitive work and could benefit from out-of-the-box motivational strategies.

Gamification quantifies work-based achievements using the basic principles of video games. Regardless of the metrics used, the goal is to enhance social learning and increase engagement during tasks that would otherwise be boring.

It works by creating friendly competition in your team’s operational workflow. While it doesn’t turn their work into a game, it can feel pretty close, especially if there are rewards involved.

Let’s say you want to increase the number of outbound calls your agents make and the number of inbound calls they respond to. With a gamified workforce management system, you can track each agent’s progress toward your goals.

It will also show your agents a daily results screen with things like points, badges, progress bars, profits, and winners. In simple terms, it’s a bit like running an “employee of the month” competition based on measurable results.

For gamification to be successful, it must contain several important elements.

Clear reference points

Encourage daily motivation with clear benchmarks to measure progress. You can use whatever incentives you think will work best for your team, but it’s important to not let competition overshadow your actual customer service. If you judge agents based on the number of missed calls, they may start to neglect their current caller in order to move on to the next one as quickly as possible. Gamification can work well, but the results you see depend on how you set up the system.

Regular communication

You need to make sure there is a feedback loop so agents know how their work is contributing to goals. You can offer bonus points for additional training or one-on-one coaching sessions. You can even provide additional resources to reinforce company principles.

Focus on improving

The key is not to leave people behind. The goal of a gamification strategy is not to screen out and shame the laggards, but to encourage everyone to play as a team. Make sure you make it clear to all employees that the goal is improvement—not perfection.

The right tools

In a contact center, gamification can technically be implemented without software—for example, by placing progress bars on a break room wall—but to get today’s workers to engage with the system, you need something they can open on their phone or laptop.

2. AI Workflows

Your QA workflow has multiple functions, each with its own performance metrics. Collecting and reporting these to team leaders takes time and effort, and they need to be done regularly if you expect them to refine their strategies.

The biggest advantage of automating QA workflows with AI is the ease of gathering in-depth performance information. Instead of relying on your team to gather data—and risking administrative errors from even the most experienced people on the job—the system can do it all for you.

Automated workflows can also support performance by tracking both soft and hard skill metrics, such as:

• Efficiency.
• Patience.
• Courtesy.
• Correctness.
• Punctuality.

With this type of employee performance data, AI can create models and reports that help managers strategically improve QA. This helps them see the overall baseline performance of the team, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each individual.

But it’s important to be careful with this data. Overreliance on AI can be detrimental to call centers if the software they use isn’t configurable. Many companies are using a combination of VoIP phone systems, AI-powered analytics, and other advanced solutions to increase their competitive advantage—and reduce labor costs.

3. Active listening training

You know how important it is to train contact center agents to handle calls, and your training materials probably emphasize courtesy. But an often-overlooked related skill is teaching employees how to be empathetic. In a market where customer relationships drive profitability, this is an important skill to develop.

Active listening training is a set of principles your agents can follow when speaking with others. It’s been shown time and again to improve the quality of the connection between speakers. In the context of a call center, this means better customer engagement and conversion rates—and it makes everyone feel better overall.

The concept of active listening training includes:

• We learn to pay attention.
• Providing feedback to the caller.
• Recognizing and acknowledging emotions.
• Refraining from jumping to conclusions.
• Practicing empathetic responses.

Active listening training can augment the contact center etiquette you’re probably already teaching. It’s a way to reinforce the idea that your agents are actually talking to people—not just customers.

4. Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps visualize how customers interact with your contact center. They not only consider objective facts, such as whether a customer has purchased something, but also consider the needs and perceptions of the customer throughout their interaction with your company.

Journey maps answer important questions about what customers are trying to achieve, how long they’re doing it, and what or who they’re interacting with. Knowing these answers can help you improve interactions based on real experiences rather than guesswork.

The point is to better understand how your business looks from the customer’s perspective, an often overlooked aspect of contact center quality assurance.

You can’t properly address a customer’s concerns if you only focus on the moments when they directly interact with your call center. Other factors (also known as “behind the scenes” interactions) are just as important, such as the questions they ask after a call, the newsletters you send, and the feedback surveys you give them.

Your roadmap should include interactions with your business before, during, and after. When you can see the entire journey, you’ll be better equipped to guide future customers to the best solution.

5. Agent’s Participation

This may seem obvious, but it’s not as common as you might think. Agents will benefit much more from actively participating in developing a QA strategy, rather than simply being told what to do.

While many QA strategies involve team leaders listening to agent conversations and then providing feedback, that’s not the only way to do it. You can invite an agent to listen to a conversation with a leader (for example) so they can evaluate the feedback and develop improvement strategies together on an equal basis.

Strategies like this can get agents thinking about their own performance in a way that encourages personal accountability and ownership of their own development process. Personal accountability encourages greater agent engagement, which has been proven to increase customer response, boost productivity, and even increase profits by up to 21%.

This method can also reduce stress for managers, which helps prevent burnout among the management team.

6. Continuous comparative evaluation

Benchmarking is a great way to see how your contact center stacks up against others of a similar size. You can also see how you stack up against the best of the best in your industry.

While benchmarking is fairly common, it’s not always done well. Many companies treat it as a one-time transaction. Instead, it should be viewed as an ongoing process that goes far beyond one or two metrics.

Once you’ve assessed performance in one area, you should move on to another to get a better picture of the bigger picture. Choosing the right KPIs can make all the difference. It’s up to you and your team to decide which combination will give you the best insights into improving service quality.

Commonly monitored KPIs include:

• Customer satisfaction indicators.
• Level of service.
• First time solution.
• Agent turnover rates.
• Average order fulfillment time.

It is best to use workforce analytics software to avoid placing so much importance on quality assessment that you neglect to maintain it.

7. Polls

Surveys are the most common tactic for assessing agent performance and improving QA. It’s as simple as asking customers for direct feedback and taking action on the information.

But you still need to compile the data you collect—whether through paid surveys, random calls, or mandatory call monitoring. Just sending out a survey isn’t enough. You should take the time to understand what the results mean.

Sometimes that means digging deeper and spending more time analyzing the data. If you use surveys as an opportunity for development, coaching, and additional training, they will be more valuable than if you were to use them as disciplinary tools.

By demonstrating your commitment to quality and sharing data in a positive way, you can build loyalty among your employees.

Key takeaways for contact centers

QA in the contact center can be complex. It involves quantifying and qualifying many moving parts, such as customer emotional experiences, agent tactics, and team leader strategies.

When you consider all this, it can be a bit like trying to solve a crossword puzzle while skydiving—and then the phone rings.

However, with the right strategies and software in place, quality assurance can become a regular part of everyday operations and will have a significant impact on agents, customers and the bottom line.